The Best CTA Button for Your Facebook Ads
07Feb

The Best CTA Button for Your Facebook Ads

Within the current digital landscape there is an insane amount of advertisements published every day, to put it flatly. In fact, marketing experts estimate that Americans see about 4,000-10,000 ads every single day. So how can your dealership get your advertisements through the noise, particularly on Facebook?

As a company that strongly encourages our dealers to be on social media and be actively advertising on it, we were excited to see a recent article from Hootsuite’s AdEspresso that discussed an experiment they conducted regarding Call to Action (CTA) buttons within a Facebook advertisement.

What’s a CTA button?

A Call to Action button is one that takes an advertisement one step further by encouraging the user to move from just viewing the ad to actually clicking on it and taking action. A CTA on an ad is a way to help increase conversions by getting viewers to click on your ad and follow the path to action you’ve mapped out for them. 

Here’s an example of a CTA on one of our previous ads:

CWS Ad

On Facebook’s ads they have a range of CTA button options to ultimately engage and deepen the relationship with your customer. They have 20 different button options ranging from a generic “Learn More” to more specific ones like “Shop Now.”

AdEspresso’s Experiment

In order to better determine which CTA buttons are highest converting, AdEspresso decided to run an experiment to test four different CTAs on their Facebook advertisements. Their goal was to address the following three questions:

  • Do CTA buttons help or hinder ad performance?
  • How much difference does the selected option make?
  • Should we go for soft options, such as “Learn More,” or something more direct like “Download?”

The four CTAs that were tested included having no button, “Learn More,” “Download,” and “Sign Up.” The content of the ad itself was the same and $250 was spent on each ad over the course of 11 days totaling a campaign budget of $1,000. They had a bid strategy of the lowest cost without cap, a mobile newsfeed placement and an audience of U.S. 1% lookalike based on seed audience of leads. Current leads and website visitors in the last 180 days were excluded to prevent subscribers from seeing the ads. Once the ad was clicked by the visitor, he/she was brought to a landing page.

AdEspresso created a hypothesis of which CTA would do the best by polling their members, where the “Learn More” button came out slightly ahead of “Download.”

Experiment Results

AdEspresso didn’t just base the ad’s success on how many clicks it garnered, but also the cost of the click. Here’s what they found:

  • No Button: 20 leads at $12.50 each
  • Sign Up: 26 Leads at $9.62 each
  • Learn More: 36 leads at $9.94 each
  • Download: 49 leads at $5.10 each
What Does This Mean?

There were five key learnings AdEspresso noted from this experiment, which included:

  1. The choice to not have a CTA button, increases the cost per lead by nearly 2.5 times. Additionally, having no button at all could look like a standard page post to viewers, therefore it could deter them from taking action.
  2. In relation to the above, any choice of a CTA button would have worked better than not having one.
  3. The “Download” CTA button likely provided viewers with enough information to decide to click. The word “download” probably indicated they just needed to click through for a quick and easy download.
  4. “Learn More” may not have been as popular as “Download” because it could have implied the viewer would have to read more, which is time-consuming
  5. “Sign Up” could have caused viewers to think they’d have to enter their credit card details or provide personal information in a complicated form.
In Conclusion…

While “Download” was the winner for this experiment, the CTA definitely needs to be pertinent to the content within your ad. If there’s not a piece to download, it wouldn’t make sense for your ad. Ultimately, consider playing around with your Facebook advertisement’s CTA buttons to see which one works best for your dealership!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelsey Fritz
Kelsey is the Marketing Coordinator at Commercial Web Services where she monitors the latest marketing advancements to better educate dealers on marketing trends that can further their business goals.

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