What is the meaning of life? How do you achieve happiness? Why are my Facebook [a.k.a Meta] ads not converting? We’re asking the big questions today and answering them – well, at least one of ‘em.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to a paid ad campaign’s success, both within the Meta advertising platform itself and outside of it. Here are some of the common themes we’ve come across throughout the different accounts we have worked with.
Your campaign is converting, you just don’t know it
You’d be surprised how often we see errors in relation to tracking and it can be a pretty easy mistake to make. Facebook has some pretty handy tools to track your website visitors’ actions through conversion tracking, so it’s pretty important to get your Pixel [and Conversions API if relevant] set up correctly.
Making sure that conversion tracking is set up correctly not only allows you to see how many conversions you’ve received, what value they’ve generated and what ROAS they’re driving, but it’s also trains the Facebook algorithm what people are most likely to convert and help reach more of them.
Facebook has some great guides on setting up your Pixel, Events and CAPI but if you’re finding it a bit tricky, we highly recommend chatting to an expert to make sure it’s set up correctly.
Your website isn’t optimised for conversions
While we’re no website experts, we’ve definitely learned a few things along the way to help make your customer’s path to purchasing [or converting] as smooth as possible. Your website’s user experience has a significant impact on whether or not someone converts, so let’s make sure it’s easy for them to do!
Here are some things to check if you suspect your website may not be pulling it’s weight:
- Website Speed – a 2019 study by Portent found that a 0-4 second load time is best for conversion rates, while the highest rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds. Check your site speed here for both desktop and mobile sites and look for opportunities to reduce that speed, even if it’s by mere milliseconds.
- Bounce Rate – are your ads driving high levels of landing page traffic at a pretty low cost per result? Are you maybe seeing a high number of add to carts that aren’t quite translating to purchases? This could indicate that you’re getting the right traffic, but there’s something on site that’s stopping them from completing a purchase. Some examples include a complicated checkout process, requiring people to create an account to purchase, confusing shipping details or a high order value required to obtain free shipping.
- Key Information and Easy-to-navigate menu – is it easy to find key information a customer may need prior to making a purchase, like shipping and return options? Is it easy to navigate to key sections (and back home again)? If it’s pretty difficult to find this information and to navigate your website, users may get frustrated and be tempted to bounce.
While those examples we’ve listed aren’t an exhaustive list of factors that could be impacting your website’s performance, they all have one thing in common and that’s making it as easy as pie to go from landing on your website to checking out.
Your organic strategy isn’t pulling it’s weight
During our time managing paid ad campaigns for our clients, there’s one common element shared by those who’s paid ad campaigns truly succeed and that’s that their organic presence is active and strong!
Your social community is one of your most powerful ‘warm audiences’ and from our experience can be one of the highest-converting audiences. It makes sense that those who already have an existing touchpoint with you, such as watching a video or liking a post, are more likely to buy and will convert at a higher ROAS.
Being active on social media, driving new followers and engagements means that this warm audience is continually being topped up and primed for retargeting!
Speaking of audience targeting…
Audience targeting could be it’s own blog post [or multi-part series] all on it’s own, so we’ll do our best to keep this brief.
This is quite the generalisation, but for the most part, the colder an audience the more it costs to convert. Therefore, the warmer an audience, the less it costs to convert them and the higher the return on ad spend will be. That’s not to say there aren’t situations where the reverse is true, which is why we’re big advocates of testing audiences regardless of what past performance has demonstrated.
With that in mind, it’s really important to ensure we’re keeping those warm audiences topped up. In addition to being present on your organic channels, this can also look like:
- Running awareness or consideration campaigns on Meta to drive engagements, video views, lead generation or website visits
- Investing in activity on other platforms, such as TikTok, Pinterest or Google, focused on consideration and website visits
- Investing in SEO to help your website rank organically and increase website traffic
By ensuring you’ve got new audiences being funneled through, you’re giving your campaigns their best chance of success and creating a really strong opportunity to scale.
It’s not you [or your campaigns]
Unfortunately this one isn’t as easy to fix as it’s one that’s completely out of our control, and that’s external factors such as macroeconomic and social influences. Everything from changes in inflation and interest rates to the increased expenditure to school holidays or special occasions can all have an immense impact on a customer’s willingness to spend.
While we can’t control these factors [if you can, please tell us], they’re important to monitor because they could present opportunities to adjust your campaign targeting, spend or even messaging to speak to these more timely pain points.
If you’ve been thinking about advertising on Meta or looking for ways to improve your current campaigns, but don’t quite have the time, energy or patience to invest, maybe our social media ads management services are for you. Maybe you just need someone to check in on your ads and tell you where to go next. We gotchu with our Meta Advertising Health Checks.
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