Last week my client had higher lead costs than we wanted. She was making sales, but we knew she could make more sales with more leads. It can be tough to figure out what to fix when you have a problem with your ads not working. So we did what a good ads manager always does: we dove into the numbers to figure it out. We looked at 3 numbers to decide what to fix:
LINK Click Through Rate
Conversion Rate
CPM (Cost Per Mille)
Her conversion rate (the number of people who clicked on the ad compared to the number of people who actually signed up) was above benchmark. (Over 20%). That meant that the landing page was working pretty well. People liked what they were reading and they liked the offer she was presenting.
The CPM (Cost to serve ads to her audience) was typical for what we see in her niche. We knew this from previous campaigns we’d run together. This meant we were probably showing ads to the right people.
The LINK Click Through Rate* was the problem. This compares the number of people who see the ad to the number of people who click on the link to see our offer. Benchmark is 1.0%. Hers was .7%. That meant we needed to fix the creative. Our images and words were not compelling enough to get people to click. The image that was working best was a text-only image. So we worked to optimize our top-performing image by making the updates below.
(*LINK click rate (Link CTR) is different from regular click rate (CTR) Link click rate is the one we watch. )
We tested 3 things to try to get her click rates up:
1. Images with bigger, bolder, easier-to-read text. We used the same words. We just made the text bigger and more clear.
2. Higher color contrast on the image. The words were blending into the background a little bit. We changed the words to a bright white and chose a bright highlight color for the images so that they stood out against the black background. Our hope was that people would read the words as they were scrolling without even thinking about it.
3. A different “hook” on the image: We pulled out a different key benefit from the program we were offering and put words to describe that different benefit on the images.
Can you guess which change had the biggest impact? Number 3. Calling out a different benefit of the program helped us get more clicks on our images. So now we’re going to iterate on that for a little bit and see if we can get an even better response.
Looking at the data and then making small incremental changes is how you improve an ad campaign. Check your LINK CTRs. If you don’t like what you see, try some different images. (Text-only images are still working well for my clients.)