Audience Engagement Tips for Facebook Ads

After you submit your ad and it's approved by Facebook, it'll post at your scheduled run time. While the ad's published online, Facebook will monitor it to see how well your audience responds.

If audience engagement drops too low, Facebook reserves the right to cancel your ad. This sounds a little scary, but each audience is different, so it's normal to take a bit of trial and error to find out what resonates with your ad's viewers.

In this article, you'll learn about Facebook's ad cancellations, and some tips to help you choose the right audience and content for your next ad.

About ad engagement

After you post your ad, Facebook will monitor engagement statistics like clicks, complaints, and audience relevance. A well-designed ad with good audience targeting will generally do pretty well on Facebook.

However, if the ad's performance drops too low, Facebook may cancel your ad. Ads can be canceled due to negative feedback, or because Facebook determined that it had low relevance for the audience. This doesn't always happen, but it's good to be informed about what to do and how to learn from it.

If Facebook decides to cancel your published ad, we'll notify you via email and refund any unused budget, in the form of ad credit, within 72 hours.

We strongly recommend that you use your leftover budget from a canceled ad to make a new ad with refined targeting strategy and content. Facebook's cancellation policy can be discouraging, but they're actually saving you money when they stop underperforming ads. This can be an opportunity to learn about your audience and make changes for the next ad.

Tips for Facebook Ad success

Here's what we know about what works best, according to Facebook. These tips can help you boost ad performance and reduce the possibility of Facebook cancellation.

Target your contacts and lookalikes

• Try targeting new people who are similar to your contacts.
  Find Facebook viewers with similar buying patterns as the contacts in your audience. Ads that target lookalike audiences typically perform best.
• Use a bigger audience to find lookalikes.
  When you target audience contacts, or people similar to your audience contacts, your ad has a greater chance of success with an audience or segment size of at least 500.
• Refine by interest.
  If you decide to target a unique audience instead of lookalikes, make sure your criteria isn't too broad or general. For example, don't advertise baby clothes without refining your audience by their interest in children, babies, and clothing.

Reduce ad frequency

• Don't post your ad too much.
  An ad that frequently appears to the same people has a higher risk of negative engagement.
• Schedule your ad to show less often.
  There are a couple ways to do this.
  • Schedule your ad to run only for a short amount of time, like two days.
  • Keep your budget the same but extend your ad's schedule to two weeks or more. This will limit the number of times the ad appears each day.

Refine your ad content

• Use high-quality images.
  Sharp images that showcase people using your product or service can boost ad performance.
• Make sure your text is clear.
  A good message, description, and call to action can help you increase engagement.

Test your ads

• Don't be afraid to experiment!
  Every audience is different, so keep trying new ads and variations.
• Show different ads to the same audience, or the same ad to different audiences.
  Look for patterns to see what ads have the best engagement and ROI, and what they have in common. Use the results to inform your marketing strategy.