There’s nothing I like better than a good experiment with Facebook ads.
That’s why today I want to share with you a quick and fun experiment that I recently tried with Facebook video ads.
If you’ve ever run video ads on Facebook, then you probably know that getting people click the play button is a real challenge. Most views come from people who passively see the video on auto-play (can you even call it watching?).
If you want people to click play to turn on the sound, then there needs to be a clear Call To Action telling them to do so.
I’ve been struggling with figuring out the right way to do that CTA for a while, but then I recently saw this post from my friend Massimo from AdEspresso and it gave me an idea.
Did you know that you can use any kind of crazy emoji in your Facebook Ads (and in AdEspresso of course)? Have you tried…
Posted by Massimo Chieruzzi on Monday, February 15, 2016
That’s when I started using Emoji’s in the text of video ads to grab people’s attention to turn on the sound.
Here are the two versions of the video ad that I tested for my client, InVision.
Version A (without CTA)
Version B (with CTA)
You can see that in Version B, I added a simple CTA saying “Tap the video for sound” surrounded by speaker emojis. A very simple difference, but it had a big impact.
The Results
The ad with the CTA had 1.7% of viewers click the play button for sound while the version without the CTA and emoji only had 0.35% of people click the play button. That’s an improvement of 386% for the version with the emoji CTA.
Not only that, but the average overall duration of video that people watch also increased dramatically. For the ad with the CTA, people viewed 27.2% of the video while for the other version they only watched 19.7% of the video. That’s an improvement of 39%.
BOOM!
Your Turn…
This isn’t the only test I’ve run recently with Emojis that has gotten really positive results. There’s just something about these little friends that grabs people’s attention in the newsfeed 👍 👻 💩 👽
Here’s a great resource for you to add Emojis to your Facebook ads.
Go run you own tests and then come back and let me know how they did either in the comments below or via email aaron [at] aaronzakowski.com.