5 Ways To Fix Underperforming Facebook Adverts
In a ‘pay-to-play’ world, where we see increasingly throttled organic reach, social media adverts are an important part of any social media strategy. They offer your business an amplified presence on social media - allowing you to position your marketing message to the audience you choose, at the time you choose it. This can result in more traffic to your website, more engagement with your content, increased sales and increased leads.
According to Sprout Social, Facebook’s ad revenue saw a 56% increase during 2021 alone - reaching a total of $28.6 billion. That’s a lot of other advertisers for your business to compete with, meaning your advert needs to have visuals that stand out and copy that resonates with your target audience.
But, even with the best visuals and copy, there comes a time in every social media advertising campaign when you might find performance results dipping day-to-day. These are five tactics you should consider when your Facebook Ad results are declining, to give them some new juice. 🧃
1. Check your Facebook tracking
Recent changes in data policies, such as the hurdle that is IOS 14, have changed the way Facebook and Instagram can personalise ads for users and report on performance. According to Flurry, as of 2021, roughly 17% of individuals opt into tracking - which leaves a huge 83% of users who don’t. Use a web dashboard like Google Analytics and track your links using Campaign URL Builder to keep an eye on performance on the backend of your website, as this may not be accurately tracked in Facebook’s system.
To ensure the data that can be tracked is visible on your campaign, make sure you verify your domain name in Facebook Business Manager. Once you’ve verified your domain name, double check your Facebook Pixel set up is receiving web events, such as items added to the basket, checkout, and checkout value. This will give you a good indicator of the sales that come directly from your Facebook Ads campaign, but any data from Facebook should be married up with data from the backend of your website (using tools such as Google Analytics or Shopify) to check for any disagreements.
2. Switch up the creative
In a paid social media paid campaign, creatives are one of the most important factors to grab and engage your target audience. In the infancy of your paid social campaign, be sure to A/B test multiple pieces of creative alongside multiple versions of copy. For instance, does video outperform image? Does image outperform carousel? Does your target audience click more on long copy or short copy ads? Finding out the answers to these questions early on means you can use your budget more wisely - when you know what works with your target audience, you can scale up with more budget.
As your advertising campaign grows out of infancy, it still needs regularly checking up on. We monitor and optimise our client campaign results daily, looking at metrics like reach, impressions, link clicks, leads, sales, likes, comments and shares. If you see a dip in any of these numbers that continues over an extended amount of time, it could be due to your advert frequency (aka the amount that the viewer is seeing the adverts). If your ad frequency number is over 4, the advert may be suffering from ad fatigue - meaning users have seen it too frequently and are becoming bored. Once this happens, you need to switch up your campaign creative. Take inspiration from your best-performing ads so far, but create something new and exciting that’s strong enough be the catalyst for results picking back up.
3. Change the targeting system
When creating a social media paid campaign, similar to the creative, targeting should always be tested. As a company, you may have an incredibly precise idea of who your target audience is - but until you’ve tested Facebook advertising, you don’t know who your ideal target audience is on there (and you might also discover new audience segments you didn’t think you had!)
Create at least 3 audiences to test and break them up so you’re testing one audience per advert set. Some audiences you could test include:
A broad audience. This audience may not be familiar with your brand, and will provide much more accurate data on how a larger, cold audience responds to your brand and product/service. Try testing different age ranges against each other, or testing an audience group you haven’t considered before. For example, if you’re a male grooming brand and your typical audience is males who are 25-45 years old, you could consider a campaign which targets parents of teenage boys, encouraging them to gift their sons with their first razor - opening up a new generation of potential purchasers. Or, you could target women who have a significant other’s birthday coming up soon and might want to buy your products as a gift.
An interest-based audience. This is a more specific audience, where you should focus solely on your target audience and their interests. Use age and location parameters, alongside Facebook’s detailed targeting function to select the interests and demographics of your audience - this could be women living in London, age 30-40 years old, interested in travel and on a high salary income. Using interest-based targeting will give you a smaller audience size in Facebook Ads Manager, but will reach people who are more likely to engage with your advert because it feels personalised to them, their lifestyle, and their needs.
A custom audience. This is the warmest audience you could create, as a custom audience has typically interacted with your brand already. Facebook Ads Manager allows you to collect and upload data from your social media pages, email lists and website, so that you can target people who have engaged with your social media platforms, visited your website in the last 90 days, and who are signed up to your mailing list. If there’s such a thing as a ‘quick win’, this is the closest to it.
If you see campaign performance start to drop with one audience, tweak your targeting or start testing a new, untapped demographic.
4. Optimise the age range
On Ads Manager, you can view your performance results in a graph that groups data according to gender and age. If your adverts begin to decline, take a look at the gender/age report, see which segments are lower than your average results, then adjust the audience accordingly. Turn off ads for any audience groups which are underperforming, so that you can maximise your budget for the right audience rather than spend money reaching an audience that’s not receptive.
5. Create a retargeting campaign
The beauty of a paid social media campaign is that the data you collect (from anyone who clicks your link, adds an items to their basket, or starts to fill in a sign-up form without completing it) can be used for future targeting, in a retargeting campaign. Start retargeting your audience when you’ve got a healthy chunk of data from your ads so far, where you know your audience is interested and could be pushed further into your marketing funnel. As the users you’re targeting here are aware of your brand already, you can have a bit of fun with the copy depending on your industry - for example, if you know someone added your product to their basket but clicked away, you could use tag lines like “Did you miss me?”, “We’re ready when you are” or “Is it pay day yet?” to entice them back.
Want more help setting up and optimising an ad campaign that converts customers? Find out more about the advertising campaigns we run for brands like yours.