3 Areas To Help Diagnose Your Facebook Ads Performance Slump

Your ROAS was great two weeks ago, but performance has started to tank.

Here’s how to quickly identify the issue(s) and get back on track as soon as possible:

1. Creative/audience fatigue: use the compare feature in ads manager/a quick line graph to evaluate your CTR over time – a downward trends means you likely need to refresh your content. Stay ahead of this issue by constantly testing new angles of creative, even when performance is great. In addition, check your frequency at the account/campaign/ad set level – anything above 1-2 per week is likely too much weighting. To solve, consider adjusting budgets and/or broadening/consolidating audiences which have overlap.

2. Website changes: sometimes, it’s not a media problem but a website problem. To identify issues that might be site specific, look at data like your landing page to conversion rate percentage in ads manager (conversions divided by landing page views). For example, those new beautiful, but heavily weighted images sitting on your homepage might have slowed down your site load speed – therefore causing an increase in bounce rate. Use a tool like Google page load insights or Pingdom to help. Overall, always analyze key ad metric costs relating to the various stages of your buy flow as it will commonly direct you to the problem area. For instance, a significant spike in ATC cost could be because of a recent edit on a product page.

3. Performance trends: look at your key performance metrics by day of the week historically. Are Monday’s always bottom performing days, whereas Wednesday’s crush it every week? Seeing poor performance at the end of the month/quarter/fiscal year? You’re likely being impacted by Facebook auction dynamics – where advertisers are bidding/spending aggressively on the premise of hitting performance targets, or Fortune 500 advertisers are dumping marketing dollars into the platform under a “use it or lose it” mandate.