Facebook advertising not working? Read some new Tips to improve
Facebook advertising is evolving and still buggy. Marketing on Facebook is unpredictable, when the going is good it’s all well, if not it’s difficult to debug. Many times the ads suddenly start delivering. Did you make a small change? that could be the reason. There could be negative feedback scores. Wrong Ad structures, creatives, targeting. There are many trials and errors. Let’s discover some tips for FB ads.
Facebook Advertising Learning Phase
When you first start your Facebook Advertising campaign it goes into The learning phase. It is the period when the delivery system still has a lot to learn about an ad set. During the learning phase, the delivery system is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set – so performance is less stable and cost-per-action (CPA)is usually worse. The learning phase occurs when you create a new ad or ad set or make a significant edit to an existing one.
The Delivery column reads “Learning” when an ad set is in the learning phase. While the delivery system never stops learning about the best way to deliver an ad set, ad sets exit the learning phase as soon as performance stabilizes (usually after around 50 conversions).
Best Practices during the learning phase
During the learning phase, ad sets are less stable and usually have a higher CPA. To avoid behaviors that prevent ad sets from exiting the learning phase, we recommend you:
- Wait to edit your ad set until it’s out of the learning phase.
- Avoid unnecessary edits that cause ad sets to re-enter the learning phase.
- Avoid high ad volumes.
- Use realistic budgets.
The learning phase is necessary to help the delivery system best optimize ads, so you shouldn’t try to avoid the learning phase completely. Testing new creative and marketing strategies is essential for improving your performance over time in FB ads.
Troubleshoot
If 7 days have elapsed since a significant edit and your ad set still hasn’t exited the learning phase, the Delivery column status will read “Learning Limited”.
This usually occurs when:
- Your bid control or cost control is too low. Consider raising your bid/cost control.
- Your budget is too low. Consider raising your budget.
- Your audience size is too small. Consider expanding your audience.
- You have too many ad sets. Consider using fewer ad sets (for example, by combining audiences) to aggregate delivery learnings.
- Other ad sets from the same ad account or Page are winning auctions instead. Consider combining ad sets to avoid high audience overlap.
- Your optimization event occurs very infrequently. Consider optimizing for an event that occurs more frequently. For example, if you see fewer than 50 purchase events in a week, consider optimizing for add-to-cart events instead.
If your ad set failed to exit the learning phase, consider making a significant edit to resolve one of the above issues.
Significant Edits and Learning Phase
Every edit you make (during the learning phase or after it) has some effect on delivery, but not every edit causes the ad set to reenter the learning phase. Only a significant edit causes an ad set to reenter the learning phase.
The following are considered significant edits in FB ads:
- Any change to targeting
- Any change to ad creative
- Any change to the optimization event
- Adding a new ad to your ad set
- Pausing your ad set for 7 days or longer (the ad set reenters the learning phase once you unpause the ad set)
- Changing bid strategy
Note: When using campaign budget optimization, switching your campaign bid strategy might cause multiple ad sets within the campaign to reenter the learning phase.
A change to any of the following areas may or may not be significant, depending on the magnitude of the change:
- Ad set spending limit amount
- Bid control cost control or ROAS control amount
- Budget amount (unless you’re using the target cost bid strategy, in which case budget changes aren’t considered significant edits)
Note: When using campaign budget optimization, adjusting your campaign budget might cause multiple ad sets within the campaign to reenter the learning phase.
Facebook Advertising Review Process
Ads that run on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network are subject to a review process that looks at the amount of image text used in your ad. Based on the reviews, the ad in question is slightly affected by text penalty. Ads with higher amounts of image text will be shown to fewer people. Read more at the Help Center Article
Facebook Advertising Campaign Structure
If you create too many adsets, then the ad set will experience minimal to no delivery. The same thing happens when there are more ads inside an adsets. This is usually the result of complex/fragmented account structures or a disproportionate number of ads in the account with no/low delivery. To resolve the issue, you should simplify their account structure. Try below options
1) Consolidate ad sets. When advertisers use fewer ad sets with broader targeting, they aggregate delivery learnings for their ads – improving the delivery system’s ability to optimize for results.
2) Pause ads that consistently see no delivery. Ad rules can make this task easier.
3) Don’t add too many ads to each ad set. If more than around 6 ads are in an ad set, each ad has fewer opportunities to learn from delivery, and exploration between the different creatives in the ad will be less thorough. Use dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to test many variants of creativity efficiently.
4) Avoid audience overlap where possible. When two ads in different campaigns or ad sets target the same person, the worse-performing the ads will see less delivery.
5) If advertising many products to the same audience, use dynamic ads. Dynamic ads are a simpler, more efficient means to advertise product catalogs than creating many ad sets.
6) If testing the performance of different targeting, creative, or campaign setups, use split tests. Without split tests, overlapping audiences can bias your test results.
The above was shared with us from a HUMAN of Facebook ads support. Considering their support system is weak, this is a gem!. I followed up with further questions and still awaiting their reply. Would you want to know more? Reply in comments
Talk to us about your social media marketing campaign. If you don’t find a solution, you will find a new perspective that could improve your FB ads.
