If your Facebook ads aren’t converting, there are probably 7 common reasons why

The Ads Manager wizard walks you through the steps of creating an ad, and part of that process is completing the Detailed Targeting box. You can add a range of interest and behavioral targeting audiences, and create and serve targeted ads accordingly:

But this targeting method only works for an audience that knows nothing about your brand, while your ad copy may be targeting an audience at the bottom of the sales funnel.

How to solve this problem : Your target audience should first be those who are interested in you. These audiences include:

Your existing customers;

Potential users who have recently responded to your content;

Email subscribers;

People who clicked on a Facebook ad or watched a video

Users who click on a website or spend a certain amount of time on a specific page.

They may also be your Facebook fans, but often they have many fake followers.

The audience in the above list knows who you are, likes what you do, and will be open to what you have to offer.

Another reason why Facebook ads fail to convert is that you’re targeting the right audience but using the wrong ad copy. In fact, the ad copy is more suitable for the audience at the bottom of the marketing funnel.

How to fix this : Use a marketing funnel, segment your users, and serve them a series of Facebook ads based on where they are in the sales funnel.

Facebook ad campaign targeting can be broken down into 3 different categories:

Acquaintance : To those audiences who don’t know who you are or haven’t been in touch with you for a long time;

Consideration : For audiences who already know you but may need more information before they feel confident buying your product.

Conversion : Give it to those who will respond positively and are ready to buy the product.

The Facebook ads designed for an audience that is completely unfamiliar to you and an audience that is familiar with your product will definitely be completely different. This is related to the TOFU (top of the funnel), MOFU (middle of the funnel), and BOFU (bottom of the funnel) model. The funnel marketing theory is closely related to user behavior, and companies can get people to the bottom of the funnel and convert.

Top of the Sales Funnel

At this stage, you want to let your audience know that you exist and that you have interesting content that solves pain points. But this content needs to be indexable, leading them to a blog post or an interest-targeted ad on Facebook that pops up in the News Feed at the right time. Your content should be educational and entertaining, and emphasize your expertise in solving your target audience's problems.

In terms of advertising, sellers should sell brands instead of products at this time. Free guides, white papers, product brochures, informational articles and videos are all effective, many of which will be spread through shared reading and lead magnets (premium content or free goodies) and found through advertising or search.

Middle of the sales funnel

At this stage, you have a solution that solves your target audience’s pain point, but it’s hard to sell it to them. Potential buyers are still in the evaluation stage, figuring out how to deal with their problems. Audiences are interested in people and stories who share their suffering (and have overcome it), as well as articles that examine the problems they are struggling with and teach them how to choose a solution.

Your Facebook ads should build brand trust while driving users to take the next step. Content types may include webinars, shopping guides, and product detail sheets.

Bottom of the sales funnel

At the bottom of the sales funnel, your audience is ready to buy your product and you just need to offer the perfect service, such as a free trial, webinar, or online consultation. This is when your ads should start to become more sales-oriented and more like ads. You can offer limited-time discounts and exclusive information to drive conversions, and you can use case studies and customer testimonials to prove that your product is valuable.

Marketing is a gradual process. Users rarely buy directly after seeing an ad for the first time, but the solution is rarely to show them the same ad over and over again. Instead, use the right content for the right audience. Once they engage with that content (watch a video, view a blog post, sign up for an account), you can move on to the next set of ads.

You have some great video content on your website or Facebook page, and your audience responds to it. You decide to use ad retargeting, but you use static images or target website ads in your ads. If you know your target audience has already responded to a video once, why wouldn’t you serve them a video ad?

How to fix this : Use the types of Facebook ads that your audience likes.

Even though the above suggestions target audiences at the top of your sales funnel, your target audience is still too broad, so you’ll need to start retargeting. You’ll still be using interest and behavior targeting, but you’ll at least be using detailed targeting tools.

How to fix this : Use detailed targeting tools to narrow your market and segment your audience, who are also more likely to convert.

Let’s look at an example of how detailed targeting works. Let’s say you want to target women who are into a number of fashion brands in the UK at the same time:

Facebook’s detailed targeting feature allows you to use Boolean logic to target women who like Joules, Monsoon, or Whitestuff. If you click Narrow Further, you can find women who also like Boden, Mint Velvet, or Phase Eight. You can also find audiences who like at least one brand:

That way you've reduced your target audience from over a million people who like at least one of those six brands to just 99,000 people who like only two of them. This segmentation makes it much more likely that you'll be able to hit that target market of women who are likely to buy quality, fashionable, mid-range clothing.

Check your News Feed right now to see which Facebook ads are selling products right away, many of which may be from brands you’ve never heard of or interacted with.

How to fix this : Save your sales pitch for retargeting ads, and show specific ads to specific people, like showing an ad about one of your products to people who have visited your product page, or have clicked on an ad analyzing that product or product-related questions.

Retargeting ads costs nothing, and the cost of ads is much smaller after retargeting.

Facebook really wants your ads to be as relevant as possible to your target audience. It rewards advertisers who do a good job by increasing ad impressions and reducing ad costs. Your goal is to improve your relevance score. AdEspresso tried running the same ad to different audiences and found that they spent:

An ad with a relevance score of 2.9, with a website CPC of $0.142;

The same ad, with a retargeting feature, received a relevance score of 8 and had a website CPC of just $0.03.

How to fix this : Tighter targeting is a great way to improve your relevance score, as is using impactful images, clear CTA content or CTA buttons in your copy. Lower ad display frequency and ads designed for your target market also help, as Facebook rewards ads that convert.

You can create the perfect ad, but if your landing page doesn’t work, you’ll lose conversions. Your landing page needs to match your ad, so the images, copy, look, feel, and tone need to be the same or similar.

How to fix this : A well-designed landing page should include social proof, respond to any objections, and use clear and concise headlines and copy.

The landing page should also add trust indicators and make the CTA highly visible and repeated throughout the page. In fact, achieving conversions is the only goal of the web page.

It’s also important to reduce backlinks. You want users to click on your CTA button, not click to view other backlinks on your website.

If you find that your Facebook ads aren’t performing well, here are seven things that may be negatively impacting your performance and how to fix them.

Text ✎ Mary/

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