19 reasons why you are not getting online sales from your ads (and ways to fix)
1. You are not targeting the right people – test different audiences (ex: gender, age groups, locations, interests, interactions with site, devices, relationships, spendings)
2. You are not targeting people at the right time – target to reach the most motivated people (ex: days&hours, life events coming up)
3. You keep targeting the same people – create new audiences, test different lookalike percentages, add frequency cap
4. You are not targeting the right channels – test different advertising sources and mediums (try different affiliate platforms, advertorials vs banners)
5. Your budget is too low or you used the wrong bidding options – pause ad sets with low ranking or high prices, test different budgets and bidding options
6. You’re too impatient – ad relevancy rankings need at least 500 impressions on Facebook, and it takes up to 48h for Facebook to optimize your ads
7. You don’t test enough – a study of 37,259 Facebook ads found that “most companies only have 1 ad, but the best had 100’s”.
8. Your ad has errors – spelling errors, crop errors, URL errors! (it’s ridiculous how often this happens, I’ve personally notified advertisers before)
9. Your ad is not attractive enough or is misleading – test ads types and creatives, match the ad content with the page content
10. Your content is confusing – beware of jargon, metaphors, anything that might cause confusion, keep it simple, clear headlines and CTAs
11. Your prices are not right – A/B test different prices with Google Optimize, experiment with different type of price formatting
12. Your products are not attractive enough – A/B test images of products, identify and change the “exit” site images
13. Your texts are not convincing enough – improve texts, emphasize the benefits, cover any pain points, add a FAQ
14. You have errors on your site – install HotJar, watch users experience, recognise frustrations and optimise
15. Call to action button is missing or hard to find – redesign the page
16. Ordering is too difficult – simplify the process
17. People don’t trust the site – add reviews, star ratings testimonials, social influence signals, other type of social proof
18. You send people to generic pages like the homepage – create ads targeting relevant pages
19. You still have no idea what is wrong – ask users for feedback, improve accordingly
Have you discovered another reason why you weren’t getting online sales?
Be sure to let me know what it was and how you fixed it in the comment section.