Author: Viktor Stoilov
Why do your Facebook ads perform well for a few days and then deteriorate?
A few days ago, I spoke with colleagues from the United States, to whom I did an analysis of their advertising account, and one of their main questions was: “Why do our ads perform well in the first days and then deteriorate sharply?”
I laughed a little because I have the feeling that in the last year I have to answer this question almost every week. Since this problem affects almost every business advertising on Facebook or Instagram, I decided that my experience could be useful. The reason for this phenomenon in more than 90% of the cases is the same, and the solution is not so difficult.
To understand where this problem comes from and why both large and small advertisers have it, we need to understand in depth the logic of Facebook’s algorithms. Let’s imagine that we have an online store for women’s clothing. We advertise individual items and categories, we select audiences, but very often we launch a category of products and after a few days sales from advertising fall sharply, and again we have to make big changes. What is the reason?
In most cases, advertisers choose interest-based targeting or so-called Lookalike audiences or similar audiences that allow Facebook to search for people who are similar to our customers.
But what happens when we target these audiences?
Facebook “takes” the audience of, for example, 150k users who fall into your interest-based or Lookalike targeting and starts showing the ad first to…
The warmest audience that has the best chance to buy right away…
In most cases, this is an audience that has already entered your website, but has not yet bought or shown interest in your products, or even just recently searched for similar products / services on Google.
This audience, for the most part, is only a small percentage of your estimated 150k people. They run out in these 2-3-5 days and then the advertising starts to deteriorate.
How can we change it? The best solution is to increase the number of people who are engaged with our content. In part, we all do it with conversion campaigns, in which between 1-5% of the audience buys, and the other 95-99% get a little more acquainted with our brand. But if you want to have campaigns that have very good results for a long time, the solution is to increase your brand awareness.
You can create engagement campaigns, ask questions, create groups, publish interesting and useful content to send to your potential buyers before they become your customers. The possibilities and solutions are many, but the root of the problem is almost always the same -> too small a warm audience that is ready at the moment to buy the product or service you offer.
