Why Aren't People Acting on Your Ads?

I’ve found that there’s a fundamental flaw in how most advertisers react to bad results. And once this approach is corrected, it changes everything.

Let me explain with a common scenario. You’re running a campaign for sales and you’re just not getting results. Not enough sales to make your ads worthwhile.

You start thinking about what went wrong.
Are you targeting the right audience? Maybe you need a new ad set targeting your lookalikes.
Are you using the right optimization? Maybe you should optimize for something further up the funnel.
Are CPM costs too high? Maybe you need manual bidding or some trick to bring them down.
Are you wasting money on bad placements? Maybe you should remove a few.

These solutions are usually misguided. And the worst response? You throw up your hands and blame Meta. You say, “I had great results last week, but now Meta screwed things up,” or “Meta’s wasting my money,” or “It’s all these terrible automations.”

Conspiracy theories like these are always unhelpful. I even recorded an entire episode about them before. The main thing to understand is this: we’re focusing on the wrong things.

If you’re not getting results, there is one very specific question you need to ask: Why aren’t people acting on my ads?

That’s the question that sends you in the right direction. Look at your ads through the eyes of your potential customer. Not with your brand goggles on.

• Does the ad grab attention?

• Does it answer questions?

• Does it inspire action?

Be honest. When my ads aren’t producing, which honestly happens a lot, I know it’s time to start over.

I start with customer personas. Who am I trying to reach? What research can I do to better understand them? Then I think about their pain points. What unique problems are they facing? What does their life look like, and how does my product solve that problem?

There won’t be a single obvious combination of ad copy and creative, but personas and pain points give me focus. They guide me to create lots of options. Hopefully something will hit.

And don’t forget about the offer. If nobody is acting on your ad, maybe the offer isn’t all that interesting.

Finally, do not ignore the landing page. If people don’t act, maybe the page is the problem. Maybe it loads slowly, looks confusing, or doesn’t inspire confidence. Maybe there are way too many unnecessary steps. Fix those things.

Here’s the bottom of the glass.
When you’re not getting the results you want, focus on the ads themselves. Let me say it again: focus on the ads themselves.

Stop wasting time obsessing over campaign construction and levers you can pull. Stop blaming Meta.

This is why you should take a simplified approach. If you’ve minimized your campaigns and ad sets, optimized for conversions and purchases, and avoided micromanaging targeting and placements, then the entire focus is the ads.

And once that’s the focus, you’re always just one good ad away from the results you want. That’s a far better use of your time than spinning your wheels on things that don’t matter.