Do your Facebook ads get clicks but no conversions?
As a coach, you’re on Facebook to meet people who may want to work with you.
As part of your goal to get in front of more potential clients, you’ve set up a Facebook ad. The ad sends them to your website where you hope they will take the time to read up on how you help them and book a discovery call with you.
When you check the stats, you can see the ads have been clicked, but you haven’t gained any new enquiries or enrolled any clients from them.
You’re feeling guilty that you spent a ton of cash on these adverts thinking it would bring a queue of new clients, but it hasn’t, and you don’t understand why.
Why are people clicking on your ad but not interested in working with you?
Check your ad placement
In the “Ad Sets” area of Facebook’s ads manager you choose where to place your ads.
There are five placement options available, although some might not show for every type of ad campaign:
- Desktop newsfeed
- Mobile newsfeed
- Desktop right-hand side
- Audience Network
Depending on what you’re promoting in your ad, you may want to turn off (uncheck) desktop right-hand side placement. I only place ads on the right-hand side if I’m promoting something that is free – such as one of my eBooks. If I’m promoting a paid offer, I only use mobile and desktop news feed placements.
No matter what you’re advertising, you should uncheck the Audience Network placement option.
When you select to place your ads in the Audience Network, Facebook will show it on external websites, often in the middle of articles on sites like the Daily Mail.
If you’ve ever scrolled through an article you’re reading on a mobile, I’m sure you will have clicked on one of these ads in error.
As a reader, it’s frustrating as you have to find the back button to continue reading from where you left off.
But when you’re paying for the ads, you’re paying for those accidental clicks.
In their rush to find the back button, they likely won’t even read the page on your website that they’ve landed on, let alone take any action.
Check your ad placement doesn’t include ‘audience network’ so you’re not wasting money on getting clicks from people with no intention of becoming your client.
Optimise your ads for specific placement
When you are setting up your ad, on the right-hand side of your screen you can see a preview of how your ad will appear for each placement.
The default view is “desktop news feed”, so without clicking on any other options, the preview you see is how your ad will appear in the newsfeed of your potential clients who have logged into Facebook on their desktop.
However, when this same ad appears on the Audience Network, there isn’t the same amount of space available as there is for newsfeed ads. What happens is that like the ads in the image above, context is lost because the copy is too long for the space available.
So, if you do choose to show your ad on the audience network, make sure you check the audience network preview to make sure your ad will look good there too., you’ll be wasting the space available to you when your ad appears in the newsfeed.
The thing is, there is more space available in the news feed, so if you are going to place your ad in news feeds AND audience network, you’ll have to compromise how it appears in one or other of the placements.
The solution is to create multiple versions of your ad, optimised for one specific placement.
I know it’s a bit of a pain, and will take more effort to set up, but it’s the only solution if you want to show your ad to every available audience, but get the best results from each.
How to craft placement specific ads:
Placement is specified in the “ad sets” area, so to show your ads in ALL available placements, you will need to create four ad sets:
- Desktop AND mobile newsfeed (optimised for mobile view)
- Desktop right-hand side
- Audience network.
Each ad set will have an individual budget, so spread your previous daily or lifetime budget across these four new ad sets.
In each ad set, tick only the one placement option (or two in the case of the news feeds ad set) and uncheck all of the other options.
Craft your ad, ensuring that the preview is selected for the placement you have chosen.
E.g. In the ad set where you ticked the “desktop right-hand side” placement option, make sure the preview is set to show you how your ad will appear when it appears on the right-hand side.
Make sure your ad looks like a post
This is especially important for Instagram as posts have a different look and feel than they do on Facebook.
In Facebook, the image gets users’ attention, the ad copy (post) draws them in, and text within the image will reduce your ad’s reach (the number of people who will see your ad).
In Instagram, the image tells the story, the copy supports the image, adding text to the image can be used to highlight your call to action, and hashtags can boost your post reach.
So, when you craft your ad, make sure it appears as though it was crafted specifically for where it will be shown.
Don’t send ad traffic to your website!
Specifically, don’t send the people who click on your advert (regardless of placement) to your website home page.
Not ever.
Let’s say you have a freebie incentive on your home page, that your website visitors can access in exchange for giving you their name and email address.
You craft your ad to send people to your home page, where you hope they will fill out the form to access your freebie.
The thing is, when they land on your home page, there is a multitude of distractions to grab their attention: a navigation menu with links to your services and about pages, blogs to read, and videos to watch.
Any one of these can distract your ad clickers away from filling out the form.
You’ve paid for your ad to be clicked, but when they landed on your website home page, they got distracted and didn’t fill out your form.
You didn’t get their details so you’ve got no way of following up with them either.
Eek!
Instead, send the people who click on your ad to a landing page (also known as an opt-in page or squeeze page) where they only have TWO options:
- Fill out your opt-in form to access your free incentive
- Or, close the page.
Remove the distractions, make it easy for them to take the action you want them to take, and watch your conversions increase.
Just like filing your own self-assessment return, you only know what you know about Facebook advertising.
It’s what you don’t know that means you are likely paying way too much for your ads (or tax)!
Veronica Pullen
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Thanks a ton! Didn’t fully understand the different placement options and how they could negatively affect the clicks. Makes sense. 🙂
Thanks Sarah. It’s one of those things that are obvious when we know, but until then, sending ads to your home page seems like the obvious thing to do, so people can choose what they do next.
Like most aspects of Facebook advertising, it’s not wrong per-se, but it will result in ad performance not matching expectations. 🙂
I can’t believe people still send traffic to their homepage! #NotEvenIDoThat it seems so obvious not to do it, yet still people do it… Thanks for sharing all your wisdom x