Using This Color in Your Facebook Ads Could Increase Your Click-Through Rate On a super-saturated advertising platform, use every last advantage you can.
By Neil Gordon Edited by Jessica Thomas
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
If you advertise on Facebook, you might sense that the marketplace is becoming more crowded, prospective buyers are warier of offers, and it's generally more difficult to get people to pay attention. This is for good reason.
I remember when I first started advertising on Facebook in the mid-2010s. I paid between $2 and $5 per lead. Some of my clients paid just under $1 per lead. But according to digital marketing data analytics platform WordStream, the average cost per lead in 2022 is $19.68.
There are of course many tools available to help marketers to optimize their Facebook ads, including retargeting strategies, lookalike audiences and simply understanding the idea that everything can be tested for very little money. Not only that, but advertising is only as effective as the offers we send people.
And yet with all of these more nuanced and even sophisticated tools available to Facebook marketers, there is one teeny tiny thing that actually can give you a slight edge.
And that's the strategic use of color — the color red to be specific.
Related: 10 Facebook Ad Campaigns That Will Maximize Your ROI
Seeing red
Going as far back as 2017, I began strategically using the color red in my Facebook ad images. But why? My theory was that people are drawn to one thing above all else when they open Facebook: notifications.
Notifications tell us that someone has mentioned us, tagged us or interacted with our posts. I imagined that other people, like me, would unconsciously seek out notifications because of the promise of connection. In the end, this is what we're all seeking when we log in to social media.
It's social media, after all.
I began putting accents of red in my ad images. I was advertising to public speakers, so I constructed big red letters out of poster board that spelled the word "keynote" and held them up in front of me.
Now, to be clear, I do mean red accents. I don't just make the ad image a big red square with a few words on it or place myself in front of a red Lamborghini. I make no more than about a third of the image red. This is meant to emulate the experience of our eye being drawn to the notifications, which are likewise a small bit of red.
The result? Back then I ran ads for a long-form webinar to get people on the phone and sell them into my programs. Although other people I knew using Facebook ads to achieve something similar would spend $100 or $150 in ads to get one person on the phone, I spent about $30 or $35. The general rule of thumb for determining whether a Facebook ad is effective or not is if it gets at least a 1% click-through rate. My ads usually got at least 2 or 3%.
These kinds of results have continued to happen, including getting upwards of 3 or 5% click-through rates for a quiz funnel ad even as recently as this year. And nearly all of the images in these ads had a small splash of red.
To prove a bit more empirically that a little red can make a difference, I created an ad with a cartoon I drew of a public speaker looking sad because the dozens of people in the audience are all on their phones. In one ad, she's wearing a blue outfit. In the other ad, she's wearing red.
The blue version got a click-through rate of 2.57% and a cost-per-click of $1.21.
But the red version?
It got a click-through rate of 4.72% and a cost-per-click of $.86.
Now, a necessary disclaimer here was that it was just a small split test. I spent a bit more than $40 and received just under 1,200 impressions for that investment. If I spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on this campaign, it would likely even out a bit more.
Still, those are pretty alarming results for such a small change.
Related: What I Learned After Posting on 10 Platforms Every Day for 30 Days
Three ways to incorporate red into your ad images
There's no limit to the number of ways to incorporate this idea into your images. Here are just a few examples.
1. The color splash effect
You likely remember Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film Schindler's List. The entire film is presented in black and white with two exceptions: the modern-day epilogue and the little girl wearing the red coat. The latter is a gut-wrenching example of the color splash effect, in which a specific part of an image is shown in color while everything else is in black and white.
One way to accent your image with red is to actually accent it with red — have the entire image in black and white except for one small part of it featured in color.
2. Illustration
As I mentioned above, my split test featured a cartoon image of a speaker in front of an audience. The speaker who wore red in the winning image took up a very small part of it.
Not only that, but in the best ad of the quiz funnel campaign I mentioned, I featured cartoon images of five animals that represented the five results participants could get. Each animal was labeled with a small red square numbered one through five — just like a notification.
If you're looking for a budget-friendly way to use illustrations in your ads, simply go to a site like Fiverr.com, and you should be able to find someone who can draw you something basic for a reasonable fee.
3. Wear red
The easiest way to incorporate red into your ads is to simply wear it. When I feature my likeness in an ad image, it's of me wearing a red button-up shirt. As of this writing, both my Facebook business page image as well as my profile pic for BIZ Experiences feature me wearing this shirt.
Disruption advertising
Facebook advertising is a disruption model, meaning that its effectiveness is based on how well the marketer can arrest their audience's attention while they scroll through their feed. Using an attention-grabbing headline, a compelling opening sentence for the primary text and excellent targeting are all ways to make your ads more arresting.
But with so much competition out there, any edge you can get will go a long way towards getting the results you seek. This is why if you're looking to maximize your Facebook ads, it might be worth it for you to experiment with accents of red. At $19.68 per lead, a little experimentation is worth your time.
Related: Free On-Demand Webinar: How to Run Facebook Ads on a Budget
