Handy Tips for Fixing Ads’ Under-Delivery on Facebook

Experiencing under-delivery on your ads is probably one of the most frustrating things that can happen to you on Facebook ads. You go through all the trouble of setting up campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Afterwards, you give everything a budget, push it live, and then… nothing happens. So, what’s the solution? Here are a few simple – yet effective - tips to help you overcome this hurdle.

1) Check for the campaign/ ad set and ad status. If the ad is live, you must ensure you have not reached any budget limits within the account. Examine the ad set budget, campaign budgets, and your payment methods.

2) It is critical that your ad's image does not contain more than 20% text. Facebook typically does not like images that contain heavy text and therefore, limits their delivery.

3) You need to make sure you are not targeting the same audience in too many places within your account. Make use of Facebook’s audience overlap tool to see if you are hitting the same users far too many times.

4) It is a good idea to try changing you bid method to automatic or, as Facebook calls it, “Lowest cost”.

5) Have a look at your relevance scores on your ads. Low relevance scores on ads tell Facebook that people are not responsive to your ads and therefore, your ad won’t serve the intended purpose. If you have low relevance scores, try changing your ad copy. Think of ingenious ways to make your ad more appealing to the people you are targeting.

6) Review the size of your audience. Having a very small or limited audience may be the reason you are struggling to get impressions and reach. This is applicable even if you have a large budget.

7) If you happen to be using conversion campaigns in Facebook, check if you are getting enough conversions on a weekly basis. This is imperative in order for Facebook’s algorithms to learn who best to serve your ads to. The general rule of thumb is to get 50 conversions per week from an ad set, so that the algorithms can have enough data to learn. In case you aren’t getting anywhere close to that figure, try changing what you are optimizing for. If you aren’t getting enough purchases, optimize for add to carts instead. Focus on something a bit further up the marketing funnel.

8) You must make sure to opt into more placements on the ad set level.

There, as you can see, fixing the problem of under-delivery on your ads isn’t rocket science. Just follow the aforementioned tips and you are sure to have everything sorted out.