How to Improve your Facebook CTR: The Actionable Guide

Facebook is one of the biggest advertising channels, gaining almost 150 million daily users from 2020 Q1 to 2021 Q1 and currently holding 1.8 billion daily active users. If you are one of the 10 million advertisers who decided to start advertising on Facebook in the past few years, you may have found that it can be easy to get overwhelmed.

With the platform’s wide variety of ad formats and audience targeting options, there is no limit of possibilities to showcase the campaigns to the target users, aiming to convert. And just like on Google Ads, performance can differ across different industries on Facebook.

One of the biggest struggles for advertisers is Facebook CTR (Click-through rate). The everchanging price might go up and down based on targeting refinement, ad creativity and organic engagement with the ad. The short user’s attention span and information overload might cause users’ numbness to the campaigns, and the real question is how to get positive outcomes from your Facebook marketing efforts?

What is Facebook CTR?

CTR on Facebook refers to the click-through rate or the percentage of people who click on an ad after seeing it. To calculate CTR on Facebook, divide the number of link clicks on your Facebook ad by the number of impressions and multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

The difference between clicks and link clicks

Clicks are what make the advertising campaign valuable. Advertisers are putting their best efforts into encouraging users to engage with the promotional content. However, not all of the clicks are the same. Facebook Advertising measures two types of clicks on its platform:

Link clicks are the number of clicks on links or responsive ads elements to particular destinations, whether the content is on or off Facebook. For example, the link clicks can be gathered when the user clicks on the link in the Facebook post and opens a homepage.

Advertisers can view their link clicks split down by destinations by going to Ads Manager and clicking Breakdown→ By action→ Link click destination.

All clicks include link clicks and clicks on other campaign parts, such as post likes, comments and shares, or a click to the business’s Facebook page.

The industry average CTR

The average Facebook Ads click-through rate across all industries in the newsfeed is 1.11%. However, it’s a downward trend — a decrease of 0.37% compared to 2020.

As different industries target different customers through ads, the CTR benchmark is different for every industry. A survey conducted by Smart Insights presented average click-through rates broken down by sectors:

Advertisers in the legal industry may struggle with a below-average click-through rate on Google’s Search, but not on Facebook. They have the highest CTR at 1.61%.

The difference in this industry’s click-through rates on the different platforms might be because it’s more difficult to impress a prospective client looking for a lawyer when your ad blends with other advertising pieces on Google’s SERP. As people are looking for such services on Google, not Facebook, the legal industry has a narrow target audience, with lower engagement but higher click-through rates.

Other industries with high Facebook Ads CTR:

• Retail (1.59%)
• Apparel (1.24%)
• Beauty (1.16%)
• Technology (1.04%)

Although fast-moving consumer goods industries are crowded in both Google Search and Facebook, they frequently offer promotions, sales, and giveaways that are great for engaging with people.

However, not every industry is achieving a high click-through rate. Employment & job training services have the lowest average Facebook Ads CTRs with 0.47%, followed by finance & insurance with 0.56% and customer services with 0.62%. This might be because users are coming to Facebook to connect with their family and friends, view easy-to-digest content and not search for the job. Business-related content is more prevalent in networks like Linkedin. However, Facebook is trying to change the users’ perspective and introduces more job-search, education, and training-related features.

How to increase CTR

There is no secret recipe on how to increase the CTR dramatically. However, here are some key tips on which will help to improve it:

• Knowing the brand’s target audience. Constant study of the business’s target audience and how they are interacting with Facebook is essential. Analyzing the competitor’s marketing campaigns and the user’s interest is a helping tool that will allow advertisers to provide the audience with more relevant content in the preferred ad format.
• Visuals that engage. Promotional campaigns are more effective when implementing photos as the link-powered lead magnet. Study shows that an ad including a photo gathers 42% CTR compared to text-only promotional content. Providing contrast visuals will catch more eyes while scrolling through their feed.
• Video content. Yes, videos are still the most effective marketing tool on Facebook. 59.3% of the marketers say that videos convert to link clicks better than any other content. While implementing a marketing campaign featuring video, marketers can set the video on mute automatically. The click from the user to unmute the video will be used to transport the user to the blog or a specific landing page. However, marketers can also have the sound activate automatically when they scroll by the video to catch their attention.

Running two different campaigns on Facebook Ads with A/B testing will help marketers determine which marketing approaches work best for the brand’s audience.

Measuring the metrics is essential

Although Facebook Ads provides the data from the campaigns with the click-through rates, marketers use data reporting tools for a deeper understanding of every campaign. Tools like Whatagraph allow marketers to gather all marketing efforts and build a visual report with different Facebook Ads metrics for an accessible 360º campaign overview.

Advertisers can build a report and view data of all clicks and other Facebook Ads campaign metrics: engagement, conversions, and profile visits. The automated reporting and premade report templates also saves time for the advertiser as they don’t need to browse through the different Ads Manager tabs and collect the data themselves.

Bottom line

Facebook is constantly changing — improved algorithms and advertising options are not the only new things that the social media giant rolled out recently. The users of this social media platform are also different. Their behavior, how they interact with brands and react to the promotional content have evolved over the past years.

Although one of the most important benchmarks of Facebook Ads - click-through rate - is decreasing, mostly it’s because of the lack of unique content. Advertisers tend to grab the lucky formula, which the competitors use with almost look-alike campaigns, and users do not resonate with the content they saw before. Apple’s iOS14 update could also be the reason for the shrinking CTRs as Facebook is going through many advertising changes.

Emoji-filled plain text ads are no longer a worthy shot. The marketers have to focus on more unique and attention-grabbing content infused with creativity. Use analytics tool to get a better understanding of what marketing efforts work best when engaging with your brand’s audience.