How to Increase your Social Media Click Through Rate

5 Steps to Success

Are you getting enough traffic from Facebook? Are you looking at click through rate (CTR) as a metric when analysing your paid social performance? Conversions are important but the traffic you’re driving through to your website/landing page is the first step to focus your optimisation efforts on so make sure you pay it the attention it deserves. Follow these 5 steps and boost your paid social performance!

Think visually

If you want your target audience to click on your ads they’ll need to actually spot them first. Sounds basic but with so many ads online these days, it’s vital you catch the eye of your audience with your creative.

When running a campaign across different platforms (both online and offline) it’s easy to lose consistency. It’s key to keep that consistency for a more impactful campaign but as essential to create tailored creative for each platform so when looking at generating creative for social Facebook has the following tips:

• Choose your image based on who you’re targeting – gender, age,… choose images that’ll resonate with your target audience.
• Context is important – sometimes the most effective images feature the product being used rather that just the product itself.
• Test different images – always run a few variations so you can test what gets best results and then keep testing!

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Edit your placements

Facebook recommends automatic placements but if engagement and click-through rate are metrics you’re aiming for, you might want to edit the placements and stick with feeds, specially on desktop.

News feed ads allow for a larger image and a longer description making your ad stand out driving higher CTR and usually conversions too. Win win combo here!

Tell people what you want them to do with CTAs

You need to give users a reason to click on your ads if that’s what you want them to do so let them know what’s that you’re after.

We regularly see accounts full of promoted ads and that comes with limitations, one of them being the lack of a call to action (CTA). We always recommend that our clients create campaign-specific ads as opposed to boosting organic posts and this is one of the reasons why.

Facebook lets you choose from over 10 different calls to action:

Also remember you can add text on top of the image itself to complement that CTA you’ve chosen but keep in mind the 20% rule or your ads’ delivery might be limited or even disapproved.

Segment your audiences

It’s easier to achieve a higher CTR with a small, defined and well-targeted audience. Avoid large audiences like the below:

If your audiences look like the above, make sure you start breaking them down into micro-audiences right now so you can better tailor ads to them. For example, divide them by genre or age group and feature that demographic in the creative you’re using; or target a specific region or country and make a reference to it within your ad copy.

Look at the right metrics

When analysing the data and looking at your CTR, make sure you’re actually looking at the right metric.

There’s two different CTR columns (customise your columns if you don’t see both) and one tends to be higher than the other… I bet Facebook would love us all to only look at CTR (all) so we see a much better performance and keep spending our pennies on their ads but make sure you know what the difference between both metrics is:

• CTR (all) – This is based on Clicks (all) and measures all clicks on the ad area including clicks on the photo or on the comments or even the view more bit if you have a long description.
• CTR (link click-through rate) – This is exclusively based on link clicks and gives you a more accurate idea of performance as it only takes into account actual link clicks.

As I mentioned at the beginning CTR is an important metric that need attention but it doesn’t tell the whole story so make sure you take a more holistic approach when it comes to evaluating your ads performance.

Increasing your social media CTR will require a strategy that is continually reviewed, analysed and tweaked in accordance with your campaign’s data. It may be time consuming, but it’s absolutely worthwhile to see an uptake in clicks through from your social media content.

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