Facebook ads, we all know them. Some are quite nice, while others are just stupid. Some are beautiful made, others are very ugly. As a company you try to make an advertisement which gets a very high click-through rate (CTR) on Facebook. But what can a company do to get this high CTR? Well, there are actually some very simple solutions to get slightly more clicks on your advertisement. I have read about a research which looks at five different ways to achieve a higher CTR. So let’s play a short quiz with you guys. Try to answer these questions for yourself and see how many you got right:
1. Ads with people in it tend to have a higher click-through rate. But which images do you think are more effective as ads, images with females or images with males?
2. Ads which actually show their products are more effective. But which category of products achieves the highest CTR when showing their products? Fashion, high-tech, jewellery or cultural products?
3. Different types of background come with different types of CTR’s. Which background is more effective, a uniform (solid colour) background, a background with nature (tree/lake/mountain etc.) or a background showing the interior of a house?
4. The way you frame your product is of course important as well. Which of the following ways of framing your products works best? Landscape, close-up, aerial or portrait?
5. Last but not least, the background colour of the ad. Which of the following colours works most effective as a background for advertisements: Black, green, red, blue, purple or yellow?
So this was it. I will now give you the answers. The answer to the first question has an interesting outcome. Images with males achieve an average CTR of 0.03%, while images with females achieve a twice as high CTR, namely 0.06%. The second question was not that difficult I think. By showing the actual product of an ad about jewellery, the CTR is 0.12%. All the other categories achieved lower CTR’s. I think the reason for this is that jewellery is expensive and mostly small with many details. High-tech products are also expensive, but the worthiness of the product is in that category mostly not visible, because it’s the inside of the product which makes it special. Jewellery is a more visual product. The answer for question 3 is an interesting one again. It seems that a uniform background achieves a higher CTR than the other two backgrounds. The frame that actually works best for a product (Q4) is the close-up by achieving a CTR score of 0.05%. The closer and the more details people see from a product, the more interested they are. Finally, different background colours achieve different CTR scores as well. These are the colours from a high to low CTR score: purple, yellow, black, green, red and blue.
So I find it very interesting that only small changes in advertisement can achieve ‘much higher’ click-through rates. For some of the above features, can you think of any reasons why the one works better than the other? Why does images with females work better than images with males? And why does a solid purple background works best?
Sources:
http://www.marketingfacts.nl/images/research/9_Adobe-Infographic-090813-01-blogsized2.png
