5 tips for creating attractive Facebook Ads

What can I do to make my Facebook more efficient and how do I get a higher CTR for my ads?

If you have been reading our previous posts, you know by now that we care a lot about the quality of your online ads and about the metrics that are evidence of this quality. Backtracking a bit, the first thing we look for when we judge quality is high CTR.

CTR stands for “click-through rate” and it shows you how many of the people seeing your Facebook Ad online also click on it. Basically, it shows how many people are actually interested in your ad.

To give you an example: a 5% CTR means that when your ad is shown 100 times and it gets 5 clicks on it. Wonder if this is that high or low? That depends on many factors, so it is hard to say unless we put it in context.

Before we begin, you must know that the average Facebook Ads CTR, across all industries, is 0.9%. Of course, it is also important what people do after they click the ad. Hopefully, they find something of interest and become customers. That is why it is important, in your ads, not to make claims that you can not back up further on your website.

Of course, an ad promising free beer would get much higher CTR (maybe even 100%? Who does not want free beer?), but that would be useless if the promise is not fulfilled. This is why, apart from CTR, we also try to look at the conversion rate, which tells us how many of the people clicking are taking an important action on your website, after the click. This important action could be buying something, booking, ordering, filling out a form, etc.

Social media is, by definition, an environment in which attention spans are short and scroll reflexes are high. Many times, users like or share content without actually reading it. It often happened to us, too, as we noticed in our advertising stats that we had more likes and shares than the actual number of clicks to see the full content of our post. One study (based on Twitter stats, though), has proved that 59% of shares are made without clicking the content.

Wonder why?

In today’s online media landscape, it would be impossible to handle so much data without doing some filtering first. Our brains are now accustomed to this new environment and keep us from getting too much information. This is why, in most cases, we will have an idea of the content in the first second we see the headline and the first few lines of text.

According to copyblogger, 80% of users only read the headline of an ad. Therefore, you have to make sure you have a quality one. As with Google AdWords, using numbers and symbols might help. What has also been proved to increase CTR is to formulate your headline in the form of a question. It directly invites people to interact with your content.

You always hear that your text needs to be persuasive, but is there a recipe for that? Actually, various sources claim there is. There are various lists of words that have been tested in order to find the most persuasive ones. One such list is this. So, when you are writing your ad, try to include some of the following: you, results, health, new, best, now, free, discover, guarantee, save, etc.

According to justcreative.com, there is one ad that managed to use most of the words from the list of persuasive terms: You can discover an easy and proven way to save money, and help guarantee your future health and happiness. Buy a home in one of America’s finest communities. You will love the results!

How many persuasive words can you fit into your ad text?

USE EMOJIS

Unlike ads on Google, Facebook allows you to use emojis in your ads and posts. If you do not know how to use emojis, have a look at emojipedia.org, where you can see the entire list based on multiple categories, events, popularity, and latest news! You can easily notice how race & gender-sensitive they are based on the demographics of several target groups. It has been shown that posts with emojis get higher CTR than the same posts without them.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT PICTURE

We talk a lot about words, but a picture might be worth 1000 of them. It is fundamental to have a picture that really adds to your message. Include text in your picture, but not too much, or else Facebook may stop delivering your ad.

Be careful also to use a picture with the correct size, adapted to the ad space. Try to use images (full or cropped) that are about 1200 x 628 pixels in size.

See another Facebook post (could’ve been an ad as well) that we like. It uses color shades (and words) perfectly to send a message.

But, as usual, do not apply these tips blindly. Some variations might work better for your particular business.

We recommend that you always test variations of your ads. It is called A/B testing. Check your traffic using Visitor Analytics to see whether version A of your ad brings you more visitors than version B.