Why Ad Campaigns Underperform & How to Fix Them?

How to optimize marketing campaigns to improve performance?

1. Consider Your Audience

Sometimes an otherwise well-executed ad campaign can fall short because of inaccurate audience targeting. For instance, if you have selected a broader campaign audience targeting, you may find that users are not familiar enough with your brand or don’t actually need your product. Similarly, sometimes when you select a narrow or exact audience, there are chances of fetching fewer leads or low reach due to a sparse target audience. Key parameters that influence the campaign audience include your audience interests, demographic profile, target location, ad placement, budget, and ad relevance.

Solution:

Audience interests

One of the best ways to continuously improve your ad performance is testing and optimizing your campaigns. However, initial audience research is crucial to identify your target audience.

For audience research, one way is to create a running list of targeting ideas for your ideal persona. Let’s say if you provide self-defense classes, one of your persona can be:

Persona name: Student A

• Male/Female
• 18-45 years old
• Interested in mixed martial arts
• Love to watch UFC

Then, go to Facebook audience insights tool to find out how many people are there in your targeting ideas. Set a location and enter one of your targeting ideas in the Interests field.

The data shows the age range of your persona lies between 18-54, men being the majority audience.

Scroll down, you can figure out the top pages liked by people interested in martial arts.

As surprising as it may seem, these pages are followed by your target audience.

Add a couple of pages and update your running list of targeting ideas.

• Male/Female
• 18-54 years old
• Interested in mixed martial arts
• Love to watch UFC
• Sachin Tendulkar
• Akshay Kumar

Repeat the above process by trying out more interests. Once you have collected enough targeting ideas, go to Facebook detailed targeting feature (under Ad Set).

Type one of our ideas inside the interest field. And one clicking the Suggestions, Facebook gives you more names (self-defense art forms) that your audience may be interested in.

Add one of the suggestions to your list and see the potential reach for it. A good rule of thumb is to reach around 5,00,000 to 1 million audience. But again, that depends on the type of your business and the locations you serve.

Then you come down to selecting the other parameters.

Location

Consider your business type and operations while selecting the location of your ad campaign. For example, a fitness centre advertising in its locality can find more inquiries than advertising throughout the city.

Finally, choose a budget based on the reach you want.

Budget

With higher budgets, auto bidding is higher. The campaign is likely to receive more traffic. With lower ad budgets, the campaign could receive fewer clicks and conversions.

But there are exceptions. If you have a small location selection and have already covered your TG, increasing the budget will not make any difference and might increase the cost per result.

The same holds true for low budget ads. If you think you aren’t receiving the desired results, your ad spend might be less and targeting broad. In such a case, you need to either increase the budget or curtail your broad targeting.

Prevent Ad Fatigue

Ad fatigue is when your audience has seen your ad multiple times, got bored of it and starts to ignore them. As a result, they do not take the action you want them to take, and your results drop off. Key things you can follow to avoid ad fatigue:

— Refresh your ad copy and creatives

— Expand your audience

— Set a custom frequency cap. Lowering your frequency may also help you reach new people in your audience and revive this fatiguing ad set

Learn 10 tips to avoid ad fatigue.

Use Ad relevance diagnostics

It is Facebook's own tool that gives you tips on how to improve your ad performance. Review ad relevance diagnostics to determine if adjustments to your creative assets, landing page or audience could improve performance.

Ad relevance diagnostics columns (quality ranking, engagement rate ranking, conversion rate ranking) can be found under the Performance column preset.

If it shows Below average, you can follow the recommendations to improve campaign performance.

Ad relevance diagnostics aren't available for ads with fewer than 500-1000 impressions.

Fix Learning limited

During learning phase, Facebook’s delivery system explores and learns to deliver your ad to the best audience possible. During this phase, the results are less stable and the cost higher. But, if your ad gets stuck in the learning phase, Delivery column status reads "Learning limited".

As per Facebook, an ad set becomes Learning limited when the ad set is limited by:

• small audience size
• low budget
• low bid or cost control
• high auction overlap
• low optimization events (e.g. clicks, leads, etc.)
• too many running at the same time

Ways to fix learning limited ad sets to improve campaign performance:

     — Combine ads sets and campaigns to get results faster

     — Expand your audience

     — Raise your budget

     — Raise your bid or cost control

     — Change your optimization event

Connect your pixel for remarketing and custom conversion campaigns

Most people need to see your ad more than once to make a purchase decision. Which is why remarketing ads to people who have already visited your website is essential. You have to set up a Facebook pixel on your website.

To help Facebook understand what type of people you want on your website, add a pixel event. For example, if you want to increase sign ups, you may add a custom event to the “Thank you page” - which comes after someone signs up on your website. Facebook will work on bringing people who are most likely to sign up on your website.

Learn how to set up Facebook pixel events, and select a custom event.

Use Facebook Lookalike audiences to reach audiences similar to your existing customer. The chances of conversion are better. Learn how to create a Lookalike audience in our easy tutorial.

2. Choose the campaign objective wisely

While creating the campaign, we select an objective to optimize our campaign towards a specific goal, such as lead generation or website traffic. But sometimes we choose a campaign objective that does not align with our business goal. For example, a real estate business searching for leads does an engagement or promotion campaign instead of a lead generation campaign. This affects the response of the ad campaign.

Solution:

Choose a campaign objective that aligns with your business goal and the stage of your prospect in the sales funnel. For instance, targeting a cold audience with a sales objective like website traffic or lead generation would likely fail. This is because your audience is not familiar with the brand yet. On the other hand, a promotion objective can first help create brand awareness. Based on your business goals (lead generation, website traffic, conversions and more), you can then run campaigns for transactions or increasing sales.

Read: How to Choose the Most Relevant Facebook Ad Objective

3. Examine the visuals and content copy

When people browse Facebook or Google, the advertiser has just a split second to grab the audience s attention. There are ads with great strategy and targeting that do not have the right words either on the ad or the landing page.

Solution:

While making the creative, you can follow the below tips:

• Noticeability: The image should have one focal point to grab audience attention.
• Brand link: Consider the stage of your audience in your sales funnel while writing the copy. Make it easy for the user to identify your brand.
• Beneficial: Offer a clear incentive and benefit for the customer through your visuals and copy.
• Informational: Your copy should explain the product well enough.
• Emotional: Make the ad appealing to the viewer by offering discounts or free returns that lower the buying risk.
• Call to action: Choose the right CTA that urges the audience to act.