Click-Through Rate

CTR indicates how many link clicks you’ve received on your ad compared to how many impressions your ad received. It’s a common metric used by online advertisers to understand how ads are driving traffic to websites and other destinations. The metric is calculated as the number of link clicks divided by the number of impressions.

Effective ways to reduce CTR:

1. Narrow Your Targeting

“Improving your CTR on Facebook is always a combination of strong targeting, good ad copy, and a powerful visual,” says SIXGUN’s David Pagotto. “However, the biggest lever you have available is the targeting options.”

Nate Masterson of Maple Holistics agrees: “One of the most overlooked strategies when it comes to PPC in social media is marketing to a niche. This means more than just marketing to the people who have an interest that approach your niche. Instead, target your marketing to specific types of customers.”

“If your audience is too broad, then the message is typically pretty generic in an effort to accommodate the whole bunch,” says Amy Bishop of Cultivative Marketing. “At that point, it’s watered down and unlikely to have strong appeal.

But on the other hand, “when your paid media strategist narrows your targeting, you’re speaking to a smaller customer base, and you now have specificity and empathy on your side,” says Evolve Digital Labs’ Ian Revling. 

“Any time your creative becomes more specific to an audience, they’re more likely to click your ad, engage with comments, share with friends and family, or click through to a conversion,” Revling says.

Of course, you won’t always know exactly who to target. “You’ll need to do some experimentation,” says Jackie Kossoff, freelance marketer and designer:

“I recently worked on a campaign solely intended to test audiences. By doing some extra research on what interests my client’s target audience had that were not accounted for, I was able to double—and in one case quadruple—the click-through rate from week one to week two.”

And Darrell Evans of Yokel Local recommends changing how you think about your Facebook ads: “I think of every ad like an email sequence. If we have properly built awareness and moved our prospect to engagement, then high click-through rates on Facebook ads should result.”

Dominick Sorrentino from Brafton also reminds us that “Narrowing your audience isn’t just about CTR. It’s also about conversion rates. Across all industries, Facebook has a conversion rate of 9.21%, meaning for every 100 clicks on an ad, roughly 9 people will convert. Relative to other paid channels such as display and search, that’s actually very strong. Take advantage of this potential by zeroing in on an audience that’s not only likely to click on your ad, but is also most likely to fill out the form on the other side of it.”

2. Run Retargeting Campaigns

“We work with some of our B2B clients to re-engage past users or customers who are 15 times more likely to engage than those who are not yet familiar with your brand and ideas,” says Hire Learning’s Chris Richardson. “They may have fallen off the map, but they start the process further down the sales funnel.”

Bogdan Zlatkov of RollWorks agrees: “The best way to improve your conversions overall is by staying top-of-mind after someone visits your site.” 

“According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 91% of marketers who have used retargeting have found it to perform equally or better than search, email, or other display ads. When Oracle Dyn used retargeting ads they got a 4x return on investment and a 28% increase in marketing qualified leads,” Zlatkov says.

3. Use Engaging Visuals

“One effective way to improve the click-through rate on your Facebook ads is to incorporate more engaging visuals such as videos, GIFs, or infographics,” says Jackie Tihanyi of Fisher Unitech. 

“People are used to seeing the same static images when scrolling through Facebook, so spicing up the newsfeed with some dynamic content increases the probability of a click,” Tihanyi says.

KDG’s Keri Lindenmuth agrees: “The key to a successful ad campaign on Facebook is to make sure your content stands out. This is why videos and images work so well. Users are attracted to strong visuals, especially when they involve other people.”

By adding a compelling video and headline, Jumpstart Go’s Rene Cabrera increased his CTR by 10%.

But not everyone recommends video.

“Surprisingly, we’ve seen that images have better click-through rates than videos for Facebook ad campaigns,” says Jeneeit Jeyakanthan, CEO of Vilampara Media.

Jeyakanthan does note, however, that videos are better for brand-building and engagement.

4. Improve Your Ad Copy

It’s no surprise that your ad copy makes a difference in CTR. Several of our respondents offered their advice on how to improve your ad copy:

• Add personal attributes to ads. John Morgan of The Penny Hoarder says his current campaign that uses the headline “If you live in Pennsylvania” is getting a CTR of 13.7%!
• Write a compelling title. “From our experience, the number-one factor in improving your Facebook CTR is through effective titles,” says Angelo Frisina of Sunlight Media. “Having a correctly optimized ad title can increase your CTR by over 50%.”
• Ask a question in your copy. “Ask a question in your ad, and be sure to follow up quickly and professionally on your responses,” says Mike Schiemer of Bootstrap Business. “The higher engagement rates with the ads will enhance the legitimacy of the ad. You’ll get more shares and link clicks.”
• Answer a question. “Answer a user’s initial question in your ad, but also guide them to click through to your landing page,” says Rachel Bills of Intuitive Digital. Optimize your landing page so that when a user lands, it’s easy for them to find what they’re looking for.” 

“It all starts with the first sentence,” says James Robinson of Iconic Genius. “It must speak directly to a pain point or desire of your customer. For example, ‘Do you feel pain in your lower back?’ If the person says yes, then they will keep reading because it applies to them.”

“Next, you want to offer a solution to their problem. And then highlight the benefits of how the solution to this problem will improve their life. You want to paint the picture in their mind with words (walk without pain, enjoy playing with the kids again, get back to the gym, etc.).”

“Of course, you also need to have a stellar offer. In most cases, prospects do not see the value in clicking a link. You must have a head-turning, eye-popping offer,” Robinson says.

5. Leverage Social Proof

“The most effective way to increase CTR on Facebook ads is to increase and display social proof on your ads,” says Blake Aylott of RideYellow.

You can build social proof by getting more likes, comments, and shares on your ads.

“A new ad with a winning image/video and copy from testing usually only has few comments/likes/shares to start,” says Kalina Fridrich of Social Fulcrum. “This usually means CTRs are rarely above 0.5% for new Facebook ads.”

“To help boost CTRs, we build social proof by accumulating post engagement. To do this, we use Page Post IDs to link the same ad across various ad sets to ensure the post engagement is cumulative.” 

“We also show new ads with low engagement to audiences with the most loyal customers (high LTV, long relationship with the brand) to collect positive comments from current customers.”

“We’ve seen the same ads with 0.5% CTR jump to 0.7%-1% CTR as a result of a rigorous collection of post engagement. We believe ad engagement provides social proof and builds virality,” Fridrich says.

6. Test Everything

Marketers love testing, especially when there are all sorts of things to test.

“When I say A/B testing, I mean you need to test everything in your ad: copy, targeting, objective, ad types, etc.,” says Growth Hackers’ Jonathan Aufray. “In fact, I recommend to do even more than A/B testing; I’d call it A/B/C testing or A to Z testing.”

“What I recommend is creating at least two identical Facebook ads where you just test one thing at a time (for instance, the copy). Then, once you find the right copy, you create several ads with that copy where you test different targets. Once you find the right target, you can test the ad format, and so on,” Aufray says.

R.J. Weiss of The Ways to Wealth gives similar advice: “For my ads, I rotate weekly through testing audience, image, headline, and text. Then, repeat.” 

“The goal each week is to test at least four new ads in each campaign I have running. Often it can be weeks or months until I’m able to improve upon a control. But once I do, the reward means a higher CTR and lower CPC,” Weiss says.

Web Geeks’ Shane Carter emphasizes the importance of specifically testing creative: “Try split-testing ads with different images and text combinations to see which resonate the best with your audience and entice more people to click through to your content.”

And when you’re testing, Bruno Ferrão of My Personal Stylist says you should also be talking to your customers: “Make it personal. Get to know every aspect of the problem that you are willing to solve for.