Ep 49: What to Do When Your Facebook Ads Aren't Working

Have you been running Facebook Ads without any results? If so, I've got you covered. Today on Marketing In 10, I'm giving you my recommendations on what to do when Facebook Ads aren't working for you.

Hey, everybody, this is Jim Lastinger. Hope you are doing well. Welcome to another episode of Marketing In 10. Today, we're going to be talking a little bit about Facebook Ads.

So, Facebook Ads are a great way to promote your products and services and Facebook has an incredible reach, but they definitely can be complicated to work with and they don't always work immediately. So, today, I'm going to give you my recommendations on what you should do if your Facebook ads aren't working.

First, we need to know what's working and what's working. So, you'll want to take a look through your campaigns and see if there are certain campaigns that perform well and certain campaigns that aren't doing as well. If you're running a funnel type of setup, where you have multiple campaigns that work together to generate sales, then you might not be able to easily turn off any poor performing campaigns. So, you have to understand how all of your campaigns work together. So, in that case, you'll want to dig into your ad sets and audiences and see what's actually working. It could be that you have some audiences that don't perform as well as others. And you can try turning those off and start testing new audiences.

Along those same lines, let's talk about ad sets. So, I recommend using just one or maybe two different interest-based audiences in an individual ad set. That way you can see how that individual audience performs compared to the other interests. So, if you're currently lumping a bunch of different interest audiences in a single ad set, then you might want to consider separating those out into individual ad sets so that you can see how they perform individually.

And when you have different ad sets and you're in the testing phase, you'll want to use the same ads in each of those ad sets. That way you can make an apples to apples comparison. And once you've been running the campaigns for a while and have enough data to know that a certain ad performs particularly well for a certain ad set, then you can start pausing some of the other ads. But try to keep the ads the same across the different ad sets when you're testing audiences.

Next, let's talk about audiences themselves. So, you'll want to try using a bunch of different remarketing audiences, see what works best for you. Again, you'll want to stick with using just one or two different remarketing audiences in each ad set, but try things like 30, 60, and 90-day visitor based audiences. And then, depending on the size of your account, you can try one, two, five, seven, 14, and 30-day audiences for customers that have abandoned checkout. And again, this is going to depend on the size of your business and how many people you're actually having go through your checkout processes. But if you only get a handful of sales per week, then you might want to stick with seven-day audiences and probably 30-day audiences.

For cold audience campaigns, so campaigns where you're reaching out to people that haven't interacted with your brand before, try creating a 2% and 5% lookalike audience based on previous customers. These seem to be performing really well right now, nearly as well as the 1% audiences that Facebook defaults to. And that's always been the default advice in the past is to start with 1% audiences, but we've seen two and 5% lookalikes start working pretty well, especially considering the issues with Facebook and iOS tracking over the last year or so.

And finally, let's talk about your ads themselves. Make sure that you aren't spamming your customers' timelines. So, take a look at the frequency column in your Facebook Ads reporting and make sure that it doesn't go over something like four. So, you'll want to set the frequency cap there or around there. Showing the same ads to people 10, 15, or even more times, isn't really going to do anything other than annoy them and it costs you money in the long run. So, make sure that you're trying out different types of ads as well. If you've primarily done image based ads in the past, then try some video. If you've only done video so far, try some image based ads with lots of copy. Try a bunch of different things, run them all together and see what works. Test out different headlines, anything that you can test, you should do that.

The bottom line with Facebook, and really it's any other ad platform, is that you always have to be testing. That's one of the things I talk about all the time on this show, always be testing. That's the only way to continually improve your performance and stay ahead of the competition. I'll have show notes in a transcript available at jimlastinger.com/49. So, go take a look at that. If you have a couple of minutes to rate and review the podcast, that would be extremely helpful, and I would appreciate that. It helps me grow the show and reach more people.

And I have a bonus for all of you loyal listeners out there. I've created a free guide that shows you exactly how to manage your Google Ads accounts in 30 minutes a week. This is the exact process that I teach all of my coaching clients. And if you follow these processes, it will give you a profitable ad account that you can sustainably run for years into the future, hopefully. You can download this for completely free at jimlastinger.com/guide, that's jimlastinger.com/guide, and there will also be a link in the show notes.

That's all for this week's episode. I'll be back soon with another episode of Marketing In 10. Until then, take care and have a great day.