Why have I been charged for Facebook Ads when I haven’t had any results yet?

“I have started running a lead generation campaign, I haven’t had any leads yet but it has already spent £20. I don’t understand, why have I been charged for nothing?”

Facebook does not work on a pay-per-result basis

When you pay for Facebook Ads, you are paying for Impressions (see topic about how you are charged for Facebook Ads) this means that you are paying Facebook for every 1,000 times your advert is displayed across various Placements irrespective of whether it generates any results or not.

No leads or Messages but charged for Ads

People get confused, particularly with Lead Generation or Messenger Ads when they haven’t had any “results” yet, but have paid £20-30 in Ads. During this course will be assume that all CPM’s are £10, so in this instance, if you have spent £30 on Ads this means you have purchased 3,000 impressions but unfortunately nobody who was served one of those 3,000 impressions chose to take action.

There are various reasons why this might be:

  • High Frequency – You have bought and received 3,000 impressions but your Frequency is 6, this means on average each person saw your ad 6 times (which means you only reached 500 unique people in total)

  • Poor Quality Creative – People are scrolling right on past your ad on the feed, because it isn’t getting their attention. This may be indicated in your Quality Score (see more in Reporting)

  • Broad Audience / Niche product – if you have a product that is only relevant to a very small number of people because it is very niche (for example, you only sell to accountants, or car garages, but you are having to target a broad audience because you don’t have any emails/website traffic to retarget and there’s very little behavioural/interest based options to filter it down – then the end result is going to be that you have to buy a lot more impressions before your ad hits someone relevant. In this instance I would advise re-working your strategy to build an audience higher in the funnel and also looking at possibly combining Facebook Ads with some SEO or Google PPC traffic.

  • You’ve been unlucky so far – sometimes when we run ads at lower budgets, we just have days where we’re unlucky. For example, when I run ads for ‘Divorce’ packages for my law firms – I may hit 1000 people a day. On Monday I just so happen to hit 20 people who were thinking of getting a divorce, but on Tuesday I only hit 3 people who are looking for one. This is why it is important not to switch off your Ads before giving them a chance to run.

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