If you use social media for business, then surely one of your objectives is improving your campaigns and delivering relevant content/offers to your audience.
Your social media click through rate (CTR) helps you determine whether your message lands with your potential audience or not. If your CTR is low it could either indicate that you need to improve your message or that you’re not targeting the right audience.
In any case, monitoring your CTR will help you create more impactful campaigns and optimize your marketing budget.
Below we’ll share a couple of tips to improve your social media CTR.
But first, let’s quickly look at the CTR formula.
HOW CAN CTR BE CALCULATED?
The Click Through Rate is very simple to calculate – it shows how many people clicked on your ad, divided by the number of people that saw it.
CTR = (clicks/impressions) x 100
So, if your ad has been served to 1000 people and 4 people clicked on it, your CTR would be 0,4%.
Easy, right?
What’s not so easy is defining “good CTR” vs. “bad CTR”.
WHAT IS A GOOD CTR?
You may be wondering: “What makes CTR good or bad”? Here’s why it’s very hard to give a “correct” answer to this question.
The average CTR depends on both the industry you’re targeting and the platform you use to serve your ads.
So, if you’re a marketing consultant and you use social media to promote your services, your CTR will be very different compared to a SaaS or B2B company.
The same goes for the platform you use to serve your ads. The average CTR on Facebook is not the same as the average CTR on Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram and other platforms.
However, to make things simpler and to give you some idea of what’s a good/bad CTR, we’ve created a simple graph that shows the average CTR across all industries on different platforms.
In recent years, as more and more companies started using social media for business, click-through rates have been declining across all platforms.
Source: Statista
Social media advertising clickthrough rate (CTR) worldwide from 2nd quarter 2018 to 2nd quarter 2020
How do you respond?
Well, you can either start praying to the social media gods OR implement some of the tactics we share in this blog...
… which takes us to our next section.
4 Tactics to Improve Your Social Media CTR
Is your CTR low or declining? Here are a couple of things you can try to create scroll-stopping ads that get noticed and clicked.
1. Improve your copy
Is your ad copy compelling enough? Do you use your ads to show people how you can solve their problems? Or, is your ad a long list of product features that nobody wants to read?
Is your offer clear? Or maybe you’re trying to sound like an expert and use confusing words that divert your audience’s attention from your offer?
Here’s a short checklist you can use when writing your ad copy:
- Does your headline speak to your audience’s intent?
If people are looking for online piano lessons, for example, “Looking for piano lessons?” is a way less relevant and compelling heading than “Learn piano at home!”
- Is your ad copy concrete?
To make your copy concrete, avoid making empty claims or using industry buzzwords.
“Cutting-edge”, “No.1”, “Award-winning” and similar claims mean nothing to whoever is consuming your content. Instead use concrete claims to drive your message home.
Instead of saying “Award-winning online piano lessons”, you can say: “80% of our students can play the chorus of Fur Elise after one month.” You get the point.
- Do you address your target audience directly?
A good question to ask is: Does your ideal customer know they’re your ideal customer?
Make your social media posts more noticeable and actionable by addressing your audience directly. You can do this by:
- Ask: “Want to learn how to play the piano, but don’t know where to start?”
- Use the “If___ then___” formula: “If you want to learn to play the piano from the comfort of your own home, then we have something for you.”
- Address them directly: “Music lovers! Want to learn how to play your favourite songs on the piano?”
- Are you selling features or benefits?
Remember, people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems.
That’s why it’s important to avoid advertising your products’ features; what you should be talking about are benefits. Even better, tell them about the outcomes.
2. Review your CTA
Your ads serve a purpose and you need to make sure that this purpose is clear to your audience.
Review your CTA to make sure that it is clear what you want your audience to do next:
Do you want them to sign up for a newsletter? Download a piece of content? Sign up to a free webinar? Schedule a demo?
Telling your audience exactly what you’d like them to do will help improve your CTR.
For example, Lyft makes it really clear what they want their audience to do: download the app and use the discount code.
A bad example?
The hero on Verve Coffee’s old page showcased their Adventure Pack (that’s all we know about it – the name) and a vague CTA: Join the Adventure.
Thankfully, Verve Coffee listened to the comments online (they were included in several “Bad CTA Examples” lists) and changed their page.
Ahh, the sweet, sweet feeling of seeing a clear CTA!
3. Refresh your visuals
Another important factor to create ads that convert consists of the visual elements you use to reinforce your message.
Pick a high-quality photo that’s relevant to the community you’re targeting and matches your message.
The great thing about social media platforms is that they constantly innovate. Sure, there’s a lot of noise, but not all businesses (in fact, very few!) use all the options that social media offers.
Test out different visuals and try some of the many visual ad options social media platforms offer. Experiment with carousel ads, canvas ads, display ads, and dynamic ads. If you’d like to take it a step further, you can always try with video ads.A platform that can help you create all these types of ads is Creatopy.
4. Change the keywords
If you did all of the above and your CTR is still low, it might be time to review – and change – your keywords.
Keyword research is one of the key steps in creating content that has a direct impact on your business results. The reason? The right keywords can help you reach more qualified leads.
There are a number of social media monitoring tools that can help you get deeper insight into your campaigns. As well as, giving you data on how to drive more positive conversations.
Keyhole, for example, can help you track your keywords so you understand their value and keep an eye on related conversations happening online. That way you’ll know if your keywords of choice are worth bidding on or not.
Another thing you can do is track trends and see which keywords are gaining traction, so you can join the conversation as it’s starting.
To complement the tips above, here’s Facebook’s official Ad Copy Cheat Sheet – you can use it as a checklist when creating ads across all channels – not just Facebook.
BONUS TIP: Understand your audience
Using social media to support business goals comes down to this: you need to know your audience.
To know what your audience wants, make sure you learn:
- What topics they’re interested in
- What they think about your brand
- What kinds of conversations are happening online
With this knowledge, you’ll be in a much better position to pick the right segment and create more relevant content that gets seen. Also your posts or ads will be remembered and clicked on.
Finally, remember you don’t use social media and create content just for clicks, you do it to connect with the right people, build a community and start conversions. Don’t allow vanity metrics to steer you off course.
That said, tracking your CTR can show you which parts of your funnel aren’t working:
If the CTR is low, work on improving the ad or content. If your CTR is high but conversions are low, then your offer doesn’t land with your audience (because you’re targeting the wrong audience.) Also, it could mean that your landing page could use some improvement.
Either way, social media marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The best way to use social media for business is to take into account the entire picture and optimize your entire funnel from top to bottom.