11 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Are Not Spending Budget

After a few weeks of hard work, you’ve successfully planned and launched your latest campaign. Congratulations!

Now, all that’s left is to wait and see the results come in. Right?

Well, not quite. A few hours later you check in to see your results and see your campaign didn’t get a single click, yet. In fact, it didn’t spend any budget at all.

What’s the deal, Facebook? Why aren’t my Facebook Ads spending my budget?

Unfortunately, we see this issue happen more often than you’d think. In this article, we’ll cover some of the most common reasons why, and help you fix it.

Let’s get to it.

advertisement

Why Your Facebook Ads Aren’t Spending

In general, we find that ad delivery issues are broken down into three different main factors.

• Low quality ads
• Issues with your audiences
• Policy infringments

Let’s take a closer look at each one of them and how we can fix them.

1. Low Bids

The first and arguably the most common reason why your ads aren’t spending their budget is due to low manual bids.

You see, Facebook’s auction-based system works with three different factors.

• Bids: how much you’re willing to pay to achieve a desired result.
• Ad Quality: a measure of the quality of an ad based on a lot of different factors, such as feedback from people viewing or hiding your ads, how they behave once they reach your website, and much more.
• Estimated Action Rates: how likely someone is to interact with your ad and complete your desired action.

Most often, in an attempt to lower costs and increase profit margins, advertisers will lower their bids but will do so a little too much.

You see, when your ad quality and estimated action rates are too low, you’ll need to bid higher to ensure you can win in these auctions – even if it means you’ll bid higher than you what you’re willing to actually pay.

Otherwise, your ads will likely not spend since they can’t win any of the auctions they participate in.

In short, try increasing your bids to see if you can resume delivery.

2. Low-Quality Ads

On the other side of the same coin, if your ad isn’t delivering it may be because it has been flagged as low quality. In these cases, it’s usually best if you fix the issue first before increasing your bids, though.

Low-quality ads can be “triggered” for a few different reasons:

• Witholding information: ads that intentionally withold information to entice users to click in order to understand the full context.
• Clickbait: ads that ask users to interact with the ad in some way, such as asking for likes, comments, or shares.
• Sensational language: ads that use exaggerated words to entice users to click and then fail to deliver on the expectations, such as “10 Life Changing Facts …” and other similar sentences.

Furthermore, if your account has several ads flagged with low-quality attributes, your performance across your account can be impacted, too.

advertisement

3. Poor Landing Page Experience

Facebook doesn’t exclusively look at your ads’ attributes to determine its quality. In fact, what happens after the click itself can be as important when determing your ad’s quality.

You see, Facebook works hard to ensure that users have the best experience possible when interacting with content. As such, what happens after the click itself can be as important (or more) when determing your ad quality.

If you’re experiencing delivery issues, your landing page may have been flagged as low-quality. Some of the reason this can happen include:

• Lack of original content: content that is similar or equal to other pieces of content on the web.
• Too many ads: pages that have too many ads can be flagged as low quality.
• Misleading content: ads that don’t clearly reflect what’s on the page and can lead to defrauded expectations will often be flagged as low-quality, and sometimes even rejected.
• Pop-ups & interstitial ads: similar to having too many ads on your page, having pop-ups and interstitial ads usually leads to annoyed users, and poor user experience.

Additionally, Facebook uses other user signals to determine ad quality. For example:

• Hide Ad
• Hide all ads from this advertiser
• Hide ad due to repetition
• Report Ad
• Landing page Bounce Rate
• Landing page dwell time

Another huge factor that can have an impact on your ad quality, and is directly linked to bounce rates and page dwell times, is your page’s average loading time.

In short, make sure to work on your page speed and decrease your average loading time – this will lead to a better user experience and better ad quality.

4. Narrow Audiences

One of the most common mistakes we see new Facebook Advertisers make is to excessively narrow their audiences down so they can “reach their ideal customers“.

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t research your customer avatar and create refined audiences for your campaigns. However, you don’t (usually) want to run ads to audiences with 20,000 users in it either.

Audiences that are too narrow will often lead to higher frequencies, higher CPM’s, and, in some cases, no ad delivery.

This is especially common with custom audiences based on previous visitors, buyers, or any other remarketing list that can be too small.

If you’re experiencing low ad delivery, try increasing your audience size.

advertisement

5. Too Much Audience Overlap

When you have multiple campaigns or ad sets targeting the same audiences, you can end up with audience overlap.

Now, according to popular belief, the reason you don’t want to have audience overlap is that you’ll end up increasing your ad costs since your ads will enter the same auctions and drive up the costs. Right?

Not quite.

You see, Facebook doesn’t really enter two ads in the same auction when there’s audience overlap.

Instead, it enters the ad set with the best performance into the auction to detriment of the other one. The downside of this trade is that the ad that has been “left out” can start to suffer from delivery issues.

According to Facebook…

“Having overlapping audiences is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to poor delivery of your ad sets. This is because when ad sets from the same advertiser are going to end up in the same auction (meaning they’re targeting similar audiences), we enter the one with the best performance history and prevent the others from competing to get shown.”

6. Your Ad Has Been Disapproved

This should go without saying, but if your ad has been disapproved… well, it won’t deliver.

There are several reasons why your ads can be rejected – and Facebook’s infamous AI has been known to reject ads without much of a reasoning behind the decision.

This only means that we need to be extra-careful when creating new ads and making sure we don’t break any policies. Some industries and verticals that are known to suffer from rejected ads include:

• Supplements
• Cosmetics
• Swimwear

You can find Facebook’s ad policies here.

7. Poor Creative Variations

How can creative variations affect ad delivery?

You see, when you choose one of Facebook’s campaign objectives, what you’re really doing is telling it to find users within your target audience who are likely to perform a specific action. For example, if you optimize your campaigns for a “Purchase” event, you’re effectively telling Facebook to find people who are likely to purchase from your website.

What this means is that Facebook will focus ad delivery in a smaller set of users within your target audience to increase your odds of driving more sales. You might’ve noticed this when your audience has 1 million users in it, yet, your frequency is close to 2 but you have only reached slightly over 100k users.

Now, one other thing that affects which users within your target audience actually sees your ads is your creative itself. Put simply, different messages and creatives can resonate differently for different users.

In other words, a new creative can “unlock” a different set of users within your audience, decrease frequency, and increase results.

If you’re experiencing poor ad delivery, try adding new creatives into the mix with different messages, formats, and angles.

advertisement

8. Poor Customer Feedback

As we have mentioned earlier in this article, customer feedback plays an important role in determining your ad quality.

Whenever users hide your ad, comment negatively, or report your ad for any given reason, your customer feedback score will decrease and can lead to ad delivery issues. In fact, you can even see account-wide penalties if the issue isn’t attended to, and your ad delivery may suffer significantly even for new ads launched.

Each page is given a customer feedback score from 0 to 5 – you can see your page’s customer feedback score here.

According to Facebook…

If your Page’s score drops between 1 and 2, your Page will see a delivery penalty applied to its ads. This means your ads will reach fewer people for the same budget. If your Page’s score drops below 1, it won’t be allowed to advertise.

9. Credit Card Maxed Out

Another simple yet sometimes easily missed issue is the credit card getting maxed out.

In other words, you’ve reached the maximum limit your credit your credit card has available and you’ll need to complete the payment first before you’re able to resume your ads.

You can see if this is the issue in your “Bussiness Settings” tab and then on “Billing“.

If you have any pending payment, sort that out first and see if that fixes it.

advertisement

10. Account Spending Limit Reached

Facebook offers the chance for advertisers to set account spending limits to ensure that no mistakes happen, and no additional budget is spent other than what’s intended.

Additionally, even though most beginner advertisers aren’t aware off, new accounts often have an automatic $50/day cap. Facebook does this to protect themselves against black-hat advertisers and to ensure new accounts have good enough quality before they’re able to increase their budget.

If you have an older Business Manager with Ad Accounts that have a good history with Facebook, you won’t likely face this issue. However, if your Business Manager is new, this is something you should definitely consider.

Closing Thoughts

Having your ads not spending as intended can be extremely frustrating – trust me, I get it.

However, in most cases, these are relatively easy situations to fix. With the suggestions in this article, we hope you can get your ads up and running as quickly as possible.

Is there any other tip you’d like to add?

Let us know in the comments below and let’s talk!