If you’re noticing some of your Facebook marketing campaigns aren’t quite performing like they once were – you’re not alone! It happens to the best of us – maven and experienced digital marketers alike. Because of this, our experts at New Engen created a guide to help diagnose the issue and troubleshoot declining Facebook performance just for you. Yeah, you.

We know… every campaign is like a snowflake – different in their own special way, but we hope this high-level framework will give you some tips and tricks to prevent you from going all ‘Office Space’ on your computer.

Let’s take a look at the most common reasons you may be seeing decline, shall we?

Frankly, It's Exhausted

Issue: Creative fatigue is the first step in triaging decline. If you’ve been using the same creative in your ads, it’s possible it has run its course and needs to freshen up.

Solution: Deliberate creative rotation is crucial to sustained success.

Issue: Audience/Ad Set fatigue – Similar to creative fatigue, your Facebook account may be having a hard time finding users that resonate with your creative. Smaller audiences or fixed seed list Lookalike’s (LAL’s), built off static email list, can have this problem.

Solution: We have found that by changing your audience with top-performing creative can help bring an account back to life. Insert praise hands emoji here.

Cut. It. Out.

Issue: Depending on your spend and CPA levels, if you have too many audiences (potentially overlapping) and/or too many ad set splits (by age, gender, placement), you could really be limiting Facebook from getting enough data.

Solution: At New Engen, we believe placement consolidation is usually the best place to start. Ages and genders should be segmented only where values props, creative, landing pages or other messaging differ between the audiences. If you ever see you have many ad sets getting light spend or zero, to a few conversions per day, you might benefit from cutting or consolidating your audiences.

Take Some Time Apart

Issue: Over-managing. Common examples of “over-managing” are launching too many new ads, changing bids/budgets too frequently, not letting new audiences run long enough and turning campaigns on/off. However, frequency of audience and creative changes are dependent on CPA targets (lower CPA targets allow decisions to be made more quickly and with lower spend).

Solution: We generally take an active management approach to Facebook, because constant testing and iteration is part of what differentiates us. However, like any good relationship, sometimes Facebook needs a little alone time. The amount of time needed depends on many variables… but try giving it some space!

A Case Of The Mondays

Issue: Just like humans, some days of the week can just be tough for certain campaigns. No reason to be alarmed or make drastic changes if you are confident in day of week forces.

Solution: It’s never a bad idea to prepare for those ‘down days’ by lowering budgets and/or having new creative or new tests to try out. Seasonality (check out Year over Year numbers, Google trends) is another place to look – but don’t always assume that’s the issue! It’s entirely possibility to bounce back after slow decline. Like the classic tale, don’t cry wolf after a bad day.

Let's Get Technical, Technical

Issue: Broken pixel, landing page changes, site slowness, product inventory issues… Ugh! The list goes on.

Solution: It’s important to make sure you’re checking into other technical reasons if your ad isn’t performing well.

Declining Facebook Account Action Framework

Now that you’ve gotten an idea of how we overcome these common issues – we created these quick tactics for you to try should you ever need it (fingers crossed you won’t – but always good to have!).

Side note: This framework is a general guideline based on your account and is fluid depending on your spend level – you can always adjust timing for more extreme cases (volume down > 50% on high spending account for 3+ days).