Forums Forums White Hat SEO PPC Will Facebook ads ever go back to normal?

  • PPC

    Will Facebook ads ever go back to normal?

    Posted by seohelper on November 10, 2020 at 11:36 am

    The last few months have been horrible in terms of ad performance. Cost has skyrocketed even though I haven’t changed anything major in my advertising. I know my audience and what works but it seems like everything I do is pointless.

    I have a small business that I mostly advertise using the messages objective and recently I’ve been having a hard time breaking even on ad spend, let alone profit. Usually most of my ads get great engagement and results as they are high quality.

    I saw a few posts that Facebook is trying to weed out dropshippers and scammy ads by increasing CPM, to only keep major advertisers on the platform.
    How does that make sense? I get they want to make the platform safer for buyers but doesn’t this crazy change affect big brands too?

    Why can’t I just go through an approval process to let Facebook know that I’m a legitimate business paying taxes and shit.
    I truly don’t get it. Will this change be permanent or is it just Q4? I’m really desperate right now.

    Larsent replied 3 years, 4 months ago 1 Member · 11 Replies
  • 11 Replies
  • ComprehensiveLion529

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 11:45 am

    It will go back to normal are you not seeing better results now though? I had terrible results as well but I’m starting to get more sales now. Still my retargeting ads are bad but things are starting to look positive.

  • _lil_kennedy

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 11:45 am

    The post about raising CPMs to weed out bad business is bullshit. If anyone is going to survive through high CPMs it’s them, since their only costs are ad spends as they have unlimited inventory, cheap fucking shipping times and don’t pay tax.

    I don’t know what’s happening either. Maybe we’re just sitting in an echo chamber and our business is a fail, but then why would I not see a single successful ad on IG? Not one. All of them have below 100 likes and if I find one that doesn’t it’s from half a year back.

    Idk what’s happening either. Any discussion is welcomed as my livelihood depends on the ads getting atleast somewhat normal.

  • patrick24601

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 11:52 am

    There isn’t now and normal. It’s constantly changing and evolving.

  • cmsciguy

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 2:21 pm

    Honestly, I think the platform has changed for the worse and I’m not sure Facebook even knows what’s going on. I’ve recently spoken with big budget advertisers whom Facebook flat out gave a $25k budget to test a new strategy they (Facebook) thought would work, and it totally flopped…

    Let that sink in a minute.

    There’s no way the recent election or holidays is the cause the drop in performance over the last 6 months either, because advertisers in other countries are also feeling it.

    If I had to guess, I’d say a recent update, coupled with privacy issues and the general public’s waning trust in Facebook and social media are too blame.

    I also wouldn’t be surprised if a recent algorithm updated focuses on shifting priority to higher CPA businesses while at the same time flagging suspicious accounts. Account bans have been getting worse and worse as the year goes on while costs are going higher and higher.

    Face it… Facebook cares little about small businesses when they have such a large pool of other advertisers willing to spend thousands of dollars every day and are perfectly happy with high CPAs and high CPMs. This way they can show fewer ads to each user, which makes it look like the platform isn’t simply shoving ads down everyone’s throats/feeds.

    I’ve moved on to other ad networks entirely and am happy to be done worrying about Facebook. Facebook takes way more time to manage and for far lower margins than any other network I’ve used. Good riddance.

  • QueenGinger

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 3:41 pm

    I have noticed the same thing for Google ads, is that just me??

  • Jpwf

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 6:33 pm

    What are you selling, and what’s been not working?

    I’ve seen a lot of accounts struggle, but most have been ‘fixable’ and are now back to profit.

    One thing I’ve seen is this “I’ve not changed anything, and they’ve stopped working” idea… But the world has changed massively, so your ads are likely going to need to change too.

    Just because something worked 9 months ago doesn’t mean it should work now.

  • sosuken

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 7:40 pm

    OP, this may come off as a bit direct but I assure you it’s the same response I had to both myself and my team a few months back.

    If cost is increasing and we are not changing any of our major (or semi-major) practices — then at what point do we stop blaming the external factors and look to how to better adjust?

    Believe me, we felt the frustration as much as every other post on here speaking to this. But once we took the time to restructure our approach with new considerations in play, we begin to see measurable variables to find new efficiencies.

    We read news articles with new lenses, always asking ourselves how new information might effect our domestic paid social campaigns (we’re US based). I’m not going to post what worked and what didn’t becuase that’s irrelevant, but I think the principle stands to help a lot of people on here suffering from the same points of friction.

    FB has a lot coming up — Governments are looking a lot more closer at its platform In regards to many issues, some old, many new. Sasha Cohen is targeting Mark Zuckerburg next now that Borat is done. Between these two items alone, one could rethink potential changes they need to make in their paid social program.

  • blueeyesdragon92

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 9:53 pm

    so everyone is seeing bad results, so is it best to shut down ads wait 2 weeeks and turn them back on?

  • Samsamsam321123

    Guest
    November 10, 2020 at 11:25 pm

    I’ve noticed these issues as well starting mid-Oct until this weekend. Barely broke even and made no profit. Similar to you, this is my full time career.

    I don’t know if this will help you or not, but I took the advice of others and I created retargeting campaigns and only ran those. I haven’t turned on or made any new interest based audience campaigns because creating a cold audience might be a bit tough now. I’ve actually done some tests with cold interest marketing and spent roughly $75 to only get around 6-8 link clicks!

    I’m hoping things get back to normal by the end of this month/early next month, but I’m in e-commerce and that means potentially loosing a to for Black Friday weekend.

  • Larsent

    Guest
    November 11, 2020 at 12:44 am

    I wonder if Facebook and Google are competing with AI and machine learning as they see this as the future of their ad platforms. The first one there gets more market share. Google ads are too complex for many small businesses so google really do need to do something since a basic Facebook ad campaign is much easier to implement. Google’s non-expert simple ads platform doesn’t perform and nor do their stop-gap phone jockeys who are fixated on their current measurement metric which tends to be about more spend or using shitty automated features. Both platforms are changing almost daily with most changes being around automation – which frequently doesn’t deliver. I assume they’ll get it right and get it right quicker than driverless cars! I’m interested to hear people’s views of my take on this – agree or disagree and why.

  • avidecom

    Guest
    November 11, 2020 at 3:19 am

    I would really like to know what people’s budgets are. I know people who are spending 3k a day and they are fine. I myself am spending about 1.5k a day and things are improving now. But then I feel as if some people who ask these questions over and over again have super small budgets- when I say that I mean <$100.

    But then I see some comments on here and people are spending 1M a month? Anyways, would be nice for people to mention a range of how much they are spending so we can at least try to pinpoint trends? idk just a suggestion.