She shoots! She scores!!!!!

This morning I was contemplating making some adjustments to an ad I’m running on Meta because its click-through rate was a little low compared to what I’m used to seeing.

This ad was for MY business and most ads I place are for clients; CTRs vary widely by industry, so I figured I’d better take a look at the cross-industry averages and see if I could get an estimate of what might be a realistic goal, given the relatively “niche” service that ad is promoting (a twelve-week training course in digital ethnography research methods applied to small business advertising; I genuinely believe the course stands to make an enormous difference for the group of people it’s designed to serve, but there’s no denying it ain’t for errbody).

Different sources report slightly different numbers and the average ACROSS industries is obviously measuring something quite different from the average WITHIN any given industry, but basically: Most industries see an average CTR of around <1.5%, and B2B services like those I am offering in my ad underperform by comparison to, say, retail (no surprise; humans do love their shiny things).

The REASON I AM TELLING YOU THIS is that my li’l baby ad, the one I was thinking about tweaking because it was underperforming relative to the CTRs I’ve been seeing on client accounts????

Its CTR = 5.2%.

That’s it. I win the internet today. Everybody else can go home lol.

(I needed a win; this Monday came with an extra side of MONDAY, yo!)

Now if only the people who CLICK THE LINK will just SIGN UP FOR THE COURSE.

CTR is great. CONVERSIONS … sigh.

(I suspect people are turned off by the amount of work involved … but tbh the only EASY way to improve your org’s social media outreach is to pay somebody like me to do it for you. If you can’t afford that, then the other option is to DIY … and it turns out that YES, actually, what I do, even the very barebones beginner version, is A WHOLE LOT OF WORK.)