Facebook has over 25.5 billion monthly visitors, making it the third-most visited site on the internet.
Brands and individuals around the world use this as an opportunity to grow their businesses through many advanced tools Facebook offers on its platform.
One of the biggest sources of revenue for the company is its advertisement business.
According to Statista: “Facebook has over 10M advertisers on the platform”.
This shows the effectiveness of Facebook ads and outlines its purpose in growing businesses.
The social media giant offers a plethora of tools to manage every aspect of your advertisements.
You can create ads, target niche audiences, track performance, and launch campaigns targeted toward specific goals.
Over the years, Facebook has continuously upgraded its tools and introduced improvements to its advertisement platform to make the ads more effective than Google Ads and other social platforms.
However, while businesses leverage the massive audience and profit from the advertisements, every so often they face some issues.
One such issue is when your ads don’t get delivered.
This means your Facebook ads aren’t getting displayed to the target audience.
Well, you need to address this quickly because ads are time sensitive, and you want to avoid missing out on potential customers.
In this article, we’ll discuss the reasons Facebook ads don’t get delivered and learn solutions to address the problems.
Let’s get started…
What happens when your Facebook ads don’t deliver?
Facebook ads “Not delivering” means that ads you’ve launched aren’t getting displayed to the target audience.
This happens to the new ads you’ve recently launched and the existing ads.
Most people get confused when they don’t see their ads. Well, not seeing your ads doesn’t mean it’s not delivering. This Is because if you aren’t in the target audience, you won’t see the ads.
However, you can confirm this by checking your Ads manager. All you need to do is check the Delivery Column, which will show the message “Not delivering” and may show a sub-status of “Update Required.”
Why aren’t your ads delivering and what to do about it?
Well, there are a plethora of reasons your ads aren’t delivering.
This issue often results from errors across various levels like the Account level, Campaign level, Ad set level, and the Ad level.
Let’s discuss some of the most common errors made by advertisers and how to fix them.
Spending limit has maxed out
Spending limit means the maximum limit of spending you’ve set for your entire ad account.
When this limit gets maxed out, Facebook automatically stops all the current campaigns and the new ones.
Well, this is a common mistake because often people forget about the spending limit and wonder why their ads aren’t delivering.
How to fix this?
You can resolve this issue by either changing, resetting or removing your account spending limit.
Under Settings in your Ads Manager, navigate to the Billing & Payment Methods section.
Here, you’ll see a spending limit box showing the limit. Now, you can increase, remove or reset it.
Bid parameters and budget are restrictive
Advertising on Facebook means spending money on your ads, depending on many parameters.
While it’s a good practice to test your ads with a low bid/budget in order to gain insights, however, every so often a tight bid or budget stops Facebook from delivering your ads.
Facebook Ad delivering system uses advanced algorithms to test advertisements across your target audience and draw insights to display the ads to the audience that resonate the most.
But if you have a low daily budget, Facebook will eat through it quickly, and be left with no time to learn about your ads performance and hence stop serving them.
This also happens with low bids, even with high daily budgets.
A low bid restricts Facebook from reaching relevant audiences and resulting in low impressions on your ads.
How to fix this?
Well, you can resolve this issue by keeping your bid and budget flexible.
This depends on many parameters like the goal of the campaign, the estimated volume of the target audience, the average budget/bids for similar ads.
The goal is to give Facebook enough time to learn from the advertisements and optimize them.
You can use Facebook’s Automatic Bidding to get maximum results for the lowest possible cost.
You can also derive insights from initial performance of your ads to adjust the daily bid caps.
Limited engagement on ads
Facebook reviews your advertisements and runs some ad relevance diagnostics on them. It involves a comparison of your ad performance based on three parameters.
- Quality Ranking: This involves comparing your ad’s perceived quality against similar ads competing for the same audience, using the feedback on your ads and the post-click experiences.
- Engagement Rate: Here, your advertisement’s expected engagement rate gets compared to that of the same ads for the same target audience from all the clicks, likes, comments, and shares.
- Conversion Rate: Facebook compares your ad’s expected conversion rate compared to ads with the same optimisation goal for the same audience.
Facebook continuously runs the diagnostics to make sure your advertisements are effective and resonate with the audience.
However, if your ads receive little-to-no engagement, the company doesn’t deliver them as often compared to ads with higher user engagement.
How to fix this?
You can resolve this issue by creating better advertisements that resonate with your audience.
Facebook rewards all content, including advertisements, that bring massive user engagement.
This means you need to research similar advertisements from successful competitors, learn more about your target audience, use high-quality creatives and optimize your ads to attract meaningful interactions.
You can also apply proven strategies or change the current ones to get maximum results.
For instance, run your ads under an engagement campaign and later leverage the ones with the maximum engagement in a new campaign.
Overlapping audiences
Another reason Facebook stops delivering your ads is it avoids competing your ads against each other.
This happens when you are targeting the same audience for multiple ads, which means you’re competing against yourself.
Well, you must avoid such a situation because it results in hurting your ad’s performance.
How to fix this?
Facebook has an Audience Overlap tool, which you can use to avoid overlapping audiences.
All you need to do is, visit the Audience tab in your Ads Manager and select the audience you think you are overlapping.
Here, you’ll find the Show Audience Overlap section under Actions, which will show you the overlap in the number of audience with a percentage.
Scheduling issues
A few scheduling errors can affect your ad reach and might stop your ads from getting delivered. There are three common errors most people face with scheduling ads.
- You have set a future date for your ads: This means the ads will run in the future. Hence, you needn’t worry if Facebook isn’t delivering them in the present.
- Ad set’s end date has passed: When the delivery date for the campaign gets passed, Facebook stops delivering the ads.
- You have paused the ads: This means if either your campaign, ad, or ad set gets paused, Facebook stops delivering the ads until you restart them.
How to fix this?
Well, fixing the scheduling issues is simple. All you need to do is change the scheduling dates to your desire. For instance, if you find the end date of your ads has passed, you can assign a new date or restart the paused ads.
Ads stuck in review
Facebook reviews every new ad to check its relevance before approving them. While they say the review process takes 24 hours, every so often it can take longer.
This means until Facebook approves your ads, they won’t get delivered to the target audience.
Running ads or previously scheduled ads can also go through the review process if you change certain parameters like targeting, creative (e.g., images, text, links, or videos), optimization and billing events.
How to fix this?
You can resolve this issue by making sure you are applying the intended parameters and scheduling the ads in advance.
By using the correct parameters, you’ll avoid making future changes that force Facebook to start the review process again, and scheduling in advance will give Facebook enough time to review your ads.
Disapproved or limited Facebook ads
Facebook’s ad review system checks whether your ads follow the advertising policies before approving them.
Most advertisers ignore the policies and end up including restricted/prohibited content in their ads.
This’s a major issue because Facebook strictly checks ads for policy violations.
If you violate the policies, your ads get rejected, the status of which you can check in the Ads Manager.
How to fix this?
The only way you can resolve this issue is by following the advertising policies while creating your advertisements.
For instance, according to one policy, each ad creative can only have 20% text in an image; otherwise its impressions will get limited or shut off completely.
Hence, double-check all the policies before uploading.
Small target audience
Targeting a massive audience is expensive, and you want to avoid wasting your budget on people that aren’t relevant to your ads.
Advertisers start new campaigns by targeting a small audience to gain insights, and then increase the volume and budget accordingly.
But Facebook asks advertisers to have at least 1,000 users in their target audience.
This means if your target audience has less than 1,000 users, Facebook won’t deliver the ads.
How to fix this?
You can fix this by increasing the scope of your advertising parameters.
For instance, you can add more interests and behavior, tweak the geographical restrictions, use Lookalike Audiences and more. This will help you expand your user-list above 1,000 easily.
Unavailable ad post
Say you are trying to promote a Facebook post in your ad.
If the post isn’t available, or you no longer have the permission to view it or Facebook has restricted it from promotion, then your ads won’t get delivered.
For instance, Facebook won’t promote an ad with an expired offer.
How to fix this?
Well, you can fix this by simply choosing another post from your page. If you wish to promote someone else’s post, you can ask for their permission. You can also review your product catalog for product availability and create future events or offers for your ads.
Conclusion
There you have it. Now, you know the reasons your Facebook ads don’t get delivered. You also know how to fix them. There are many moving pieces you need to take care of before Facebook successfully delivers your ads to the target audience. By making sure you are following the policies, targeting a large enough audience, and using proper parameters, you can expect proper delivery of your ads.