22 September 2026 · 6 min read · Oscar Markham
“We tried Facebook ads and they didn’t work” is usually true. Here is why.
This is the most common sentence we hear on a first call, and it is almost always accurate — the campaign genuinely did not work. What did not happen is anybody establishing why. Four causes account for nearly all of it.
It was switched off too early
A campaign needs a number of conversions before the platform can find more of the right people. Below roughly thirty results a month it never gets there, and what you are looking at is noise rather than performance.
Two weeks and a hundred euro is not a test. It is an expensive way to learn nothing, and it is the single most common version of this story.
The form asked nothing
A lead form requesting a name and a phone number is effortless to complete, which is exactly the problem. People fill it in idly and do not answer the call.
Adding two qualifying questions typically halves the leads and multiplies the ones worth ringing. Most businesses experience the first half of that and conclude the platform is broken.
It sent traffic somewhere that could not convert
The ad did its job and delivered somebody to a slow page with the phone number in the footer and no obvious next step.
The campaign gets blamed because it is the thing with a number attached, but nothing was wrong upstream of the landing page.
It was the wrong channel for that business
If your customer only needs you at the moment something breaks, social is a poor fit and search is the answer. Nobody scrolls Instagram deciding what to do about a blocked drain.
For those trades, the honest conclusion is that Facebook was never going to work, and an agency that sold it anyway was selling what it had rather than what you needed.
How to tell which one it was
Look at three numbers from the old campaign: how long it ran, how many results it produced in total, and what proportion of those you could actually serve.
Those three answers identify the cause almost every time, and they also tell you whether it is worth trying again.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.