What to do when your ads stop delivering results

Seeing your ads on Facebook or Google Ads simply stop delivering the expected results for no apparent reason is discouraging to say the least.

But unfortunately, it's more common than it seems.

Today, we're going to share a simple checklist for you to use in this situation and take back control of the results you expect from your ads, be they clicks, engagements, sales, visits to your store or others.

In fact, if you really want to specialize in traffic management and never experience difficulties with a lack of results again, I recommend that you specialize with one of the best Growth Marketing courses in Brazil.

1. Check if your campaign is getting impressions

“The devil is in the details.” When a campaign stops generating results, it is very common to imagine that the cause is a much more complex problem than it actually is.

Therefore, before you start calculating the circumference of the Earth and the positioning of your campaigns in relation to the southern axis of Antarctica, simply check whether the campaign is printing.

If the printout is equal to zero, most likely:

The. your campaign has been disapproved or is in the analysis phase

B. your payment method has stopped working (or your balance has run out)

w. your audience is too small

If your impressions have not dropped to zero, but have decreased considerably or remain at the same average as always, go to the next steps.

2. Check change history

Even the most experienced people in paid traffic are prone to making mistakes.

Many times your campaign stopped working because you or someone on your team (or the team of that agency that still has access to the ad account…) made some wrong move.

One click on the wrong button can actually “kill” a campaign.

Fortunately, all advertising platforms today allow us to see the history of actions and, therefore, be able to diagnose whether any recent action may have resulted in a drop in advertising performance.

3. Check the landing page

Although ad platforms are increasingly quick to detect landing pages with errors, this automatic blocking can take a few days.

Therefore, it never hurts to check that the landing page (URL) used in the ads is opening normally – that is, without broken links or extremely slow speed.

Remember to use an anonymous tab so your cookies do not influence this analysis and, whenever possible, ask other people to test the page from desktop and mobile.

4. Check Frequency

There is a very important metric in Facebook Ads which is Frequency. In other words, how many times your ad appears to the same person.

Although there is no rule written in stone for this, it is not recommended to keep an ad with a frequency greater than 3. This is because, if the person saw your ad more than four times and did not interact with it, it is not the fifth time that this will happen. to happen.

So, pay attention to the frequency and don’t forget to create a habit of testing new audiences and creatives.

5. Check if the conversion is working

If you are using custom conversions or events to optimize your campaigns (which is definitely recommended) be careful to check that they are being counted correctly.

As the algorithm will be based on this metric to optimize campaigns and deliver the expected result, if the conversion is not working (whether due to an error in the Pixel or any other reason) it is natural that your campaign will also lose performance.

We always recommend the Facebook Pixel Helper and Google Tag Assistant extensions for this.

6. Check the competition (on Google Ads)

One of the points that most affect the performance of a Google Ads campaign is, without a doubt, competition.

Your campaigns may be perfect and your product may be the best on the market, but if you are investing R$1,000 per month in Google Ads but your competitor is investing R$10,000, your performance will definitely suffer.

Therefore, if your campaign has stopped working on Google Ads, you have checked all the previous points and everything is working well, most likely your “stone in the shoe” is your competitor.

In this case, it is worth considering the option of increasing your bids within what your margin allows and, above all, varying your acquisition channels. After all, you don't want to be completely dependent on the movements of your competitors and have to literally fight for price.

Final considerations

With this checklist you will be able to diagnose a campaign that has stopped generating results much more quickly. If you completed the checklist and did not find the reason for the loss of effectiveness, the best thing to do in this case is to simply create other campaigns from scratch or even consider other lead channels.

Also remember to test as many campaigns as your budget allows and read our text about the most common mistakes people make on Facebook Ads.