By Vernon Johnson, Paid Social Account Manager
One of the optimization campaign options for ads on Facebook is ‘link clicks.’ Facebook describes a link click/traffic campaign this way:
“Once you’ve decided on the aim of your Facebook clicks to website ad, you’ll want to select images, write a headline and description and choose a call-to-action button. Your call-to-action button should correspond to the action you want people to take. For example, you would use the Shop Now button to send customers directly to your online store or a Learn More button to give people information.”
Although this type of campaign is not used much in our industry, it’s still considered one of the best options for blog posts, articles, and for use when you don’t have a Facebook Pixel in place on your website. It may seem like the only option in driving traffic to websites, as well. However, there is another option for sending quality traffic: a conversion campaign.
This idea may not make much sense at first. Obviously, conversion campaigns are for direct response-related focuses and goals, right? Conversion campaigns are focused on driving users towards specific conversions events. So, how do you drive traffic with a conversion campaign? Instead of driving towards a down-funnel event, optimize towards pageviews.
Pageview is the default conversion event for the Facebook Pixel. The Pixel fires when your website loads, and it can determine how long someone stays on the page.
In a link clicks campaign, Facebook optimizes towards people who would be likely to click. In a conversion campaign, Facebook optimizes towards people who are likely to land on the page. A minor difference, right? Well, in a test with a client, tweaking our campaign to be a conversion pageview campaign resulted in a 1.32% percentage point increase in CTR (an increase of 4335%!), resulting in a 86% reduction in CPC and 2200% increase in clicks.
Some caveats: There were a few differences between these two campaign objectives, so there were other variables besides the campaign objective. The two campaigns had roughly a 50/50 split between ad sets, meaning 50% of their ads were identical across both campaign types, while the other 50% of their ads were different.
To help give a sense of the impact it made on traffic, you can see the change in clicks near the beginning of September in the chart below.
And the effect CTR had on CPC in the chart below.
As you can see, we saw amazing results. Because conversion campaigns require the Facebook Pixel to be installed while a normal link clicks traffic campaign does not, the conversion page does require slightly more initial work. However, once the Pixel is installed, we strongly recommend trying out pageview conversion campaigns for your link click initiatives. Facebook’s conversion optimization is one of the best assets Facebook provides, and utilizing it for pageviews has proved to drive much better results for us than a traffic campaign.
