Every marketing professional eagerly anticipates the outcomes of their campaigns. We establish ad campaigns with certain result expectations.

Therefore, it’s incredibly discouraging to log in and find absolutely no results. Your campaigns are displaying zeros across the board.

Usually, we begin by verifying the obvious: Is it turned on? Am I looking at the correct date range? But what if everything is set up correctly? What should you do next? Here are four frequent reasons why your Facebook Ads are underperforming, along with solutions to get them back up and running. But first, a quick disclaimer.

Caveat: Not seeing your ad doesn’t mean it isn’t running

You were probably intrigued by the mention of four reasons and a caveat, so let’s start with the caveat. It’s crucial to understand that there’s a distinction between your ad not running at all and you or your client simply not seeing it. Many marketers I speak with want to see their own ads, and it’s understandable. It’s a matter of pride and helps to know firsthand that your ads are live. However, just because you don’t see your ads, doesn’t mean they aren’t running. Compared to Google Ads, it’s more difficult to trigger impressions for yourself with Facebook Ads. On Google, you search your targeted keywords, and the ad either appears or it doesn’t. Facebook isn’t as straightforward. Depending on your targeting, you might be almost certain you should be seeing your ad, or you could be completely unaware if you’re even part of the target audience, like with Lookalike Audiences. Therefore, this post will concentrate on situations where your ad isn’t receiving any impressions at all, not instances where you personally aren’t seeing your ad. Free guide » 7 Fundamental Facebook Advertising Tips every advertiser should know.

Reason #1: Your target audience is too limited

In recent years, Facebook has faced several privacy concerns. One measure the company is taking to prevent feeling “too intrusive” is requiring advertisers to target a minimum audience size for ad campaigns.

Your ads won’t run on Facebook if your target audience has fewer than 1,000 active users. Here are a few ways this could happen:

• The chosen targeting parameters simply don’t have enough users.
• You’re excluding a large portion of your audience in an attempt to be efficient.
• Your uploaded customer list didn’t match as many people as expected.
• Your targeting layers are set up incorrectly. So, if you’re aiming for a very specific and small audience with your Facebook Ads, this might be preventing them from running.

How to address this

There are two potential solutions, depending on the answer to one question: Can individuals outside this specific audience see your ads? If not, you won’t be able to market to your chosen audience due to its limited size. If yes, you need to expand your audience in a way you’re comfortable with. This might involve adding more interests or behaviors, broadening your demographic limitations, or, if it’s a customer upload, simply adding more users to the list. Reaching at least 1,000 users is necessary for your Facebook ad campaign to run.

Reason #2: Your ads are disapproved or restricted

Similar to audience size guidelines, Facebook has rules regarding acceptable ads.

There are limitations on the amount of text allowed within an image. If an ad creative contains more than 20% text, its impressions will be restricted or completely halted. You can use this tool to verify your ad creative before uploading it. Advertising restrictions also apply to sensitive categories like age, politics, housing, and dating. These protected categories require extra approvals or have specific limitations to prevent discrimination on the platform. On the other hand, there are rare instances where your ad gets flagged for these violations even though you haven’t broken any rules. Facebook sometimes proactively denies borderline ads out of caution. If your ads are wrongly disapproved, you can contact support to appeal the decision. While this might involve spending a significant amount of time on the phone and sending follow-ups, in most cases, I’ve been able to overturn inaccurate disapprovals. Access our user-friendly guide to Facebook approvals (and disapprovals!) here.

What to do about it

Your options here are somewhat limited. You must either adjust your ads to comply with Facebook’s guidelines or they won’t run. This might involve completing political paperwork, creating new images with less text, or spending hours on the phone with Facebook support to get your ads approved (trust me, I’ve been there). Without approval, your ads won’t be displayed.

Reason #3: Your ad has poor or low engagement

Facebook has a responsibility to its users to maintain an engaging and enjoyable platform. For ad campaigns, this means ads with minimal or negative engagement aren’t shown as frequently as those with high positive engagement.

Three factors are at play for all creatives:

• Quality Ranking: This ranking reflects your ad’s perceived quality, measured through feedback and the post-click experience. Your ad is ranked against others competing for the same audience.
• Engagement Rate Ranking: This ranking represents your ad’s anticipated engagement rate, including clicks, likes, comments, and shares. Your ad is compared to others vying for the same audience.
• Conversion Rate Ranking: This ranking estimates your ad’s expected conversion rate. It’s based on comparisons with ads having the same optimization goal and targeting the same audience.

What to do about it

The first (and simplest) solution is usually creating a new ad and hoping for better engagement. If that doesn’t work and you’re struggling to gain traction, try running your ads through an engagement campaign first. Once they’ve garnered good engagement, you can leverage them in a new campaign. If these options fail, there are other strategies based on the observed ad relevance diagnostics. Honestly, there are so many potential optimization combinations that it’s easier to illustrate them visually than describe them in text. Here’s a helpful guide from Facebook:

If you’d like to delve deeper, check out this article.

Reason #4: Your bid/budget parameters are overly restrictive

One of Facebook’s greatest assets is its algorithm, which determines who sees your ads. Even within a targeted audience, not everyone will see your ad, as Facebook prioritizes those most likely to achieve your optimization goal, whether it’s landing page views, lead generation form submissions, online purchases, or ad engagement. This decision-making process relies on some flexibility to learn from both positive and negative performance. Overly restrictive budget or bid goals can hinder this learning process. Here are a couple of examples: Imagine you’re selling t-shirts for $20 each, but in an attempt to save money, you allocate a meager $1 daily budget and set conversions as your optimization goal. Unless your t-shirts practically sell themselves (unlikely, or you wouldn’t need Facebook Ads), this budget and goal combination is unrealistic. With such limited funds, Facebook can’t gather enough data to achieve success and will likely stop running your ads. Similarly, let’s say you have a more reasonable budget of $20 per day, but you impose a strict bid cap of $1. Similar to the budget constraint, Facebook will struggle to reach the audience most likely to convert with such a low bid. Without initial success, it will stop serving your ads due to insufficient data for learning and optimization.

What to do about it

Ensure your budget and bid restrictions allow Facebook enough time to learn and optimize. For budget, aim for a daily budget that’s roughly 50% of your target cost per acquisition (CPA). In our t-shirt example, this would mean a $10 daily budget to break even. While not a hard and fast rule, ensure your investment is reasonable. If you can’t afford this amount, consider postponing Facebook Ads or modifying your campaign goals. For bids, starting with automatic bidding for the lowest cost and adjusting based on initial performance has worked best in my experience. Allow campaigns to run for at least one to two weeks, sometimes even a month, before setting any restrictions.

Facebook ads not delivering: Identify the issue & implement these fixes!

There are several reasons your ads might not be delivering on Facebook, but unless you’re blatantly violating the rules, there are solutions. Hopefully, these scenarios have given you some ideas to get your ads running and generating sales on Facebook again as soon as possible!