Garry Grant — June 4, 2020 The Facebook advertising platform is robust and can be confusing to the newcomer. If your having trouble with an advertising campaign, there are a number of things that can be wrong whether it is failing to deliver the results expected or even not delivering at all. With that said, let’s take a look at what could be wrong. We’ll go through the most obvious reasons first and then delve into more complex topics that could be causing your ad to underperform.
- Your ad has been disapproved: this is one of the most common reasons for an ad not to be delivered. If your ad has not been approved, it will say, and there are a few things to look at to fix it. First, you’ll want to go over the Facebook advertising guidelines. If your ad promotes anything illegal or even has grammar or punctuation issues, it will be rejected. Make sure not only your ad complies with the guidelines, but your landing page as well. You can either edit your ad or appeal the decision to get your ad running.
- The ad hasn’t been approved yet: another common reason for your ad to not be running is that it’s still in the approval process. If it is, again, it will say. Approval usually takes about 24 hours for them to review the ad. If you edit your ad before the approval process is over, you will have to wait up to 24 hours again.
- Low-quality ad: does your ad contain engagement bait, sensational language, or withhold information? If so, this may cause your ad not to be delivered.
- Ad budget reached: did you spend up to the limit of your budget? If so, Facebook will stop running your ad. Simply increase the budget to allow the ad to run more or wait until tomorrow if there is a daily budget set.
- Bid cap too low: did you set your bid cap too low? If so, Facebook won’t be able to deliver your ad because, for example, it may not be able to earn a click while keeping the number of impressions low enough to meet your bid cap. Simply edit your bid cap to resume your ads showing. If your ad was serving previously, it is possible that your CTR went down because people have already seen the ad and don’t want to click on it. Check out what your historical CTR is and see if you need to make adjustments to the bid cap to get the ad running again.
- Optimization goal bid too low: did you set an optimization goal? If so, you may need to either raise the bid or try optimizing for clicks first. This will allow Facebook to get the data it needs to find an audience suitable for your ad’s conversion goal. When you set an optimization goal for a new ad, and there are no clicks, Facebook may think that the bid for the goal is too low for it to serve any ads, so your ad will not run.
- Too much text: if your ad contains too much text, it may not be delivered, or maybe delivering to fewer people. Facebook’s 20% rule is that your ad should contain less than 20% text. You can check if your ad has too much text by looking at the ratings. If it says image text is OK, you’re good to go; otherwise, you may want to lower the amount of text. To allow your image to run normally, include most of the text in the ad itself and not in the image.
- Ad not relevant to enough people: is your ad irrelevant to the majority of your audience? If so, you may want to increase the relevancy. Facebook looks at things like CTR and conversion rates to determine the relevancy of an ad.
- Audience overlapping: do you have multiple ads with the same audiences? If so, you may want to check out Facebook’s overlapping audience tool. If you have multiple ads with the same audience, Facebook will prevent some of the ads from running to avoid them competing against each other.
- Scheduling issues: are you using scheduling in your ad? If so, has your end date already passed, or is it not yet time for your ad to run? Your ad may also be paused. If the end date has passed, you may want to consider extending it. If it’s not currently in the time window of the ad, consider waiting until it is or changing the schedule.
- The audience too small: although Facebook can run ads to tiny audiences, this may be an issue causing your ad not to run. Not only that, but when you narrow your targeting to smaller audiences, you may need to pay more to get the same amount of impressions you’d otherwise get with a broader audience. If the ad has already shown to everyone in the audience, your ad may seem like it’s paused. We recommend either waiting, increasing your bids, or widening the audience when this happens. Also, try out Lookalike Audiences to see if Facebook can find an audience similar to the one your targeting for additional reach.
- Landing page issues: does your landing page have a lack of substantive content, illegal content, or otherwise? Facebook looks at landing pages to determine if the ads can serve. Having the wrong content on your landing page will block it from serving ads.
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