Why Just One Letter Can Make ALL the Difference

They say there’s no special formula for making your ads convert, but there are small changes you can make to get on the right track.

As part of Optimised Digital’s Scale Up Series, we looked at this Facebook ad for a series of businesswomen awards based around the Mornington Peninsula and Frankston.

As always, while this ad is already doing a lot of good things, we took a look at what they could potentially be doing better to improve conversions, as a guide for how you can optimise your own ad performance going forward.

Here are our key takeaways.  

Stick to one audience per creative

How much difference can one letter really make?

In the case of your ad copy or creative, the answer is “a lot”!

In this instance, a typo at the top of the creative of “women” rather than “woman” doesn’t just create a grammatical error, but also adds to the confusion around who the real audience for the ad is.

"When you have so few moments to capture the attention of your audience, you want to be as clear as possible on who that audience actually is."

Here's what this ad could be doing differently:

1. Choose a specific audience – are they trying to target women who might enter the awards themselves? Or people who might know a woman in business to nominate?
2. Keep the same audience across both the copy and ad creative.
3. Make the CTA wording clearer – are people applying for the award, or nominating someone else? Choose one and stick to it.

Being clear on the goal for your ad will not just help conversions, but your audience as well. If you do want to target two different audiences, make sure you test with different creatives or copy in a separate Ad Set.

Split your ad testing properly

We love seeing businesses experiment with different copy, creatives, and variations on their ads, because if there’s one thing we can advocate for it’s “test, test, test!”

This ad mixed things up with different types of creatives (changing the wording and imagery), as well as different formats for varying placements (Stories, Videos, Feed, etc). The one area they could improve on is how they tested.

"Testing is one of the most important elements of running ads, so take a look at how you can optimise your tests with the right setup to get the best return on your ad results."

If you need a refresher, the Campaign is where you set your Objective, your Ad Set is where you set your Audience, and your Ads are where you choose your Creative and Copy.

When testing ads, make sure you:

1. Set up with different Ads – if you change creative or copy in the same Ad setup, you’re never going to know which ad is performing better. Make sure you set these up as different Ads in Facebook so you can test and optimise what is performing best.
2. Change audiences in your Ad Set – similarly, your audience should be set in your Ad Set, rather than trying to use the same audience in the same Ad. In this case, an Ad Set could test between applicants and nominees.
3. Only change one thing at a time – when testing creative edits, it’s important not to change everything at once for different ads, or you’ll never know which feature was working. Instead, test the same copy with a different creative, or vice versa.

Make your hook as clear as possible

In an ad example like this, where your ad is promoting “A+B=C” (or woman + business = apply for awards), you want to make sure your purpose is as clear as possible.

With the confusion on the audience, the hook and purpose of this ad creative becomes unclear. Again, do they want women in business to nominate themselves? Or are the awards open for others to nominate a woman in business?

"We all know that competition for social attention is high, so by making your hook as clear as possible with value and an immediate understanding of the purpose of your ad, your audience will know exactly what you want from them, and whether your business is relevant to their needs."

Making the call-to-action as clear as possible with Nominate or Apply Now would clear up the purpose of the ad, and what you want the audience to do.

To make sure your hook is as clear as possible, you can:

1. Make the value clear – you have just a few seconds to grab the attention of your audience with a Facebook ad. Create value and an immediate understanding of what you want in the first line of your ad copy.
2. Make the CTA clear – Learn More, Message, Apply Now etc. Your button and call-to-action at the bottom of the ad will help streamline the purpose of the ad.
3. Test long-form copy – if you want to create more engagement with your ad, test both long and short-form copy in different Ads. In this case, long-form copy could help tell the story behind the awards and build some more rapport and engagement.

Be consistent and make things easy to use

Ad optimisation doesn’t stop once you’ve finished setting up your ad in Facebook. It continues onto where you are directing your ideal customers; in this case, the landing page.

While this landing page does a lot right, we often see massive improvements to conversions by having a CTA above the fold. In this instance, it would be to apply for the awards to make it clear they are advocating for applications, or at least directing down to the applications step.

This is one of the reasons you want your ad messaging to be consistent with your landing page messaging, to make it as clear as possible for your customers to find what they need and convert, rather than clicking out of the page.

"After all, if you’re putting your hard-earned dollars behind an ad, you want your landing page to be spot on."

 

Here are a few ways this landing page could be more consistent and easier-to-use:

1. Keep messaging consistent – this could even come down to the use of one word, such as the phrase ‘checkout’ after mentioning that the awards are free to apply for.
2. CTA above the fold – this can improve conversions massively by making it as easy as possible for them to see what they need to do.
3. Make applications even easier – if you have a lot of options for actions (like this page), it can be easier to get people to take a single action before breaking them down into one step. For instance, rather than having people apply for individual categories from the home page, it could be easier for them to click on an ‘apply now’ button and then choose their category.
4. Include FAQs – it’s easy for us to read between the lines when we live and breathe our own businesses and goals. Where possible, have a third party read your landing page. If they are left with any questions about the process or what you are promoting, consider including an FAQ section to answer the questions your customers might have as well.

At the end of the day, optimising any ad and landing page is going to come down to testing and trying what works for your business and your audience, but we hope this review and suggestions can help you next time you’re planning on running ads.