Grace Media Group

Depending on the goal of your advertising campaign, you may be interested in increasing CTR (and resulting click volume) generated by your Facebook ads. For my clients focused on increasing brand awareness and building communities, higher CTRs are one of the critical metrics of success. Following are 5 ideas for helping you improve your Facebook advertising efforts.

1. Revise your targeting based on responder demographics. Check out your “Responder Demographics” report from the Facebook Report area. If you have historical click data for your ads, you can find the highest performing demographic groups just by sorting your report based on CTR. You may find that men ages 45 – 54 are the highest performing demographic group and this will help you narrow your ad targeting to them. You’ll also find out what demographic groups are not performing well and you may want to eliminate impressions being served to these groups.
2. Rotate your ads more frequently. If your impression levels support it, rotate your ad creative more frequently. (Wouldn’t it be nice to see that 0.02% CTR go up to 0.04%?) Test a more frequent rotation and see what happens.
3. Modify your campaign structure. Check to see if you have ads with similar targeting, but are all under the same campaign. Over time Facebook’s system automatically learns to prefer the ads in your campaign that have performed the best in order to help optimize your campaign. While this is fine in most cases, it may mean that the ad that has been running the longest in the campaign (with the most impressions/clicks), could be getting “preferred” over the newer ads you are rotating in. Set up your new ad creative in a separate campaign to allow the ads to run more evenly. In the end, you will be able to better judge whether the new ads outperform the original ad creative.
4. Use Facebook Ads for Pages. Facebook offers a specific ad type to promote your external website, and another ad type to promote your Facebook Page (or Facebook Event). Depending on your marketing objective, you may want to test promoting your Facebook Page with Facebook Ads for Pages. Facebook Ads for Pages allow people to “Like” your Facebook Page without ever leaving the page they are viewing, and when someone does like your ad, a story is automatically created in their profile page (and possibly even their friends’ News Feeds) creating a much wider distribution for your ad.
5. I know it’s been said, but humor does work. Try testing a wider variety of imagery in your campaigns (against a similar copy execution) and see if the more humorous images outperform the rest. Chances are, the more amusing the image, the higher the CTR.

Enough said. Happy testing and keep me posted on what works well for you.