One of the most common questions my clients ask me is, what is a good click-through rate for Facebook ads?
While the click-through rate of your Facebook ad is a useful metric to gauge how engaged people are with your advert, the metric on its own doesn’t provide much actionable input.
For example, you could have a click-through rate of 75% over 10,000 impressions, but if the advert receives 0 conversions, what good is a 75% click-through rate if you generated $0 in sales?
On the flip side, if your Facebook ad click-through rate is 1% over 10,000 impressions, but this time your ad results in 27 conversions and $75,000 in sales, then that’s fantastic!
In this article, I’ll explain how you should use click-through rates to improve your Facebook ad strategy.
What click-through rates mean on Facebook
Facebook calculates an ad’s click-through rate by counting the amount of times your advert has been clicked through to your website by the amount of time it’s been viewed.
The click-through rate should not be confused with link clicks or clicks, which also take into account someone clicking the like, share, or comment section of your ad.
How to think about click-through rates
Click-through rates become important when you have a successful campaign and want to lower your cost per action.
There’s very little point in focusing on your campaign’s click-through rate if it’s not turning a profit. In this case, you most likely have a much bigger problem like a bad offer, poor targeting, or bad creatives.
Once the campaign validates itself as being successful or having the potential to drive sales, only then should you start looking at click-through rates and how to improve it to lower your CPA.
An AdEspresso study found that the greater the click-through rate percentage, the lower the cost per click and the higher the relevance score.
The click-through rate is one metric used to determine the relevance of your ads. Optimizing your creatives and targeting can help you increase your click-through rate, which ultimately will reduce your cost per action.
However, if your goal is to reach thousands of new users or to increase brand awareness, the click-through rate on your ads are of less importance because your goal is to generate awareness, not clicks.
Click-through rates have greater importance when you want to drive action.
Tips to increase your click-through rate on Facebook
There are a number of ways to increase your click-through rate on Facebook. They include:
Better creatives – The biggest factor to increasing click-through rates is the ad creative and copy you use. The more engaging and relevant your ad is to your target audience, the more likely they are to click.
Limiting frequency – Click-through rates are measured by the number of clicks x impressions. If your ads have a high frequency of repeat impressions, then that will lower your click-through rate.
Keep an eye on frequency when serving ads to larger audiences. For smaller custom audiences of less than 10,000, I would not worry about it too much.
Refine targeting – Cutting the fat off your audiences will also help increase your click-through rate. For example, not everyone in your lookalike audience or custom audience is interested in your product or service.
For lookalike/cold audiences, you can refine by interest behavior; for custom audiences, you can exclude people who are under a certain age or demographic.
You should only use these tips when you have a winning campaign and want to optimize it.
How do you think about click-through rates on Facebook?
The click-through rate metric on Facebook has it uses in certain situations, but don’t make the mistake of thinking a 0.5% click-through rate is bad if the campaign is driving you sales at a profitable ROI.
The main metric you should focus on for any advert is your intended goal (sale, opt-ins, page views), not a vanity metric like click-through rates, link clicks, or the cost per click.
Click-through rates should be used as a signpost of how users are interacting with your ad and a benchmark figure when you try to optimize your campaign to lower your CPA. For example, if your ad is generating good sales and has a click-through rate of 1%, then when you start optimization you have a 1% benchmark to work with that you want to improve.
How do you view click-through rates when managing your Facebook campaigns?