Five Common Culprits for Failed Facebook Ads

Armed with killer creative that really speaks to your brand and fresh copy variations, you launch your ad campaign with high hopes. After a few weeks, your CPA is climbing and your ROAS is falling. This isn’t the ROI you expected.

What happened?

Five rookie mistakes that hurt your sales

1. Laser focusing on only one part of the funnel. Rookie ad managers tend to concentrate on top of funnel metrics. Impressions and engagement are nice to have, but neglecting the rest of the funnel means missing opportunities to retarget audiences that have shown interest in your product.

2. Making inferences about audiences without supporting data. Without conducting cohort and age analyses to identify your audience, your killer copy and ad creative may fall on deaf ears, and key audiences may never get to see your ad.

3. Cutting lower performing ad channels out of the marketing mix. Marketing efforts across advertising streams work together and cross pollinate, so removing one stream will affect overall performance. When customers view your ads, they’re likely to search for reviews, confer with friends, and browse your social media before committing a purchase. These sales may be inspired by your low performing stream, but won’t show up its analytics.

4. Keeping ineffective ads running. Ads that don’t drive conversions should be terminated, even if the ad creative is aesthetically immaculate. You may find your ad to be compelling, but if it doesn’t compel prospective customers to buy, that ad needs reworking.

5. Relying only on lookalike audiences. Ad campaigns running only with lookalike audiences will perform well for a short while, until it tanks. Running lookalikes without refreshing your pixel and audience lists means showing the same ads to the same people.

Assessing for kinks in the sales funnel

Effective ad campaigns lead customers down the marketing funnel. When your ads aren’t driving sales, assess your funnel strategy for stages which aren’t meeting objectives. These are the metrics you should consider:

Bottom of Funnel	Track your conversions, CPA, and ROAS. Are people making it to the end of the funnel? Are some audiences responding more than others? Does timing of ads play a role in sales performance?
Middle of Funnel	Track your bounce rate, how often customers add products to cart, initiate checkout, click on links, and how long they spend on the site. How are customers interacting with your site? Are these customers being retargeted? Is it your ads or your website that needs refining?
Top of Funnel	Track your CPC, CTR, and engagement. Do customers even notice your ad? Do people respond favourably to some copy variations over others? High performing ads don’t necessarily elicit lots of likes and comments, but poor performance throughout the tunnel indicates that improvements should be made in this funnel stage.

The secret to driving sales with ads

Paid media is a powerful tool which helps you nurture your brand’s relationship with customers. Prime your ads for success with these three tactics:

1. Adopt a holistic approach to managing your sales funnel.

Each ad campaign in each funnel stage works together to guide consumers to convert. Focus your objective on conversion throughout the funnel process, and check where in the funnel customers are to identify areas for improvement. 

You may discover that your ads work perfectly, but people abandon their cart because the website isn’t user friendly.

2. Run agile campaigns by terminating ineffective ads and scaling ads properly.

Use your ad spend decisively: scale your budget only when an ad meets or exceeds your KPIs. 

Evaluate ad success by net margin. If your business has a negative cash flow business on first purchase, make sure you understand your LTV (lifetime value metrics) to allow you to set up thresholds on your CPA.

3. Get to know your audience by running cohort and age analyses.

Gauge your audiences’ interests, and explore regional analytics to garner insights to make data-informed adjustments to your campaign strategy. 

Expand your audiences with variable tests on custom audiences, interest based audiences and expansion of lookalikes audiences to prime your pixel.

How to diagnose and fix ad fatigue

Ad fatigue is inevitable with traditional campaign management. Keep your ads fresh by running agile campaigns. Read more→

Perfecting your ad campaign

Having ads that aren’t converting isn’t an immediate cause for concern — missteps are part of this iterative process. Agile ad managers test out many variations of ad creative with full expectation that some ad variations inevitably will fall short of KPIs. If your hunch for a winning ad doesn’t work out, take it for a test run next month—perhaps it’s an issue of timing.

Guide customers down the sales funnel by maintaining a holistic full funnel approach, running agile campaigns, and reaching out to the right audiences.

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