Should You Delete Negative Comments on Facebook Ads?
Sometimes clients ask me, should we really delete negative comments on our Facebook and Instagram ads?
Getting abuse on the comments section is extremely common. But worse yet, the worry is that people will leave negative comments, typically how the product/service doesn’t work and it’s a scam or unethical somehow, and that influences other people.
My take: Yes, it does affect conversion rates so you should delete them.
Smarter folks like Barry Hott agree with this too. But I learned this on my own in 2024, when I had a top performing campaign in the education lead generation getting $3-$6 cost per lead suddenly tank. It had been getting leads significantly cheaper than competitors who were looking at around $15 cost per lead.
But one day I noticed the CPL had gone up to around $20 cost per lead. I had no idea what was going on until I logged into the client’s page and saw a festering swamp of negative comments.
The ad was trying to help people looking for new careers to make the switch. The comments had flooded in about how the new career sucked and training programs are a waste of money.
So I deleted them. And from memory, the CPL settled down back to it’s previous high performance probably within 24-48 hrs.
Should you hide or delete?
Some people say that you should hide the comments rather than delete them, arguing that people who added the comments will know if you deleted them (and cause more trouble).
I’d argue you don’t have worry about that. Users whose comments are deleted won’t be notified, so it is better to delete them.
And if you’re really worried about it, just give it a few days to rest before deleting them if you can. They’re unlikely to comeback unless their life is terribly sad. At which point you can block them if they do.
Should you reply instead?
I get the sentiment here. We’ve all seen examples where brands are cool on places like Twitter and manage to turn the conversation around on the troll. And smart ad buyers like Ben Heath support this.
But I’d argue that successful outcomes from doing this are rare and require exceptional taste and skill. Most people can’t do it. And when your quirky reply doesn’t land, it makes things much worse.
In once case, a social media manager was replying to nasty comments on behalf of my client with this rationale. Sadly, some of the responses were frankly, a little weird, and people ended up flaming the ad even more because of it.
Compare that outcome to simply taking a second to delete the comment and I think you’ll agree the ROI on deleting versus replying is better.
If you have any more questions on Facebook ads, feel free to ask me in the comments below or via email anytime.