It can be incredibly frustrating to put in a ton of effort on a social ads campaign only to watch it flop. But don’t pull your hair out just yet! There are a lot of adjustments you can make that can turn your zero into a hero.
Social Ads Not Performing? Here’s What to Look For
Even with the best planning and creative work, it’s inevitable that you’ll need to tweak your campaigns as they unfold. People love ads that are current and fun, and if there’s one thing you can’t afford to be in advertising it’s stale.
Meta does a great job with their ad tools, and despite having excellent AI a human touch is usually the difference between pretty good and fantastic results. Here are some things we look for when an ad campaign is underperforming.
Missing Target Demographics
If your audience is either too broad or limited, you’re not getting a good bang for your buck with your social ads. The answer to these problems may not be simple, but Facebook has a great tool we recommend called Audience Insights that helps you find out how many people will potentially see your ads. Click the Filters button to test out changes before they go live.
Too Narrow
When you target too narrowly, you’re going to exhaust the available pool of customers who see your ads. Campaigns saturate quickly, and you’ll see an alarming dropoff in revenue and KPIs. Sometimes the answer is as simple as adding an ‘and’ to your demographic terms to expand your footprint.
Further Refining Your Audience
Another great tool to help your team better target your social ads is by creating a buyer persona. It’s a distilled, bulleted list of personality and life traits that are likely to be a match for your business. Here are a few ideas to identify your perfect customer:
- Age
- Gender
- Job
- Level of education
- Marital status
- Number of children
- Religious affiliation
Lacking Creative Variation
Buyer personas help your creative team get the message and tone of your ads on point. But if you only have a narrow range of ads you’ll be in danger of appealing to small, highly specific segments and missing out on a general audience.
Creating variations in ads may seem counterintuitive from an ROI perspective, but it can be extremely beneficial for your campaign if you have the expertise to effectively produce them. Creatively varying ads not only give you a chance to probe customer segments, but test the algorithm as well to refine both engagement and channel strategy. It’s a deeper dive into social ads, and one for which a little investment in a marketing expert can produce huge rewards in both data and revenue.
If you need more ad variants but don’t feel creatively comfortable, Meta offers the amazing Advantage+ toolset for Facebook that can generate up to 150 variants of your ad, analyzing the results to fine-tune the delivery and impact of your social ads.
Overly-Wordy Content
News feeds are stuffed to the gills with content, but the fact is, few people stop to actually read ad copy because visual content is what tends to captures the eye. Facebook recommends only a few lines of text at most, and we notice better results if text is kept to the headline with a short description. This even includes your logo!
Facebook will warn you with a popup if it thinks you have too many words in your ads. If you feel strongly you need more text, consider using a carousel format that will scroll details in a limited space, or just ask a marketing expert! A little wisdom and experience can go a long way towards perfecting your social ads.
Marketing Funnel Too Long or Short
If your social ads don’t meet people at the right waypoint on their buying journey, conversion rates will suffer.
- Ask is too big: first-contact social ads that click through to landing pages with large asks are poor converters. You’re appealing for too much, too soon. In this scenario, focus on light conversions such as page likes, or text and email information that gently brings them closer to your brand. Once they’ve decided to share their contact information with you, then you can start moving them further along your marketing funnel.
- Requiring too many clicks: If a customer is ready to buy but you place too many clicks between them and the sale, they’ll likely lose interest and close the page. Landing pages need to take people where they want to go and make it easy to get what they want.
Wrong Bidding Strategy
Here’s where things can get hairy. Meta generally does a pretty good job with social ads bidding, but there’s no complete solution for human experience.
Most businesses use the Auto Bidding option to buy ads, but when this doesn’t work it can be necessary to engage in manual bidding. Because it’s more complex, it’s often a huge time and money saver to partner with a professional.
You’ll need to understand a few things to get your manual bidding on point:
- Be patient. If you need to fine-tune things a computer didn’t get right, be prepared to engage in a trial-and-error approach.
- Don’t make a lot of changes at once. To judge the effectiveness of your tweaks, limit the number to a few changes at once. Adjusting too many things too quickly can cost you more than you gain, and it’ll be almost impossible to tell which changes were the ones that worked!
- Bid the max you’re willing to bid right away. Don’t underbid and hope things work out. You need to reach the people you need to reach, and at a price point that makes sense to your business. Underbidding means under-delivering on KPIs.
- Concentrate on a sensible number of campaigns. Spreading your budget too thinly across too many campaigns dilutes the effectiveness of your social ads.
You Don’t Have to Know it All!
Time is money, and you’ll hemorrhage both if you try to fix things on the fly without sufficient experience. The right social media partner will save you more than they cost you.
Social Ktchn is a Facebook and Instagram marketing agency that specializes in crafting and running profitable paid ad campaigns across many sectors. If you’d like some assistance maximizing the revenue your social ads bring in, we’d love to hear from you!