How do you know if your campaign is no longer spending money?
Good indicators would be a crash in your campaign performance graph, or a sudden drop in conversions to 0. If your Facebook ads are not delivering (i.e., you’re not getting any impressions on your ads), they likely have one (or more) of the delivery issues listed below.
The first place to check for issues with your ads is the All Ads page of your campaign. Here you will find error messages issued by Facebook, including why an ad was disapproved, or suggestions from AdEspresso.
- Click Your campaigns on the main navigation bar, then click Search a campaign, and select the campaign from the drop-down menu.
- Click the All ads tab. Errors are displayed at the top of this page. Red messages are failed delivery checks, and orange messages are recommendations that won't always require action.
- To view the error details for each specific ad, scroll down and click Show # ads below each adset.
- Under the status column, hover over "Ad has errors/warnings" to read the full explanation.
Common delivery issues
- An ad was disapproved or is still in review
- Your ad account has reached its spend limit
- An image violates the 20% rule
- Your bid is too low
- Your campaign's budget is too low for the number of running ads
- Your optimization goal is hard to reach
- Your audiences overlap
An ad was disapproved or is still in review
All ads are reviewed by Facebook before they are run, to ensure they follow Facebook's advertising policies. See the full list of prohibited content that could get your ads disapproved. If your ad is rejected, the reason it was disapproved will be displayed in your All Ads tab. See above to learn how to review ad errors. Facebook will also send you a notification to the email address you have registered with them.
According to Facebook, most ads are reviewed within 24 hours. During busy periods, however, it may take longer, so your ad may not be delivering because it’s still stuck in review. It’s a good idea to publish your campaign in advance with a future scheduled date to avoid any delays.
To resolve this issue
If your ad has been disapproved, make the required changes to the ad, and after your edits are saved it will be resubmitted to Facebook for review. You can also choose to submit an appeal to Facebook.
Your ad account has reached its spend limit
It’s a good idea to set a spend limit on your Facebook ad account so that no campaign spending goes overboard by accident. However, it’s easy to forget that a limit is in place, so over time that limit could be reached. When that happens, ads will no longer spend.
To resolve this issue
Navigate to your Facebook Ads Manager payment settings. Here you can change, remove, or reset your ad account's spend limit.
An image violates the 20% rule
Facebook generally does not allow images in ads to exceed an image to text ratio of 20%. Reach is often restricted for ads that have too much text in their images. This includes logos, watermarks, and slogans. The more text an image contains, the lower the ad’s reach will be. It may not run at all, and this generally happens without warning from Facebook. Learn more
Exceptions to this rule can include images of book or album covers, games, product images, and event posters.
To resolve this issue
Use Facebook’s text overlay tool to check your ads, and then make the necessary adjustments.
Your bid is too low
Facebook delivers ads based on three factors: Their bid (what you're willing to pay for the desired action), how likely your audience is to take that action, and the relevance and quality of the ad.
Placing a bid cap on your bid could keep it too low and cause delivery problems. See Choosing a bidding strategy to understand the different bidding options in AdEspresso.
To resolve this issue
Raise your bid, or switch to lowest cost without a bid cap.
Your campaign's budget is too low for the number of running ads
To ensure your campaign runs as expected, you should have at least the minimum budget per ad per day. This depends on your campaign type and bidding strategy, but generally is at least $2 per ad per day. Learn more
Keep in mind that running split tests creates more ads that have to share the budget within an adset, so budgets should be set accordingly.
To resolve this issue
You can easily edit the budget from the campaign’s dashboard.
Your optimization goal is hard to reach
A campaign’s optimization goal is the action you want Facebook to help you achieve by showing your ads to the people most likely to take that action. Your budget is optimized to get you the best performance from your ads based on this goal.
Delivery issues can occur when, instead of a common action like link clicks, the optimization goal is conversions. A conversion is less common than a link click, so Facebook has less data to work with to find an audience likely to take your desired action. If you have no conversions, your campaign can end up stopping after a few days.
To resolve this issue
Edit your optimization goal in your campaign’s dashboard to a more frequent action. Your conversions will still be tracked, and you’ll also get a wider audience being targeted.
Your audiences overlap
If multiple adsets in a campaign target very similar audiences, they could be competing against each other for the same audience. Facebook prevents competition by stopping the adset that isn’t performing as well.
To resolve this issue
Navigate to your Facebook Ads Manager audience page, check the boxes to select some audiences to compare, click more (three dots), and then click Show Audience Overlap. Then you can make edits to your targeting to reduce that overlap.
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