As a business owner or marketer, you love seeing results. However, it could be frustrating to have a Facebook ad show “Active” but is not delivering any impressions or results. If you have ever experienced this, you are not alone. Many Kenyan businesses have experienced this frustrating issue. Read on as in this article we are going to explore the reasons why your ad is active and not delivering. We will also provide you with fixes. Feel free to contact Ciriz Digital Services in case you need more help after reading this article.

What does “Facebook ads not delivering” mean?

“Facebook ads not delivering” means that the active ads you have on your Facebook page are not being served to the target audience you specified. The overall effect of this is that the ads are not generating any impressions and you cannot get any revenues from the ads. This can happen for new ads or existing ads that have been active in the past.

To check if your ads are delivering or not, you can visit your Ads Manager and click on the Delivery column.

If the ad is not delivering, then there will be a “Not Delivering” status on the ad. This can appear due to many reasons which we are discussing below.

Reasons why your Facebook Ads are not Delivering

• The post associated with your ads is not available

The following are some of the reasons why the post associated with your ad may not be available:

• The post may have been removed
  • You no longer have the permission to view the post
  • Your ad may contain an expired event/offer
  • You may be using a post that cannot be used in an ad
  • The product you are promoting cannot be found because the product ID is missing or the product set is out of stock or deleted
  • The post is a shared post. Shared posts cannot be promoted by anyone other than the user who initially created the original post.

The Fix

Depending on the reason you can:

• Choose a different post
  • Get permission from the page admin or editor
  • Create a new offer and ad in a different ad set
  • Review your catalog to see if the product you want to promote is still available

After you make the changes, you can toggle to check if the ad is set back to active. The “Update required” will not show if the ad is set to active.

• Your ad is still being reviewed

This is the most frequent and least concerning reason for a lack of delivery. After you publish your ad, it enters Meta’s automated and manual review process to ensure that the ad complies with Meta’s advertising policies. While Meta claims that ads are reviewed within 24 hours, this may take longer or way lesser time depending on the nature of the ad and the time.

The Fix:

Always be patient. If it is less than 24 – 48 hours, give it more time. Avoid making edits during the review period as this will reset the review process and set the ad back to the queue. If it has been longer than 48 hours, you can check the ad status in the Ads Manager for any specific “In Review” flags.

Always plan and schedule your ads in advance. In the Budget and Schedule section of the ad creation process, you can select your ad’s start and end date. This allows you a few more days just in case your ad needs to be manually approved by Meta’s team.

• Your ad was rejected

If your ad is rejected, it will stop delivering immediately. Meta is very strict about its advertising policies and there are different reasons that can cause a rejection from simple grammar mistakes to promoting prohibited content.

Some of the common reasons for rejection include:

Prohibited content: Promoting illegal products or services, discriminatory practices, adult content or dangerous goods.

Misleading claims: Using “clickbait” headlines or making unrealistic promises (such as an ad that claims to sell a product that can make users lose 10kg in 1 week).

Too much text on the image: Ads with high text-to-image ratio always have an issue with delivery. The 20% rule may no longer be an official Facebook policy. However, images with too much text tend to struggle and underperform.

Poor grammar or punctuation: Small errors may trigger the review system.

The Fix:

Check the Ads Manager for a “Disapproved” status and check to see the reason.

If Facebook says they disapproved the ad because of profanity, change the ad copy to something without profanity. Save the ad and resubmit. Hopefully they will approve it.

However, if you feel that Facebook made a mistake and your ad has been wrongfully disapproved, then you can submit an appeal in Account Quality.

It is important to note that Facebook reviews the landing page associated with the ad. So make sure your landing page works, contains a product or service that matches the one on the ad and does not have a misleading headline.

If your ad falls in a unique category, such as financial products and services, employment, housing, social issues, elections or politics, your targeting will be limited by age, gender or location. It is important to choose the category that best describes your ads so that your reach would not be reduced unnecessarily.

• Your ads are not converting

While placing the ad, you pick an optimization goal which informs Facebook the exact action you want your target audiences to take. This helps Facebook to target your audience better.

This means you need to optimize your ads for the right optimization goal. Optimizing your ads for conversions is not a bad thing in itself. However, this may be a negative thing if the ads are not converting as you may not be able to gather enough data to convince Facebook that people want to see your ad.

The Fix:

Update your optimization goal. Switch to a kind of conversion that is more likely to happen, like “Adding to Cart” instead of “Purchase.”

You can change the optimization goal from conversions to link clicks. Through this, Facebook will be able to track conversions and also figure out the persons who are likely to see your ads based on the people who clicked them.

• You have hit your account’s spending limit

This is a simple and overlooked reason. Many advertisers set an account spending limit. The purpose of this is to control their total ad spend. Once the limit is reached, all campaigns will stop delivering, regardless of their individual budgets.

The Fix:

Navigate to your Ads Manager > Billing and Payments settings. Check for an account spending limit and either increase or remove it entirely if it is no longer necessary.

• Your budget/bid is too low

Facebook’s ad delivery operates on an auction system. The ad you have placed is competing with other advertisers for the same audience. If your daily or lifetime budget is too low, then other marketers may be outbidding you, especially during peak seasons or for highly competitive audiences.

The Fix:

• Increase your budget: Try increasing your daily budget slightly. Even moving from a low budget say from Kshs. 300 to Kshs. 600, can make a big difference.
  • Check your bidding strategy: If you are using a manual bidding strategy, such as bid cap, you may be setting the bid too low. You could consider switching to “Lowest Cost” to let Facebook’s algorithm automatically bid competitively for you.
• You picked a very narrow audience

Facebook’s algorithm needs a large enough audience pool to find the best people to show your ad to. If you have created a highly specific, narrow audience by applying too many filters, such as a very tight age range, a specific location in Nairobi or Kenya, and multiple niche interests, your ad may not have enough people to deliver to.

The Fix: Broaden your audience.

Expand your targeting: Try a wider age range or geographical area.

Add more interests: Include a few broader interests that are relevant to your product or service.

Use Lookalike audiences: If you have a solid customer list (at least 1,000 people), you can create a Lookalike Audience to find people who are similar to your existing customers.

• You have high auction overlap

When you run an ad on Facebook, your ads compete against other advertisers to reach a specific target audience. However, when you have multiple ads targeting the same audience, you may start competing against yourself. This may harm your ads’ delivery.

When you have several ads with similar targeting, Facebook tried to prevent your ads from competing against one another in the ads auction. At the ads auction, the ads with the highest total value will win the auction. Ads with lesser value will be paused. This reduces costs and optimizes your budget. While this is a preventive measure, it may cause your ad sets to underperform or not deliver at all.

The Fix:

You can use the Audience Overlap tool to fix this.

Go to Ads Manager and navigate to the Audiences tab. Choose the audiences you think are overlapping and click Show Audience Overlap under Actions.

Here you will see a chart that shows the percentage of ads that are not being delivered due to the auction overlap.

If the percentage of undelivered ads is high, you can:

• Cancel the ad sets that target the same audience but are yielding poor results
  • Combine ad sets that have near-identical audiences
• Payment Method Issues

An expired credit card or a failed payment can instantly halt all your ad campaigns. Facebook will not deliver ads if there is a problem with your payment method.

The Fix:

Ads Manager > Billing section. Look for any failed attempts alerts and update your payment information. It is always good to have a backup payment method on file to prevent future interruptions.

• Your ad engagement is low

The Facebook’s algorithm works to show relevant and engaging ads to the users. So if your ads are not relevant to the target audience, Facebook will not deliver them as often as ads that are relevant and drive more engagement.

Facebook’s ad’s relevance parameters include:

• Quality Ranking: How your ad’s quality compares to other ads competing for the same audience.
  • Engagement rate ranking: How your ad’s expected engagement rate compares to other ads competing for the same audience.
  • Conversion rate ranking: How your ad’s expected conversion rate compares to ads with the same conversion goal competing for the same audience.

The Fix:

Create a new ad with better visuals and messaging. You can always try tweaking your post-click landing page and targeting a high-intent audience.

• You are having scheduling problems

Facebook will only show your ads during the times you have set. So, if you have one or more of these scheduling issues, your ad may not deliver:

• Your ad, ad set or campaign is paused
  • Your campaign is set to run at a later date
  • The end date has already passed

The Fix:

Update your scheduling. If your end date has passed, set a new end date. If your campaign is paused, restart it. And if your campaign is set to run at a later date but you want it to start now, edit the start and end dates.

Need Expert Help?

At Ciriz Digital Services we help Kenyan businesses troubleshoot and optimize Facebook ad campaigns for real results. If you are stuck, our experts can review and fix it fast.