You’ve landed here for one reason and one reason alone: you’ve encountered the dreaded challenge of trying to skyrocket your Facebook Ads CTR. And it’s driving you crazy.
Every online marketer has been there before and knows all too well how frustrating it is. But this is one of those problems that once you know how to tackle, you’ll never feel that frustration again.
Your CTR is one of the most important metrics – it’s what tells you how many people are actually clicking on your ad. Getting ads in front of the right people is the first step, getting them to click on your ads is the hard part.
Don’t give up just yet though! Our team’s years of experience has shown us exactly what works and we’re going to explain 8 tips that can double your click-through rate on Facebook.
The Importance of Facebook Ads CTR
CTR (click-through rate) is something you need to monitor on any ad platform, not just Facebook. Why? Because it’s one of the core metrics that indicate how well your funnel is working.
Here’s the basic journey that your audience would take assuming you convince them to convert:
| Step | Relevant Metric |
|---|---|
| They see your ad on their Facebook feed | Impressions |
| They get intrigued by your ad and click on it | CTR |
| They’re taken to your landing page | Average Time on Page |
| They’re converted into a paying customer | Conversion Rate |
Next to each step we’ve included the relevant metric. Obviously, we could add a bunch more, but these are the main ones to monitor at each step of the funnel.
Each of these metrics is important because if your ad isn’t picking up, these tell you why that is. Back on topic – if your Facebook Ads CTR is low then that tells you that the ad isn’t intriguing your audience enough to get them to click.
What is a Good CTR for Facebook Ads?
This is one of those questions that marketing leaders hate hearing. There’s no definitive answer to what a good CTR for Facebook Ads is, and every industry, every business, is different.
Sure, you can go ahead and look up the average CTR for Facebook Ads for your industry and use that as a baseline. This is completely fine. But don’t depend on your findings because you’re going to see dozens of different numbers.
This isn’t the answer you wanted; we know. It’s true though.
Your goal should be to increase your CTR rather than just trying to reach a baseless number that you found on a random marketing website. Focus on that instead and you’ll instantly relieve a lot of stress.
Still not satisfied? Fine, we’ll give you something to work towards. Aim to maintain a CTR of at least 2% – the higher the better, but this is the minimum you should accept.
8 Ways to Increase Facebook Ads CTR
Now onto the main event.
You don’t have to spend the next month messing around with your campaign trying to get more clicks without knowing what you’re doing. Just follow these 8 tips and your Facebook Ads CTR will start improving in a matter of days.
1. Thin the Herd (Not Literally)
You don’t have to send a portion of your audience to the farm but kicking them out of your campaign’s targeting strategy is a good place to start.
One of the most common reasons for people struggling with their click-through rate on Facebook is because they target a really broad audience. Unless you’re an S&P 500 company there’s not really a good reason to be targeting over 1 million users.
Assuming you’re a start-up, your audience size shouldn’t be more than 100,000 (even this is a stretch). Every business differs but targeting an audience of 10,000 is a good place to start.
Facebook gives you a lot of ways to cut your audience down too. Age, gender, interests, and location are just a few things you can specify in your targeting to make sure your audience doesn’t include people who aren’t interested in your business. Don’t know who your ideal customer is? Build a buyer persona first.
By eliminating all of those uninterested users, your CTR will jump up and your budget will be spent more efficiently.
2. Relate to Your Audience with Pain Points
The best way to convince prospects to sign up or buy from you is to relate to them. And one way that you can do this is by focusing on pain points that your product/service helps with.
Here’s how Jasper.ai, an AI copywriting tool, did this with one of their ads:
The first sentence, “Hate writing blog posts?”, gets straight to the pain point: writing blog posts. It’s no secret that an area marketers struggle with is copywriting for the sole reason that it’s not stimulating. It’s boring and tedious, and it takes years to get good at.
With this short intro sentence, they address the pain point before presenting a solution to it, and they even address a concern that many people have with AI tools.
Think about what pain points your audience has and build your ads around that. Your Facebook Ads CTR will gradually increase after you mess around with a few ads and pain points to see which one gets the biggest reaction out of your audience.
3. Entice with a Timed Offer
FOMO is a powerful thing. Nobody wants to be left out and you can use this to your advantage.
This two-pronged tactic is great for two reasons. It tells your audience that they’re getting a discount, and it encourages them to click your ad before the offer is gone.
Here’s another example, this time from Unbounce.
The ad creative makes it clear that they’re running an offer (it’s the first thing anyone who sees that ad will notice). But the ad copy is also crucial to what makes this ad work. It starts by getting straight to the point – they have a sale – and ends with a sneaky “but only for a limited time.”.
It’s these subtly worded sentences that can be the most effective at boosting your click-through rate on Facebook.
4. Evoke Specific Emotions
A big part of marketing is psychology; understanding how humans think and make decisions. If you can create Facebook ads that evoke certain emotions, you can (almost) manipulate people into clicking.
This is something you’ll need to work on though. If you wanted to get your audience frustrated about a problem so that they see your solution as the holy grail, you need to be careful not to get them so upset that they scroll away. This isn’t easy.
5. A/B Test EVERYTHING
Seriously, everything.
Every aspect of your ad – the copy, creative, CTA, colors, and everything in between – contributes in some way to the ad’s performance.
You don’t know where you’re going wrong and you need to find out. The only way to do so is to start A/B testing different versions of your ad.
Make sure you don’t change too many things at once, this is a common mistake. All this does is make it hard for you to pinpoint which changes influenced the change in performance and could lead you to make false assumptions.
You can see from the two Adobe ads above that they only changed one thing: the creative. Everything else is identical and their intent is to see if changing the creative increases engagement.
6. Run Some Video Ads (HUGE Facebook Ads CTR Boost!)
We stand by Facebook Video Ads and if you aren’t running them, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Short videos that get right into showcasing your product’s main selling points will get up to 5 times more engagement than a standard ad. Not to mention the lower CPC and higher Facebook Ads CTR they get. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy either.
The usual excuse we hear is that videos are expensive to make and they don’t “have that type of product”. Both are nonsense.
There are a bunch of tools out there that make creating your own videos fairly easy and that include templates, and you don’t have to be a professional video editor to throw something together.
The key to making video ads work is keeping them short or grabbing the viewer’s attention in the first 3 seconds – after this, you’re going to see the retention rate plummet.
7. Don’t Be Afraid of the Negatives
Every product has its own downsides. Some cost a lot to produce so they have a hefty price tag and others aren’t that versatile. You don’t have to cover up your product’s negative aspects too much.
Obviously, they shouldn’t be the main focus of your ads, that would be shooting yourself in the foot. But turn negatives into positives instead.
Your product costs $250, but it’s going to save the customer $40/month – tell them that. Let them know that you’re aware of how the price of your product is a concern but show them how the benefits outweigh it. Every product has flaws that can be framed in this way and you have to find yours.
8. Know How to Use Emojis
Emojis are a scary thing to use in your ads. Some people think they look unprofessional, and others worry about using them too much. Both are valid concerns to have.
Sometimes it’s easier to avoid emojis altogether but depending on your audience, using them properly can boost your Facebook Ads CTR. The key is to know your audience and whether it’s appropriate to use emojis in your ad copy.
You could even go as far as analyzing the specific emojis that people respond to if you’re really invested in getting a great CTR.
Our point is, you don’t need to completely avoid emojis. Use them to your advantage and even though it means putting a little extra work into your ad copy, it’ll help your performance.
And just to give you a quick example of how emojis can be used, here’s what Wendy’s did.
They actually did this in a really unique way. Not only is it using emojis, but their copy is written around those emojis.
Conclusion
None of the tips that we’ve just given you are extreme. In all honesty, you could start implementing most of these within the next few hours and start seeing results by next week.
The more that you run your Facebook Ads campaign, the more of these little tricks you’ll pick up on which enable you to go further in future campaigns and you can apply this knowledge to all other aspects of marketing that you decide to pursue.
After dealing with the stress of getting your Facebook Ads CTR up, your next challenge is converting those who click on your ads using a perfectly designed landing page.
