Tom Benattar
February 9, 2018

How we increased our Facebook Ads CTR by 600%

So you want to increase your Facebook Ads CTR and get a better ROAS on your ads? Then this post is for you.

In this article, we'll talk about how we increased our Facebook Ads CTR by 600% with just a single trick.

PixelMe — Content curation + Retargeting ads = 💥

You’ve likely heard about retargeting visitors to your website.

Well, how cool would it be if you could retarget people who clicked on the links you share on social media?

For the past couple of months Tom , Jérémie and I have been working on just that. We call it PixelMe — a url shortener that embeds a retargeting pixel in a URL instead of a website.

Like almost every startup idea, we began by creating a landing page and tried to drive some traffic to see if we could get some signups.

Our first campaign was not really a success with a 0.6% CTR on our Facebook ads … for a cost of €2.40 per click. 🤔 (We had a super specific target audience: People who live in New York, San Francisco, London & Paris between 25 and 40 years old and interested in Buffer or Hootsuite and in Retargeting. Of course the CPC is a lot higher than the average, but the more detailed you are the higher the CPC is).

On a positive note, 100% of people who clicked on our ad signed up to check out PixelMe. This is the metric that led us to create our first MVP. 😃

increase CTR Facebook Ads

After a couple of improvements we were able to increase our CTR to 2% but never more than that!


So let me tell you how we went from 2% to 14% CTR in 14 days using PixelMe 👏

How to increase CTR Facebook Ads with link retargeting

1. Embedding our Facebook Pixel with PixelMe

We started to look for great content about Growth, SaaS Marketing, Ads, Retargeting, etc.

We wanted to find the sort of content that could be super interesting for our Target audience.

With PixelMe, we shortened every link and it automatically embedded our Facebook Pixel in the links we shared 😀

pixelme-dashboard

2. Sharing shorten URL on social Media

The second phase of this experiment consisted of sharing all the content on our social media page. For instance, we used PixelMe’s Twitter profiles to share 114 links during 14 days. We have around 2,000 Followers on this profile

pixelme-posts

A few examples of the content we share on Twitter

3. Looking at our Facebook custom Audience growing

For fun, Jérémie coded a Slack integration to track every time we had a click on a link we shared. 😀 After only 10 mins, this became so distracting that we had to mute the channel 😂

The Slack integration was a fun way to double check Facebook Data 😉During the 14 days, we collected 727 clicks on our links 🚀

slack-channel-clicks

Looking into Facebook Ads Manager, we could see our Pixel Fire audience growing (a Pixel Fire is someone that clicks on a link and has been identified by Facebook). The metrics in Facebook are slightly different from what we counted thanks to our extension.

facebook-dashboard-data

Facebook collected a total number of 163 Pixel Fire and we had been able to find 22% of the people who clicked on our links. Which seems a great ratio at first sight 🖖

4. Launching Facebook Ads on our Custom Audience

After collecting a few people in our Custom Audience, we’ve created two different Ads with which we reached 158 Facebook users 🤙

facebook ads ctr increased

After few days, we collected 24 clicks on our Ads for a total of €16.40. Which is €0.68 per click 💥 (compared to €2.40 in our previous experiment)

links clicks evolution facebook ads

Sum up on how we increased our Facebook Ads CTR

In 14 days, with a very small budget, we’ve been able to increase our Facebook Ads CTR by 600% using content curation and Retargeting Pixel 🚀

We’ve shortened 114 links with our Facebook Pixel inside using PixelMe.
We got 727 clicks on our links after sharing it on PixelMe’s twitter profile (2,000 Followers).
We got a total of 163 Facebook Pixels Fire resulting from those clicks (Which is a 22% identification rate from Facebook).
We created two Facebook ads on our Custom audience with which we** reached 158 users**.
We had 24 clicks on our ads for a total cost of €16.40 (a rate of 0.68€ per click)

So in the end we had a 13.92% CTR on our ads. In comparison, the average CTR on Facebook Ads in the software industry is between 0.2 to 2%.

Although we know our campaign numbers are low and not significant from a statistical point of view, we’ve decided to share our little experiment with you all because we’ve tested this idea multiple time and in each cases we increased the CTR quite significantly. That leads us to think that even on a larger audience we should be able to increase the CTR quite significantly . We’re actually testing this idea on a bigger audience. More on this soon 🎁…

How much is your average Facebook Ads CTR?

Want to give PixelMe a try and boost your ads CTR? 👉 Sign up for a free 7-day PixelMe trial.

If you have any questions? just contact us

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