Understanding Facebook CTR?

We started a brand campaign in Meta a few years back to drive brand consideration.

The campaign had an open targeting and was optimized for clicks.

It drove a lot of traffic to the site.

However, the traffic had a high bounce rate and fewer retained sessions.

The creative was very good and had a great CTR.

We found a fascinating insight when analyzing what went wrong with the campaign.

In Meta, you get what you optimize for.

If you optimize for clicks, the campaign targets so-called clickers, and you get many clicks.

The same happens when you optimize for add-to-cart. You get "Explorers".

However, it was interesting to know who those clickers and explorers are.

In the campaign mentioned above,

- 57% of the spends and most of the clicks were from people over 55 and

- 39% of the clicks(overall) were from people who are 65+

I have seen this phenomenon repeatedly.

The elderly audience tends to interact with the ads more than the other age groups.

But they bounce off the website often.

Hence, in Meta, they form a significant chunk of Clickers.

Conversely, the younger audience, under 21 years of age, makes up the majority of the explorers.

I have seen this in a few campaigns, too.

You can also check if you have an active Meta campaign where you recently changed the optimization from the bottom funnel to the mid-funnel event.

The campaign's age group would have skewed towards the lower side.

In parallel, your add-to-cart-to-purchase conversion would have gone down.