My ads aren’t converting!

That’s something I’ve heard a lot from ad managers as I’ve been coaching them over the years. And there’s a few things we need to look at to find out why.

So why aren’t your ads converting? Well, there’s a few things that we will go through to troubleshoot that and see what the exact problem is. But first of all, the first thing we want to consider is are you even using the right objective? Sometimes when we’re wanting people to come over and take an action to opt in or sign up for something, we need to choose the right campaign objective.

Now this is something I have heard Facebook reps have said to people, you need to do a traffic campaign to start with, to get people there. And yes, I think maybe five years ago, we did kind of do traffic campaigns to season the pixel a bit. And then we’d move over to our conversion campaign. But these days don’t do that! Don’t, If you are wanting people to convert.

So if you’re sending them to a page where you want them to opt in or sign up or you know provide their details, you want to use a conversion campaign. And then in that conversion campaign, you want to select the objective that you want them to trigger. And this is where we have pixels and we’ll have them installed. So say for example, someone’s opting in for lead magnet and you’ve got the lead standard event on the thank you page. So therefore when people sign up, they go on the thank you page. And bing the standard event code for lead is fired.

And that’s how you’re tracking your purchases so that you can say, great, I’ve got a lead and it costs me $5. So you need to optimize for that event that you’re wanting them to take especially when it’s a short funnel like that, where people are just opting in again, you may hear that No, no you gotta take a step back and you’ve got to optimize for the step before.

When you are just starting out, you know, don’t go straight for optimizing for leads, take a step back and just optimize for view content or page view or something. So typically that doesn’t work and you will want to do especially when it’s at your funnel you want to be optimizing for leads.

So first thing, if your ads are converting, have you chosen the correct objective campaign objective. So using conversions instead of traffic. Two, have you then selected the correct standard event that you want to fire. So lead on the thank you page rather than optimizing for the step before. They’re the first couple of things and if they’re all in order.

Next thing we’ll go and have a look at the ad itself. How is the ad performing? So this is where we will look down at the ad set level to see the data. Now, the data you typically want to be looking at here initially is we want to look at the CTR links. So that’s the click through rate for our link clicks. That’s what we’re wanting people to click on the link and go off of Facebook.

So that’s the metric that we’re looking at here. Now we want that to be up around 1% because that’s typically our benchmark for saying, we want 1% of people who see this ad to head over to the page. I know that sounds like a crazy low number, but that’s the numbers. Okay. 1%, if you have a 0.5% click through rate, that’s a really strong indication that you need to be working on the creative of the ad. Like the image or the video or the headline, or even a bit of the copy itself when it comes to those three things. If it is a 0.5, I would look at the creative first. What’s happening here? What’s the image or what’s the video?

Is it actually getting people to engage and stop? So I would be looking at that copy in that imagery first, then I would look at the headline, making it a snappier headline, giving it a great hook so that it’s drawing people in and it’s, you know, hitting a pain point straightaway, or it’s resonating with them in some way so that they read it and they go, Oh man, that is me. And they want to know more. So they click on the head over. And then it would be like the ad copy, like the first couple of lines, that you will see above the image. That would be particularly the next thing that I would be focusing on.

So your ad we want to have a 1% click through right now, if it does have a 1% click through rate, but then we want to look at how much is a cost per click. Your cost per click typically would be like $2 or under or $3 or under. If it’s over that, if you’re paying $7 cost per click, then that’s really going to hurt you. You’re not going to be able to get the number of people you need over the site in a cost effective manner to be able to be profitable with your ads.

So if you’ve got a high cost per click, you need to look at the CPM as well. Is the CPM too high? If it is, it’s typically either a sign that it’s a heavily targeted audience. And so there’s a lot of competition there. Or again, it could be a sign that Facebook isn’t terribly keen on your ad.

And so therefore it’s not keen on it because they can see that people aren’t engaging with it. And it’s not getting the desired results. So they’re going to give it a high CPM to throttle it in the newsfeed so that it’s not getting out. So again, that would be coming back to ad creative. If you’re cost per click is high.

If your click through rate is low. And if your CPM is high, then yes, that’s all a sign that you need to do some work on your ads. That’s where the problem is and why they wouldn’t be converting. Now, if that’s all looking good and people are clicking and they’re getting through over to the landing page, look at the landing page conversion rate.

We need to be seeing that people are opting in at what we’re expecting. So typically if it’s a PDF or a guide or something, we would be typically wanting a 25% conversion rate. When someone lands on that page, if it’s sending someone over to an application, then that may just be like a 10% conversion rate or so. So you need to get the required number of people over to that page to start seeing those numbers.

So if you get 10 people over to your page to opt in for a PDF, then you would be expecting two to three people should have opted in by that point. That’s about at that 25 to 30%, if that’s not happening well, you know, let it go a bit longer. That’s still very early days if it’s getting to 20 or so, definitely if you’ve got to 100 and you don’t have 25 people having opted in there is a big problem. The problem there indicates that there’s something off with the landing page, right? That they’ve come through, they’ve been engaged with the ad and they’ve clicked on the ad.

They’ve come over, but you’ve lost them on the landing page. Was the messaging off? Was it not congruent with what was being said in the ad? So that could be a well, would be a very big indicator for you that we need to work on the landing page. The ad itself is actually working. It’s doing its job. People are clicking and coming over, but then once they get there, people aren’t signing up. And with that always make sure you check on mobile because 90% plus of your traffic is going to be coming from mobile.

So make sure that your mobile page is loading fast and it’s nice and clear, and it’s all there on the screen, okay. That I don’t have to squeeze in or out or there’s any issues with it. So that’s your ads. We’ve checked your ads, looking at those key metrics on the ads, looking at the landing page, seeing if people are actually opting in also, we need to consider the budget. Because if you don’t have enough budget, then it’s going to take you longer to get the results. So say for example, you were spending $5 a day on ads where you were wanting someone to fill in an application. An application, we typically see them be lower. It’s not like your typical opt in rate for a PDF or a guide it’s generally lower.

So it might be 10% of people that would get to the page would then apply for whatever your offer may be. So therefore, if you were spending $5 a day and it costs, you say $2 cost per click. So it was costing you $2 to get someone over to the page and you had $5 a day spend then you’re going to get two and a half people there a day over to your page, which isn’t giving you enough room to get that 10% opt in. You would need to get 10 people over to the page. And then ideally, if you are getting that 1% opting in, if you got one person opting in out of 10, you’d be doing very well.

But for example, it’s costing you $2 to get someone to the page. So to get 10 people to the page is costing you 20. So you can see at $5 a day, it’s going to take you four days, at least typically to get somebody to opt in. So therefore you need to be patient and need to go over a week, we’re probably only going to get one person opting in. So if you’re able to increase the budget and if you had a budget of $50 a day, then you would get 25 people to the page. And then ideally you’d have someone opting in every day. So that’s something else to consider if all the other numbers are looking good and, and, you know, matching those metrics. So why are people opting in, well, you just maybe need more people there. So you need more budget to get more people there to get those results.

So there’s a few things like, why your ads may not be converting. One, the correct objective has not been chosen and then the correct optimization for a conversion campaign may not have been chosen. Then looking at our ad data. Is that the click through rate? Is it the CPM? Is it the cost per click? Where are the signs showing us that people are either engaging or not engaging with our ads then if they are, and they’re getting to that landing page, are they opting in or are they not opting in? And then is that the budget? We just need more budget to get more people there and then we’ll start getting the results.