Why aren't Facebook Ads working?

Facebook Ads has many options that can impact your success and end results, and perhaps one of the most important is your campaign objective. In Facebook Ads, defining and specifying the campaign objective correctly is the key. You’ve probably experienced a situation where you set the campaign objective to impressions or clicks. You even got impressions or clicks at a good price, but the business still wasn't making money. That's because Facebook (Meta) strives to give you exactly the result you ask for and at the price per result you are willing to pay.

Like everyone else, we also wanted to save our money on Facebook (Meta) advertising and initially chose the cheapest advertising objective – impressions. We thought it would help us get the clicks we wanted. As a result, we got a huge number of impressions with a very nice CPM, but there were almost no clicks, the CTR was terrible, and the CPC was too expensive.

Then we decided to set up the campaign for clicks. The results improved: CTR and CPC became much better, although CPM increased significantly. But all those hundreds of cheap clicks seemed useless, as if they were being done by bots. No profit, just wasted money. Then, finally, we realized that clicks and transitions to the website themselves make no sense when our true goal is sales.

In the end, we decided to admit to Facebook (Meta) that we really needed sales, not impressions, not clicks, but sales. We set the objective to sales, and here's what happened...

We set the pixel to sales and began preparing for a large flow of sales. And it seemed we had understood the essence, and now everything would go smoothly. However, reality turned out to be different. We immediately set a rather high bid cap, but it didn't work at all. We increased the cost per target result by 50%, and some impressions started coming in. Nevertheless, the amount was far from what we got with clicks. We realized that at this rate, we would get the first result in six months. We increased the cost by another 50%, and impressions started coming in more actively. We began to get the first results. We noticed that our daily budget was being spent in the first few hours, especially during nighttime, when there were few users but many advertisers. We assumed that the budget was not being spent optimally.

We came to the logical conclusion: lower the cost per result, but then we faced issues with unstable ad delivery. So, we realized that we needed to find a balance between price and result. This is the biggest challenge.

With the right objective, you can achieve results, but be prepared for the fact that the cost per result may disappoint you. Saving on your advertising is naturally not in Facebook’s interest. Your spending is its earnings. You can try to save on the cost per target result by trying to guess the optimal price. Even if you find it, it will change over time, as Facebook Ads works on an open auction principle. Your price will be either too low or too high. Obviously, we couldn’t manually monitor and change bids 24/7.

We solved this problem with automatic bid adjustment, which selects and sets the best price at any given time. You can try to implement this yourself, or you can use a web service that automatically adjusts bids to achieve optimal results.

Good luck with your advertising!