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December 11, 2018
There’s no question about it when your Facebook Ads CTR (click through rate) is performing well, it can make you feel like this:
Okay, maybe not quite that excited…
But is there a worse feeling than when your Facebook ads are running and just aren’t getting a single click?
Perhaps you’re wondering, “What’s the big deal? Why does it matter if my Facebook Ads CTR is good?”
And then you may ask, “If no one can control people, then how could I make them click on my ad?”
We’ll cover all these questions and more in this article. We’ve broken down Facebook Ads CTR into six main elements, and we’ll show you to improve each one step-by-step. But first, you’ll want to know the basics about Facebook Ads CTR.
CTR, or the click-through-rate, is the rate of how often people saw your Facebook ad and clicked on it.
However, there are a few things to note about this.
When we’re calculating the CTR, we’re using the Link Click metric as opposed to the click metric.
Facebook’s Click metric counts a single click every time someone performs an action on your ad. Actions such as these are counted:
As you can see, these actions aren’t the money makers for you. Link Clicks, on the other hand, are counted when someone clicks on your ad to be taken to your linked destination – whether that’s a landing page or promoted event.
When looking at Facebook’s column options, you’ll want to make sure your CTR is the one labeled “CTR (Link-Click Through Rate) instead of CTR (All):
CTR vs. Clicks
Note: The separation between Link Clicks and Clicks is only a 2017 addition. Looking at your click data from before then might have a different calculation that includes all the actions that Facebook counts on Clicks.
Assuming that you have your timeline set up correctly, you may be wondering how Facebook calculates this rate of link clicks. You don’t have to be a mathematician to figure it out.
You’ll take the total number of link clicks, compare it to (divide it by) the number of impressions – or the number of times your ad was shown. You’ll get a decimal here, so you’ll just multiply it by 100 to get your CTR as presented in a percentage.
Formula for CTR
If you’re looking to add Link Clicks and CTR to your reporting columns in Facebook Ads Manager, go to your Columns set, and select your Customize Columns.
You’ll find Your Link Clicks, CTR, and CPC under Engagement – Clicks:
Add CTR (Link Click-Through Rate) to your columns.
Once you add them, save as a preset if you’d like, then hit apply.
Now that you’re looking at your CTR, you may be asking yourself, is that number good or…
IDK ♂️
Unfortunately, there is no cookie-cutter answer.
Oh come on…
I know, Dr. House, but it’s just not that easy! The honest answer is that a good CTR score… depends: It depends on your goal, and it depends on the conversion rate.
If your goal is just to get clicks or engagement on your ads, then the higher your CTR, the better. But if all you’re looking for are clicks, then set your goal for Engagement, and track your metrics from there so Facebook can optimize your ads the best.
When considering the efficiency of your CTR, you’ll always want to consider it against your Conversions.
If every single person clicks on your ad, but no one converts, you’re doing something wrong.
If you only get a small percentage of clicks, but half of those clicks turn into conversions, then you’ll be making much more progress.
Just because your ad has a high CTR doesn’t mean it’s actually performing well.
The best way to calculate what a good CTR for you is to consider the cost-per-click and the conversion rate. In order for you to run a profitable ad campaign, you’ll need to have a positive return on investment; with that in mind, you can determine what a solid CTR looks like for you.
Although your Conversion Rate is the number you really want to raise over time, the CTR shouldn’t be neglected. If your CTR is high, that means people are clicking on your ad because they’re interested in seeing your landing page, and if they’re interested, that means you’re targeting the right group of people.
Similarly to Google Ad’s Quality Score, Facebook has a metric called the Relevance Score
. Although Facebook says that the CTR isn’t directly calculated in the Relevance Score, the engagement you get does tell Facebook how relevant your ad is (on a rating of 1 – 10) to your chosen audience.
Think about the CTR from Facebook’s point of view:
Facebook’s goal is to show people what they’d like to see so their collective audience continues to spend a ton of time (950 million collective total hours a day) on Facebook.
If people are interested and like seeing a certain ad, then they’ll interact with it.
The more people that interact with an ad, the higher the relevance score is.
The higher the relevance score is, the more Facebook wants to show the ad to people.
The more often Facebook shows the ad to people, the less it has to charge per 1,000 impressions.
Having a lower CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) and a higher CTR will mean that you’re being charged less for more clicks.
Your CPC is less, and as long as you’re getting increased conversions from the increased CTR, the less you’re spending per click and per conversion.
A lower cost per conversion means a higher return on investment. And that’s the bottom line.
Done!
Now onto the aspects of what can make or break your CTR.
Before the click happens, an ad needs to be prepped. Six elements need to align for a person to take the step from looking at your ad to clicking on it. Your landing page will be where the real science of the conversion happens, but let’s remember that a Facebook conversion starts with a click and that there are only six aspects that you can work on to increase the number of quality clicks.
You can click on any of the six to go directly to that section. In each section, I’ll explain why they’re important as well as a few easy to apply tips to improve it.
When you start to run ads of any kind, you have a goal in mind. To make money, right? Sure, but from there, you’ll want to choose your strategy. You (hopefully) know better than to go kicking doors down and demanding that people buy your product. You know that you have to court someone into becoming your customer.
All too often marketers will become obsessed with vanity metrics. They’ll start focusing on growing Impressions or silly metrics instead of remembering that their end game is to grow their company and make it more money. If you’re running a campaign or an ad that doesn’t either focus on making money or play a part in the overall strategy, then why are you running it?
When you run your Facebook ads, you’ll want to create different campaigns for different stages of courting the customer. You’ll need to guide them down the sales funnel. Each campaign that you run needs to play a part in guiding the customer. This is established by three parts; your objective, your audience, and your offer.
The objective is the first thing you tell Facebook when you’re creating a Campaign. You’re telling Facebook what you want to achieve and track by running these ads:
Choose the marketing objective for your Facebook campaign
There’s plenty of options to choose from, and starting out with the most applicable campaign objective can heavily impact your CTR. When you tell Facebook what your end goal of the campaign is, Facebook will optimize everything in your ad delivery to get you the best results it can.
If you’ll notice, there are three main categories of marketing objectives: awareness, consideration, and conversions.
If you’re just looking to build brand awareness, then you won’t want to really be looking at the clicks metric – you’ll want to focus on the impressions and reach metrics.
However, if you’re looking at the consideration or conversion objectives, those will be where the CTR metric becomes applicable. Starting out with the right objective will ensure that you’ll want to get clicks on your ads and that Facebook will know how to best optimize your ad delivery.
Facebook will optimize your ads based on the marketing objective that you chose at the very beginning. It will also optimize ad delivery on a goal that you determine, if you’d like.
Under the advanced options, you’ll have the ability to change the Optimization for Ad Delivery. If you’re running a conversion campaign, then Facebook will automatically choose to optimize for Conversions, and you’ll generally want to keep it on there.
However, sometimes you won’t have enough data to optimize for conversions, so you’ll want Facebook to optimize for Link Clicks first.
Optimize for link clicks
From there, the people who choose to convert can be tracked by Facebook and you can then target look-a-likes later. People who click on the link but don’t convert can be added to the retargeting list. For more on audiences, keep on reading!
Before we get started on this, there’s a lot that goes into choosing the right audiences. We’ve written a full guide here that will answer any and all questions. The only part of audiences that I’m covering here is the part that will help improve your CTR and results.
Before you get started with opening a PPC platform, you need to know who your customers are or who benefits the most from using your product or service.
If you think about it realistically, there’s not a product every single person in the world from newborns to the elderly and everyone across the different cultures needs or wants. If you think about your own product or service, you’ll probably agree that there’s a certain type or range of people that use your business.
Get to know what their work is, what their hobbies are, what they care about, if they have a family, how old they are, and as much information as you can gather. Chances are, Facebook has a targeting option for that.
Now that you know what your ideal customer is like, stop targeting the entire world. One of the quickest ways to improve your CTR is to narrow down your audience. You want the people to look like this when they see your ads:
Okay, you have my attention
Instead of doing this when they see your ads:
NOOOOOOO
While you’re creating your audience, Facebook will show you your potential reach so you can see the number of people who may see your ad and realistically ask whether or not 89,000 people will really be interested:
It says defined, but is it really?
The more defined your audience is, the more likely they’ll be interested, want to click, and want to convert. One of Facebook’s strengths is the level of detail that they include in their audience targeting. Here’s a quick list of what you can narrow your audience by:
You can mix and match these details to essentially create and target the person who you think will want to purchase from you.
The part I wanted to focus on here is the Detailed Targeting. You can narrow your audience down as much as you’d like by adding more options.
I’m not sure what you’d be advertising here, but let’s say you want to target people who are interested in both reptiles and rock music:
Detailed targeting options make anything possible
In this, you’ll tell Facebook, “I want you to target someone who is either interested in frogs, interested in lizards, or interested in having a reptile as a pet.” The more options you have here, the broader your audience is because Facebook will choose people who have at least one of those three interests.
Then, you’ll tell Facebook, “I also need this person who is interested in one of those three items to also like rock music.” This narrows your audience down as Facebook is now going to find people with those two specific interests to show your ad to.
If you don’t narrow your audience down, you could be showing your ad to a lizard enthusiast who likes country music. And that’s no good. The more narrow your audience is, the more relevant your ad will be, and not only will your CTR raise, but the quality of clicks and chance of conversions will increase.
Have you ever visited a website, become engaged in something else that caused you to leave the website without a purchase, and then saw an ad for that website on Facebook? You’re not alone.
In business, the one who got away can keep you up at night.
It’s okay remarketing is here to save the day
But you don’t have to lose sleep. Much like you’ve seen ads for that web page you were browsing during lunch break, you too can target those people who visited your website without converting.
Setting up a remarketing campaign is not only an easy way to increase your conversions, but it also will raise your CTR because you’re reminding those people of what they almost missed out on. You’re reminding them of your product while they have free time – enough free time to browse Facebook is enough free time to complete a purchase or fill out an online form.
Even if you’re certain that the custom audience that you’ve created is a sure-fire image of your customer, don’t forget to test your audiences.
Facebook gives you the option to allow them to expand interests when they think it’ll get you more conversions, but don’t hesitate to do your own testing.
Expand interests for more clicks
Your customers don’t live in glass jars of select interests. Everyone likes many things, and you might be surprised by what your customers like.
If you suspect your reptile lovers might enjoy yoga instead of rock music, test those audiences against each other! You never know unless you test.
Each person that you’d like to target is in some part of your sales funnel, whether they haven’t heard of you yet or whether they’re one ad away from buying from you.
Let’s say there’s a person who has never heard of you, is maybe–sorta interested in a product like yours, and is enjoying browsing their Facebook feed.
Do you think they want to whip out their wallet and make a purchase today? Probably not.
Will they click on an ad that’s asking them to “buy today”? Probably not.
Does matching your audience with their interest level matter? Definitely so.
When you’re making your offer to your audience, you have to remember where they are in the sales funnel; you have to keep in mind how much they trust you and align your offers accordingly.
Conversion funnel
With each audience you build, you’ll need to know if you’re attracting them, engaging them, converting them, or delighting them. If someone is in the attract stage, hitting them with a “buy now” ad will produce poor CTR and low (if any) conversions. If someone is in the convert stage, hitting them with a brand awareness ad will be weak.
I’ve listed below a few engaging offers that are designed specifically to increase your CTR and set your customer up for the killer conversion ad that you’ll follow up with.
For most people, if they can fix something on their own and not have to spend money, they will.
If someone has back pain, they may not want to immediately hop into a chiropractor’s office because they’re aware that it’s going to cost time and money.
Instead, they’ll start by doing some research to see if there’s anything they can do first to fix their back pain. A lot of chiropractic clinics run blogs for this reason. They offer free information such as “10 Stretches to Help Back Pain” so a person who is interested can start learning about the chiropractor’s brand and start to trust them.
While Facebook doesn’t allow you to specifically target someone who has a health issue, you can target people who have related interests and market your blog to them.
Running a traffic campaign that advertises your free blog can easily give you a high CTR, and it sets your blog readers up for some easy remarketing ads.
It doesn’t just have to be blogs, either, you can offer eBooks, brochures, and more.
Why do all events, presentations, and carnivals seem to have raffles? Why do they advertise their raffles? Because it gets people excited. Free stuff with just a spark of competition (even though raffles are based on luck)? It’s sure to get people’s hearts racing.
Rafflecopter was looking for more traffic to visit their blog so they hosted a giveaway worth $750 – wow!
Rafflecopter giveaway
I’d love to see the results they got from that.
Netflix is famous for its free trial offer. It’s become quite a common meme that people try to outwit their system to get as much free Netflix as possible.
Who’s really done this?
But for the most part, the free trial offer grabs and holds their customer base. If you don’t finish all the seasons of The Office during your free month, don’t you think you’re going to keep watching?
Advertising a free trial is an easy way to get higher clicks and quick conversions – but to make sure you don’t go broke, remember to hit up your customers with a reminder before their trial expires so they’ll want start paying for their awesome service.
Although it’s important to remember to match your audience to your offer, don’t forget your goal. Each audience in each stage of the funnel needs to be moved along closer and closer to the conversion end.
It’s your job to strategize what offer will move them to the next stage, and what your goal is in that next stage. When you’re presenting your offer, remember to tell your audience what’s expected of them.
If your goal is more traffic, let them know to click to view your blog (the offer). Focus on one goal at a time, and be patient!
When you’re choosing what creative – whether that’s a picture, a video, or a compilation – to use, remember that the people you’re showing this to will be scrolling through family and friends’ feeds.
They’ll be skimming text posts and looking at pictures of people they know. When you make your ad, make sure it stands out from their feed; you’ll want to make sure it stops your potential customer mid-scroll and grabs their attention. And the thing that catches someone’s attention is the ad creative.
Here are a few ways to make sure your ad creative is eye-catching and CTR increasing.
What is this ☝
Stock photos can be weird…eye-catching…and unique…but for the most part, they’re boring. No offense, but they’re designed to show relatable aspects of everyday life – someone clicking on a mouse, someone using a computer, someone drinking coffee and so forth. People would rather not see the same image over and over again for different ads.
And the photos that aren’t mundane are generally very strange – not advisable for an ad. When you’re looking to upload your creative, make it your own. Skip the stock and make something that’s uniquely yours.
Keeping their ad creative’s feel consistent is one thing that AdEspresso does really well. Here’s where they created six ad creatives for one eBook that they were advertising:
Brand consistency matters
Half of their images used their cool little mustached mascot. One used a woman working, and the last two used paintbrushes as their creatives. Even though they used different pictures for all the ads, the feel of the AdEspresso brand remained the same. All the images were a little creative and fun, but still tasteful and professional.
When you’re running your ads, keep a consistent image feel so your customers get to know your brand name by seeing a picture and knowing the way it makes them feel. This especially works when you’re starting to advertise to your retargeted audience. Once they get to know and trust your brand, the faster they’ll click on your ad – even if they just see the picture.
Remember how I mentioned that you want your ad to stand out from your customers’ feeds? One of the easiest ways to do that is to make it pop with color.
Lots of color makes your ad stand out
Nike does an excellent job at this. When you look at their ad, it immediately draws your eye; the pink and the red are sure to stand out from anyone’s Facebook posts or photos. When people post pictures to Facebook on their personal accounts, they’ll generally upload photos of themselves, other people, a place they went, or something they did/ate. None of those photos will have a strong single color with a stylized product in it.
Scrolling through a feed of people and almost everyday things and coming across a bright, cool new shoe is scroll-stopping and click-inducing. It’s just a simple way to increase your CTR.
Unfortunately, your ad won’t be the only one that’s bright and colorful. A lot of companies use color because they know it’s attention-grabbing. After a person sees so many bright ads, they start to associate an image that’s chock-full of bright neons as an ad and will learn to quickly scroll by without pausing to see what the image is. That can severely drop a CTR.
Using colors to contrast can save you from that.
Great use of contrast
Dapulse’s ad shows a mundane black and white workspace contrasted with a bright and energetic workspace after it’s been upgraded to visual reports. Literally, nothing between the before and after pictures have changed besides the computer screen and the splash of color.
That unique half-colored image is more eye-catching than a generic image that serves as just another ad. Consider contrasting the perks of your offer against a more bland background to make it stand out and have people clicking on that bit of color.
Its hurts to look at
This goes more into the design aspect of the images, but when you’re creating a high-quality ad creative, be sure to give it white space. Crowding an image with too much of anything can overwhelm someone and cause them to quickly scroll past simply because they don’t want to look at it.
Proper use of whitespace
G Suite does a great job of using whitespace. Not just because the majority of their ad is white, but because of the lack of clutter in the image draws your attention to the important part. Their image’s message is simple, clear, and looks classy.
Similarly to using whitespace in ad design, balancing your creative is an important part of having an ad that increases CTR. Take a quick look at this zoo’s ad:
Balanced images are more aesthetically pleasing
Sure, it’s cute, and your eye is immediately drawn to the giraffe. But both the main visual focus and the words are on one side of the ad. It gives a feeling of unease as you scan the right side to see if there’s more to the ad. You almost feel like there should be more to the ad because it’s so heavily weighted on the left side.
For every visually attractive aspect that you place on one side, balance it on the other. An ad that creates balance will leave people with a more positive feeling about your ad and your company.
Facebook has a 20% text rule for their ads. Because they do give you so much room to write your message, they simply ask that you don’t fill your image with text.
However, if you balance your text in your ad, it can be a powerful asset. Take a look at Shopify’s ad:
Balanced ad text
The bold words, “What’s stopping you?” catch your attention, but they’re not the only part of their image. They’re against an aesthetic poster with a cute potted plant book combo on the left. It draws your attention, but it doesn’t give away what they’re selling, so you read their headline and other information.
Test text in your images against ones without to see if cleverly adding in the text will increase your CTR.
Carousel Ads are one of Facebook’s newer ad types. They’re an arrangement of photos or videos that you can choose to display one after the other. Some marketers skip right over them because they’re thinking, “I’m not running an eCommerce store, why would I use a carousel ad?”
That’s when you want to think outside the box…but inside the multiple boxes!
Take a look at this ad for Vegas:
Carousel ads are hard to ignore
Every scroll reveals more of the beautiful Las Vegas Strip and the view you possibly could have from your hotel room. The layout draws more attention, and if done properly, can easily raise your CTR.
When uploading your ad creative, you can use almost any image that stands out (as long as it follows Facebook’s guidelines)
However, try to at least make the image be relatable to your product or service.
Wut?
Sorry…what does a cat have to do with network marketing? Yes, I see it’s on a keyboard, but cats don’t market. (I love cats as much as anyone else on the internet, but I just don’t see how a picture of a cat is related to network marketing.)
The image just gives a vague feeling of confusion. However, a good ad is Groupon’s ad:
Who wants to go?
Immediately, you’d think, “Well, a hot air balloon has nothing to do with a coupon company.” But seeing the hot air balloon makes someone immediately start thinking about riding in one, and then they’ll wonder if Groupon has a discount for a hot air balloon ride, and boom – they’re hooked. They’ll click, and up goes Groupon’s CTR.
Although the creative is what’s going to catch your potential customer’s eye, the ad copy is what reasons with them. No matter how pretty you pose your product or how nicely you present your service, people will always still look for more information before clicking. And you’ll need to make that information interesting:
What will interest your customers?
Even if your writing is as bland as milk, there’s still hope. There are quite a few ways to write your ads to improve your CTR and results.
It should be pretty common sense that if you pair a bunch of random elements together to make an ad, it won’t do very well. As mentioned earlier, making your image relatable to your business is a solid idea. However, even if your image isn’t right off the bat understandable, you can match your ad copy with it.
Great Facebook at from Litmus
On first glance of Litmus’ ad, someone might wonder what one earth is happening in the picture and how any company can use letters in love to advertise.
Then you’ll read the ad copy and realize that Litmus is just advertising a webinar that covers how to make people enjoy reading your emails. Pretty cool, right?
When someone sees a Facebook ad, they look at the picture, then they look at the headline. Most people don’t actually read past that point.
Which kinda makes sense. Facebook puts your headline right under the image (where your eyes naturally go after looking at a picture), makes the font larger, and bolds it. What ad copy could possibly stand up to that?
Not all is lost, however, there are ways to make your ad’s headline absolutely clickable. The next few sections cover this in detail.
Although Facebook gives you a ton of room to work with when you’re writing your headlines, there’s really no need to use all that space. Take a look at this ad; it’s clear what they’re offering, but the headline gets cut off partway through their benefit.
Too much text, not enough value
It may get a click to expand the headline, but it probably won’t get a link click.
Zeel’s ad, however, has the perfect headline. “Massage on Demand” is short and clear as can be. This app will let you get a massage on demand. It’s nicely paired with the CTA button “Install Now”, which makes it clear that you’re downloading an app.
Zeel keeps its ad concise
When it comes to the length of writing a Facebook ad headline, there’s not a set in stone word count to strive for, but we’ve found that keeping them at a sentence or shorter works wonders.
Not only do numbers draw attention for standing out from words, but they can quickly communicate valuable information.
The difference between:
“$9.99 New Patient Special”
And
“Ten Dollar New Patient Special”
Is a world of difference. First, the numbers draw attention, and secondly, they just look cleaner. You can use the numbers to advertise prices, discounts, the number of happy customers, the number of specials in stock, and more.
Frontier knows how to use it:
This ad follows all the rules and makes great use of numbers
Their ad creative already has their big number in it – tickets as low as $39. But their headline shows another important bit of information – their sale only goes on for 2 days. Better grab tickets fast.
If you’d like someone to read more than just your headline because you have more information to share, a good way to do so is to ask a question. Soylent does this in their ad, and then they go on to explain their question:
Soylent engages customers with a question
You could also ask a question in your headline as an incentive to click and get the answer – an easy way to raise your CTR.
Emojis are a universal language that has been around since 1999. Everyone uses Emojis, and people who don’t live under a rock – and probably don’t use Facebook anyways.
If you’re looking to increase your CTR, adding Emojis into your headlines or ad text can boost your results. You can do this in your headlines or ad text to boost results, depending on where you’re wanting to get conversions from. Just don’t go crazy with them and compose your entire ad out of a random assortment of emojis.
You’ll want to balance relevant emojis with your writing. When done properly, it can draw extra attention to your headline or ad text. Uniconutrition (as shown on Instagram) does this beautifully, and if you look closely, their ad creative has an emoji too – can you spot it?:
Clever
Think about how strange it would look if they used a different emoji or just used the cake emoji alone – the message wouldn’t get across.
At the end of the day, who really needs to like your Facebook ad copy?
Is it Facebook? Not really, Facebook doesn’t care about ad copy as long as it passes regulations.
Is it you? Not really, you should always strive to make yourself proud, but you’re not the person who needs to really like your ad copy.
Is it your boss? Not really, your boss should care about your results, not the nitty-gritty bits of ad copy.
The only people who need to actually like your Facebook ad copy are the people in your audience. Your potential customers.
When you write your ads, remember who will really be seeing it – people who could potentially give your company money. When you’re writing with your customer in mind, you’ll want to remember a few things, which I’ll cover in more detail in just a moment:
One, your customer doesn’t want to buy from someone they can’t relate to.
Two, your customer doesn’t know all the fancy terms you use in your everyday business life.
Three, your customer doesn’t give a hoot about how awesome your product is; they want to know how awesome it’ll make their life.
When your writing for your customer, remember how you want to portray your brand, and then write in that tone.
One brand that does this so well that I immediately knew that I wanted to use them as my example for this is HelloFresh:
HelloFresh get’s you to imagine what it’s like to be a customer
Finding time to cook each night can be stressful. HelloFresh knows this, which is why when they wrote their ads, they didn’t take a serious tone. They choose a friendly, upbeat tone that encourages you to take pride in cooking something healthy and delicious.
Let’s say a PPC manager walks into a bakery and tells the owner, “Hi, I can increase your ROI by running PPC campaigns with RLSAs, bid modifiers, following bread crumb trails, and setting up SKAGs.”
Would the bakery owner understand much of anything that the PPC manager said? Probably not. They might think they understand what a bread crumb tail is, but unless they were well-versed in PPC, they wouldn’t quite get the point.
The same goes for your customers. When writing your ads, you might be tempted to use the terms that you discuss every day with your co-workers, but your customers won’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.
Discuss your product and benefits in terms that they can understand; better yet, stick to discussing the benefits it offers instead of the features.
Every product and service is designed to solve the problem. If there’s no problem, then there’s no demand for that product or service. If there’s no demand, then why does it exist.
Your company is the exact same way; it exists to solve a problem. No matter how minor and first-world that problem may be, it must exist.
When you write your Facebook ads, focus on explaining to your audience that you will be solving a problem of theirs, and exactly what the benefits of your product are.
A company that does this really well is Codeable:
If you have a WordPress problem you’re clicking on this ad
They clearly state the problem in their ad text: it’s difficult to find WordPress experts. And they post their solution of bringing all the WordPress experts together in one place. Instead of explaining how they bring all the designers together and other information like that, they explain that the designers they offer won’t just build a website, they’ll build a relationship too. They pack value in every part.
When writing any part of your ad copy – whether it’s the headline, text, creative overlay, or news feed link, try posting some social proof in there.
People like knowing that other people have enjoyed your product. It’s actually very natural for someone to look up reviews of a company before they actually commit to making a purchase.
So to save your audience a trip to your review page, why not post some of your best reviews and let your customers do the talking for you?
Perfect Locks claims they’re #1 in hair extensions, and they provide the reviews to back it up:
Awesome use of reviews ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Including the customer’s first name increases the trust that the review wasn’t fabricated, and when people trust other peoples’ reviews, the CTR goes up.
Emotion can trump logic. When you make a snap decision, is it generally because of logical reasoning or an emotion?
When a Facebook ad properly plays on someone’s emotions, they can get quick clicks and conversions.
Grammarly easily plays the shame and embarrassment card:
If you’re an online dater you just bought Grammarly.
It plays on the assumption that no one wants to be single, and that if you are single, that maybe, just maybe, fixing your grammar will help you land a date.
You don’t have to rely on a negative emotion, either. Try creating excitement in your ads with a peppy tone, or try offering hope when you explain the benefits of your product or make them curious by leaving a question unanswered or a line unfinished.
Have you ever missed a deal because you hesitated? Has that product haunted your dreams for months or years afterward? Everyone has, and it’s one of the worst feelings in the world.
That Fear of Missing Out is a popular Marketing Strategy. On Facebook, it collects clicks like candy and drives CTR up the wall.
Advertising a sale to your remarketing audience can be golden. If you have people in your audience who have hesitations about price, you can give a limited time offer to lock them in.
Great use of a limited time offer
Creative Tim knows that summer is approaching fast and that the limited offer is sure to get conversions from people who are stoked about summertime.
When you miss a link click or a conversion, it’s possible that the reason there wasn’t a click was because of an unaddressed concern.
Subscription ads note this all the time. They know that people are afraid of contracts, not liking their surprise box or the price.
To combat this, they’ll have answers for unspoken questions.
Dollar Shave Club answers the question of a contract:
Well now that we’ve cleared that up
“No commitment”
Stitch Fix has figured out how to handle dissatisfaction:
What do you have to lose?
“Keep what you love, return the rest.”
Bark Box is clear about their pricing, and makes a sweet deal to combat it:
We ruv this ad ❤
“Start a 3 or 6-month BarkBox subscription today & score a free upgrade for an extra premium toy in each month’s box ($27 or $54 value).”
Take some time to get to know your customers and what almost stopped them from buying your product. Then address those concerns from the beginning.
Now that you’ve made your ad scroll-stopping, engaging, and interesting, here comes the final part to getting that CTR up. You have to have a strong Call to Action. No matter how interesting your ad is, you need to make sure to encourage your customers to click on it. Otherwise, they’ll just do this before scrolling on:
Nice try
When running your ads, it’s vital to remember one thing – your goal. Implementing a CTA has the exact same rule.
It doesn’t make sense to run an ad asking someone to sign up for a subscription or buy something outright if you either don’t use a CTA at all or if you list your CTA as “Learn More”.
The further down the sales funnel your offer is, the stronger you’ll want to advertise, and the stronger you’ll want to have your CTA. Doing all of this properly and matching all of these up will increase your CTR and give you higher quality traffic.
People viewing your ads shouldn’t have to guess what you want them to do. You want them to click, right? They’ll click and convert, ideally.
Instead of just posting an ad that will leave them wondering what you want them to do, seal the deal by clearly asking them to click or to sign up, etc.
Tell your customers what action you want them to take and how it will benefit them
Leadpages does a great job of this by introducing themselves and suggesting that you sign up to start collecting leads right away. There’s no mystery about what they want you to do.
Just like you have to be clear about what you want your customers to do, you have to be clear about what they’re getting.
You can’t list an ad telling someone to click without offering an incentive. Someone is on Facebook for entertainment or to catch up with friends and families; your offer has to be pretty tantalizing to make them click away from the app that they’re already enjoying.
Keep it short, sweet, and discounted
Banana Republic does a great job of making an offer that can’t be refused. An offer of 30% off of their quality clothing certainly makes someone want to “shop now” or at least browse the site – leading to more clicks and higher CTR.
Remember that your CTA is one of the most important factors in improving your CTR.
Don’t get so lost in your creative or the ad copy that you distract from your CTR. Sure, it’s important to make sure your ad has great quality writing and creatives, but you’ll want to make sure your ad flows; you’ll want to make sure it all leads to the CTA – which is the invitation for people to click.
Stay focused on the CTA
AWeber does a great job of this. Their CTA is clear, tells you what you’re getting, and lists its CTA where it can’t be missed. The minimalist style of the ad doesn’t distract from their invitation for you to take a quiz.
“But you just said not to distract…” I know. Don’t distract from your CTA, and don’t make your multiple CTAs confusing.
However, trying two CTAs can be a CTR wonder. Here’s what I mean:
Teabox is clear about what they want you to do. They want you to learn more about their sale. They have two CTAs to allow you to do just that. You can either watch their video, or you can click the learn more to go to their landing page.
The video gives you the information about the date and the sale, but not necessarily what the product is that is going on sale. Clicking the Learn More button possibly allows you to browse to learn even more information than the video offered. Teabox certainly sets up a great path for you to follow and increase their CTR.
Sometimes that little CTA button can’t do its job all alone. You’ll want to pair it with a CTA in your headline.
Soylent shows off its options
Soylent invites you to “Mix Up Your Meals” by Shopping Now. Listing the headline as another benefit would seem redundant after their clever three benefits listed above, but asking you to mix up your meals draws attention to the three flavors they offer and invites you to shop and avoid the redundancy of the same meal.
When writing your CTA, you’ll want the user to follow your ad as soon as possible. One way you can do this is to make a great offer. Another way to do this is to include a sense of urgency in your CTA.
One of the easiest ways to include urgency is simply offering a limited time sale:
Notice they specify that this is an in stores only promotion
Target makes their sale very clear. One day a year is Target Run Day, and that’s the day when you get 10% off your purchase.
Using data collected from our in-depth audit, we’ll deliver a detailed plan to grow your business month after month. Your proposal includes:
WRITTEN BY
Evie Welborn
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