How to Boost Conversions for Your Facebook Ad Creative

The click through rate for Facebook advertising continues to increase, making Facebook one of the largest and most important online advertising platforms for marketers.

While advertising with the world’s largest social media network can potentially generate conversions, brand awareness and recognition, engagement and even sales, pulling off Facebook ads to see real conversions takes quite a lot of trial and error.

In a recent compilation of display adverts’ click through rates, David Chaffey of Smart Insights found that across all types of placements and ad formats CTR for online ads globally is just 0.17%. Chaffey posits that, “this is less than 2 clicks per 1000 impressions showing the difficulty of driving response from online ads.”

The good news is that it is entirely possible to see significant results with online advertising and especially with Facebook ads, by optimising your ad creative for better conversions.

What Are The Key Characteristics Of A Great Facebook Ad?

Successful Facebook Ads have these common characteristics:

• They address key pain points and provide timely solutions
• They have short and captivating headlines
• They have compelling visuals to convey the ad message
• They demonstrate social approval
• They make it easy for users to take very specific action

Here is how to Optimise Your Facebook Ad Creative for Conversions:

Design Campaigns for Specific Audiences

The most compelling visuals and copy may not yield optimal conversion if the ad itself is not targeted to the right audience.

Facebook offers advanced audience targeting to ensure that ads are shown to the most relevant people to increase chances of conversion.

If you are not spending more time zeroing in on your target audience, you will certainly waste a sizeable chunk of your advertising budget, as you will not see any significant results with the ads.

So, your first step in optimising ads for Facebook is understanding the needs of your audience and the kinds of solutions they are looking for. This way  it becomes much easier to generate engagement with your ad who are interested in your ad content.

Make Your Offer Visible, Clear and Meaningful

With over 4 million advertisers competing for eyeballs on Facebook, getting your point across in the most compelling and visible way is essential.

A great way to approach this is to present a problem to your target user, show them why this is a problem and provide a solution.

To accomplish these three crucial tasks, you need to optimise three other elements; these include the headline, ad copy and the call to action.

The headline is perhaps the most important of these three aspects. The message you convey here will determine whether users will proceed to engage with your ad and move further down the sales funnel.

Headlines that convert offer a precise and relevant value proposition, grab attention, and promise a solution.

Get Smart with Images

After targeting the right audience, images are arguably the most important elements of a Facebook ad.

You want to use images in a way that they tell the story without you needing to use more words to do so.

Authentic visuals with high realism have been found to draw the greatest engagement than carefully curated images. People like to see other ordinary people like them using a product and being in relatable environments.

Given that the brain is attracted to uncommon patterns, backgrounds and elements, visual contrast can be a simple but effective way to make ads more visible in increasingly crowded Newsfeeds.

What’s more important is that your visuals need to be consistent throughout each marketing campaign.

While you do not need to use the same images throughout the funnel, visuals need to convey a unitary message in each campaign.

If the image you use for your Facebook ad placement for mobile is drastically different from what users see when they arrive at your landing page via desktop, what would their likely reaction be?

Such visual inconsistency drastically reduces the chances of conversion.

Optimise for Mobile

Facebook offers three options for ad placements: Newsfeed for desktop conversions, right hand column ads for remarketing and mobile for brand awareness.

Unsurprisingly, mobile dominates the Facebook advertising platform.  Facebook reported recently that up to 84% of its revenue growth can be attributed to mobile advertising sales.

According to Facebook CFO Sheryl Sandberg, “The small screen is now big…this is now a really important place to reach customers, both because this is where customers are, but also because this is an exciting creative canvas.”

There is no denying the power of mobile.

You can do a couple of things to optimise mobile conversions for your Facebook ads:

• Use Messenger destination ads to direct users to a chat box where you can engage in a one on one conversation.
• Utilise Facebook lead ads so that users do not have to go through the lengthy process of filling an opt-in form. Facebook automatically populates users’ data, therefore allowing you to easily collect crucial lead information.
• Use Facebook canvas ads to create in depth ads for mobile users. Canvas ads allow you to use videos, images, fast-loading landing pages and to include CTA buttons. With these ads, you can really engage mobile users in a way a website cannot.
• Finally, be sure to dedicate some of your campaigns specifically to mobile users. When creating audiences on Facebook be sure to include mobile users under the Custom Combination option.

With up to 1.86 billion monthly active users, Facebook offers significant opportunities for advertisers to reach a historically wide audience. Taking the time to optimise your Facebook ads sets you one step ahead of competitors and enables you to get more ROI in terms of realising meaningful conversions.