How to Increase Click-Through Rate on Facebook Ads

If you want to run effective Facebook ads, it’s important to continually look for ways to optimize and improve. One metric you might want to look at is click-through rate (CTR).

What is a Click- Through Rate?

Click-through rate is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. In this example, the campaign has 9,313 impressions and 132 link clicks. 132/9313 = a CTR of 1.42%.

A higher CTR means more people who see your ad will click on it.

Here are a few ways you can try to increase this metric and get more visitors to your site for cheaper.

The easiest and fastest way to get ads with high click-through rates is to test multiple variations.

What Should You Test?

The most important element to test which can have the biggest impact on performance is the image. This is the first thing a person sees when scrolling in their feed, so it’s important the image is eye-catching to get their attention and look at the ad. It doesn’t matter how compelling your copy is, if the image isn’t good they will never stop to read the rest of the ad.

1. Image Testing

When testing different images, it’s much more effective to test radically different designs. Testing the same ad image with two different headlines in the image will have very little impact. Here is an example of 2 very different designs promoting the same thing:

Or this:

Here are the results:

2. Copy Testing

Once you’ve tested a lot of different images and found a couple of winners there, the next element you may want to test is copy. Now that your ad image is capturing attention and making people stop scrolling, they are going to start reading the copy.

Some variations you can try are different lengths of copy, appealing to different emotions, highlighting different benefits of what you’re promoting, using different offers or deals, including emojis, and testing different angles.

VS this:

Here are the results:

3. Headline Testing

Finally, you can test different headlines for the ad. Make sure your headlines aren’t too long and don’t get cut off on the ad. Also be aware of how ads look on desktop vs. mobile.

Or this:

Here are the results:

These are the 3 major elements of the creative to test, but another extremely important factor is targeting. You might have the perfect ad, but it doesn’t perform well because you’re showing it to the wrong audience. Here are 5 ways to find audiences to target on Facebook.

4 Image Tips For Effective Facebook Ads

Now let’s look at some of the specific tactics you can use on ad images to try to increase the click-through rate.

1. Try High Contrast

High contrast images with bright colors are more appealing to us. Try increasing the contrast of your image by 40% using a photo editor.

2. Use Diagonal lines

Our eyes are used to seeing horizontal and vertical lines. Diagonal lines are a pattern interrupt for us and catch our attention.

3. Try Text Overlays

Putting text on the image helps people understand what the ad is for very quickly. Make sure the text is easy to read at a glance. Also keep in mind here if the ad placement is smaller like the right-hand column or on mobile that the text will be even smaller. If the text can’t be read easily, it’s likely that they’ll skip over the ad.

4. Use Desirable Imagery

Use images that are desirable. Show something that your audience would like to be or have or feel.

Remember Your Goals

All of these techniques can help improve the click-through rate on your Facebook Ads. But it is very important to remember what the true goals of your campaigns are.

In most cases for us, click-through rate is just a vanity metric. We use it as a bit of a litmus test to see how people are responding to ads, but getting clicks to our website is not our main goal.

Our main goal of campaigns is often to produce revenue or subscribers. Those are the metrics we look at when making optimizations and decisions about ads.

We might have an ad with a low click-through rate, but that ad might be producing a lot of revenue because the people clicking on the ad are highly qualified. If we were to turn off that ad based on its click-through rate, we would be making a huge mistake.

Similarly, we might have an with a high click-through rate and is driving a ton of traffic to the website, but if those people aren’t converting it’s a waste of ad spend.

What do your most effective Facebook ads look like? Let us know in the comments below!