Why is My Facebook Ad Not Delivering?

You've meticulously crafted your Facebook ad campaign, targeting the perfect audience, creating compelling copy, and designing eye-catching creatives. You hit "Publish," expecting a flow of traffic and conversions, but instead… crickets. Your ad says "Active," but the delivery column stubbornly shows zero impressions. It's one of the most common and frustrating problems marketers face, but the solution is usually found in a few key areas. This article will walk you through exactly how to troubleshoot a Facebook ad that isn’t delivering, from simple technical glitches to bigger strategic fixes.

First, Understand How Facebook Ad Delivery Works

Before diving into troubleshooting, it helps to know why Facebook chooses to show one ad over another. It’s not just about who has the biggest budget. Facebook’s platform is a massive auction where you compete against thousands of other advertisers for your target audience's attention.

Your ad's ability to win this auction comes down to its "Total Value," which is influenced by three main factors:

• Your Bid: The amount you're willing to pay to achieve your desired outcome (e.g., a link click or a purchase).
• Estimated Action Rates: How likely Facebook thinks a user is to take the action you’re optimizing for (based on your ad, past performance, and landing page).
• Ad Quality: Facebook's assessment of your ad’s quality based on user feedback, engagement signals, and things it can detect in the image or video (like too much text).

When your ad isn’t delivering, it means it's consistently losing this auction. One or more of these three components are failing, and Facebook has decided showing another advertiser’s ad will provide a better experience for the user and generate more value. Your job is to figure out which part is broken.

Immediate Checks: The Quick and Easy Fixes

Start with the simplest potential problems. It’s surprising how often one of these is the culprit, and finding it can save you a ton of time and stress.

1. Your Ad Status Isn't "Active"

This is the most common reason for zero delivery. Log into your Ads Manager and check the status of your campaign, ad set, and ad.

• Is it in Review? All new ads and any ads with significant edits go through a review process. This usually takes a few hours but can sometimes stretch to 24 hours or longer. If it's still in review after 48 hours, something might be stuck, and you may need to contact support. Do not make edits while an ad is in review, as it will reset the process.
• Is it Disapproved? If your ad violated one of Facebook's advertising policies, it will be disapproved. Facebook will usually specify the policy you violated. Read it carefully, correct the issue in your ad or landing page, and resubmit it for review. Common culprits include making unsubstantiated claims, using "before and after" images, or having restricted content.
• Is anything turned off? Make sure the toggles for your campaign, ad set, and the specific ad are all blue and switched on. A deactivated campaign or ad set will prevent any ads within it from running, even if the ad-level toggle is on.

2. The Schedule is Incorrect

Go to your ad set settings and check the "Budget & Schedule" section. It's easy to accidentally set the start date for tomorrow or even next month. Also, if you use ad scheduling (lifetime budgets only) to run ads on specific days or times, make sure it’s not currently an “off” period.

3. You’ve Hit Your Account Spending Limit

Every Facebook Ads account has an overall spending limit that you can set to control your total budget. If you hit this limit, all of your campaigns will stop running until you raise it or reset it, regardless of their individual budgets.

To check this, go to your "Billing & Payments" section in Ads Manager. You’ll see a setting for "Account Spending Limit," where you can view your progress and make changes.

Budgets and Bids: Are You Competing Effectively?

If the simple checks don't fix it, your problem likely lies in your budget and bidding strategy. You may be trying to enter the auction with a bid that's too low to win entry-level placements.

1. Your Budget is Too Small

While Facebook allows tiny budgets, setting a budget that’s too low can prevent your ad set from exiting the "Learning Phase." The Learning Phase is where the delivery system explores the best way to deliver your ad. To get out of this phase, an ad set needs to generate about 50 of your chosen optimization events (e.g., 50 purchases or 50 leads) in about a week.

If your budget is only $5 per day and you're optimizing for a $50 purchase, you probably won't get enough conversions for the algorithm to learn. As a result, delivery remains unstable and may stall completely. If you’re stuck in "Learning Limited," try either increasing your budget or choosing an optimization event that’s cheaper and more frequent (like "Add to Cart").

2. Your Bidding Strategy is Too Restrictive

When you're first launching a campaign, it’s best to give Facebook's algorithm as much flexibility as possible. If you use strict bid controls like a "Bid Cap" or "Cost Per Result Goal" set too low, you're telling Facebook not to enter any auctions where it predicts the cost will be higher than your limit.

If your cap is unrealistically low for your industry or audience, Facebook simply won’t be able to find any placements for you. For new campaigns, start with the "Highest Volume" bidding strategy (the default). This lets the algorithm bid what it needs to in order to get you the most results for your budget. Once you have baseline performance data, you can test more restrictive bid strategies if you need to control costs.

3. Your Budget is Fragmented

Are you running 10 different ad sets with tiny $5 daily budgets each? This is a common mistake that starves each ad set of the budget it needs to perform. Consolidating your budget can drastically improve delivery.

The best way to do this is with Advantage Campaign Budget (formerly Campaign Budget Optimization or CBO). By setting the budget at the campaign level, you allow Facebook to automatically distribute your spend to the best-performing ad sets and audiences in real-time. This prevents you from wasting money on underperforming ad sets and gives more fuel to the ones that are working.

Audience and Creative: Reaching the Right People, the Right Way

Your budget could be perfect, but if you're targeting the wrong people or your creative is weak, delivery will suffer. Poor engagement signals to Facebook that your ad isn't relevant, which harms its performance in the auction.

1. Your Audience is Too Narrow

In your ad set settings, keep an eye on the "Potential Reach" estimate. If you've layered on too many interests, demographic filters, and exclusions, your audience might be too small for Facebook to deliver ads to consistently. If it’s just a few thousand people, a small portion of them might be online at any given time, making delivery sporadic or nonexistent. Try removing some of your most restrictive targeting layers to see if it broadens the audience and restarts delivery.

2. You're Experiencing Audience Overlap

If you have multiple ad sets running that target similar or overlapping audiences, you might be competing against yourself in the auction. Facebook will generally prevent your own ad sets from driving up costs for each other, but it will do so by killing delivery on the ad sets it deems weaker. You might find one ad set gets all the impressions while the others get none.

You can check for this using Facebook's "Audience Overlap" tool. If you discover high overlap, consider combining the ad sets and letting the algorithm find the best pockets of users within that consolidated audience.

3. Your Ad Quality is Low

Facebook gives you direct feedback on how your ads are perceived by users. To view this, go to your ad level within Ads Manager and customize your columns to add "Quality Ranking," "Engagement Rate Ranking," and "Conversion Rate Ranking."

These metrics rank your ad against others competing for the same audience. If you see ratings of “Below Average,” it’s a huge red flag. It means Facebook thinks your ad is less relevant and engaging than the competition’s, and it will penalize you with higher costs and worse delivery.

The only fix for this is to improve your creative. Test new images or videos, write more compelling copy, and make sure your call-to-action is clear. A negative user experience, like having a high frequency (showing the same ad too many times to the same people), can also tank your quality score.

Final Thoughts

Troubleshooting a Facebook ad that won't deliver follows a clear path: start with the technical basics like status and spending limits, then examine your bidding and budget strategy, and finally analyze your audience targeting and creative quality. By systematically checking these components, you can almost always identify the reason your ad is stalled and get it back on track.

Fixing delivery issues is the first step, but truly understanding your performance requires seeing the bigger picture. After you fix your ad, how do you know if it’s actually driving sales and not just clicks? For that, we built Graphed that connects directly to your marketing and sales platforms — like Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and Shopify — so you can see your real ROI in one place. You can use a simple chat to instantly generate reports and build dashboards, letting you see exactly which campaigns make an impact without exporting a single messy spreadsheet.