TROUBLE SHOOTING YOUR FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGN: 5 Questions to Ask When you Aren’t Getting the Conversions you Want

Have you ever set up a Facebook ad campaign and you were so sure that you’re setting up a winning campaign?

Your targeting was on point, your ad image was great and your ad copy is very compelling.

Then you run it and to your surprise, the conversions aren’t there?

I think most of us have been there and it can get frustrating.

In this article, we want to share with you 5 questions we ask ourselves when faced with this situation and what we do to improve our ad campaigns.

• Are there any technical issues?

The first thing we check when Facebook isn’t recording any conversions is if there is any issue with regards to the website, the funnel and the Facebook Pixel.

To ensure that your funnel is working correctly, make sure to go through the whole process from landing page until the page where conversions will be tracked.

As you go through each of the pages, make sure to check Facebook Pixel Helper to see whether your pixels are firing and whether the correct conversion events are being triggered.

You can download Facebook Pixel Helper here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-pixel-helper/fdgfkebogiimcoedlicjlajpkdmockpc

• Are we getting impressions?

It may seem like a useless question but there may actually be times when the ads are not showing at all or they are shown to very few people. This tends to happen when we are targeting very narrow audiences or if manual bids are too low.

If the concern is that our audience is too narrow, we usually add in more interests to target to expand our audience. For situations where in this is not possible, like when we do retargeting to custom audiences, what we do instead is to change the optimization to Daily Unique Reach. You can do this ad the ad set level.

If the audience size is not the problem, then what we do is to increase the manual bids and/or increase the ad set budget if it’s set at automatic bidding.

• Are we getting clicks?

If impressions aren’t the problem, then we check whether the ads are getting clicks. Link clicks specifically.

If our campaigns are not getting clicks, we can’t expect conversions.

If we find that we have low link clicks, we first check the CTR of the campaigns.

If CTR is good, then it’s usually more of an issue on audience reach. For these instances, we just increase budget.

However, if CTR is low, it could be because we are targeting the wrong audience or our ad copy is not compelling enough.

Though it is possible that both could be the issue, we tend to test changing one element first whether it’s the targeting or the copy.

Usually, we first work with the same set of ads and show it to a different audience. If results are the same, we try changing the image. Then we try changing the copy.

• Are the ads representing the landing page and the offer correctly?

Sometimes, what happens is that the campaign shows good results in Ads Manager but still, there are no conversions. When this happens, we find that it may be an issue with regards to what the ads are promising to what the landing page is offering.

One way we test this is to ensure that the ad image and ad copy is as very close as possible to the image and copy seen on the landing page.

If we’re driving traffic to a landing page where users will be asked to opt in for a free webinar or a free e-book, we make sure to include it in the ad copy.

Having a clear match between the ad and the landing page provides a smooth transition for the users who leave Facebook and arrive to your landing page.

Without this smooth transition, users will become aware that they left Facebook (which was why they opened their mobile phones or laptops in the first place) and will hit the “back” button away from your page.

• Are we asking for too much?

If our ads very clearly describes what users are to expect in our landing page and they still click but they do not convert, we usually start re-evaluating what we are offering.

If users are already expressing interest in our offer but they do not go on to convert, we usually try to look for friction points from within the landing page.

At this point, we evaluate whether we are asking for too much from the user.

What does this mean?

Some people think that just because they are offering something for free that people will pounce on the offer. But we found, as you probably have too, that this is not always the case.

When we give out our offers with no charge, we still do ask for something else in return.

The 3 things we usually ask for in opt-ins is the user’s name, their e-mail address and their time.

With regards to the fields users have to fill out, we make sure to only ask for the information we need.

The most important element we consider at this stage is how much time we are asking from the user.

Whether we are offering an e-book which takes 10 minutes to read, a 1-hour webinar or a 2 week e-mail course, we always check whether we are in the position to be asking for that time.

For example, would you spend a whole hour from your busy schedule to listen to a person who you do not even know and who has not proven his/her expertise to you? Probably not.

So what we tend to do is to show the users that we are worthy of the time we are asking for. You can do this by:

• Promoting a piece of content related to the offer first then presenting the offer at the end of the content by asking “Want to learn more about this?”
• Using retargeting to promote the offer to the users who consumed the content
• Trying to use long form sales copy on the landing page covering as much as you can about the offer and about what you can bring to the table
• Including testimonials

We believe that a good offer can thrive despite a poor traffic campaign but a well set-up traffic campaign cannot salvage a poor offer.

So if after any of these, the campaign is still not working, it’s best to go back to the drawing board and craft a new offer.

What do you think?
What other troubleshooting questions do you tend to ask yourself?