Sometimes, it’s the little things that make a big difference.

And when it comes to getting someone to click on your Facebook or Instagram Ads, the small details matter.

Why?

Because you have a split-second to stop someone from scrolling past your ad in their feed, and getting them to not only view, but take action and click on the ad.

Simply writing good ad copy and good creative is not enough.

It is essential to strategically upload and format your ads in Ads Manager in such a way that they get the most attention and clicks possible, otherwise all that creativity will go to waste and no one will read or watch what you’ve put together.

Previewing and Editing, The Final Crucial Step

In all the excitement to get our ads out to the world, we often forget this final step, and this is what can make or break an ad that has strong potential.

At Digitalina, once we’ve set up our ad at the ‘ad level’, we do not immediately hit ‘Publish’.

This is the point in time where we take a step back, preview the ad and ask ourselves, ‘will this grab attention enough attention to stop someone mid-scroll?’

Bottom line: We make an intentional effort to preview and edit the ad.

To illustrate just how important this step is, let’s take a look at an ad that we ran for a Digitalina Facebook Ads Webinar, to get more leads for our course launch.

The first screenshot shows what the ad looked like as soon as it was uploaded, simply using Facebook Ads Manager’s default settings. The second screenshot is what the ad looked like when we took the time to preview the ad and make some adjustments to make it more engaging.

Before

After

Which one would you click on?

Keep reading to learn the five important steps we took at the previewing stage, to turn the ad around.

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The 5 Tiny Tweaks That Make All The Difference

As mentioned above, these two screenshots both use the exact same ad creative, with the same headline, and same ad copy. Yet they look extremely different, and one is far more attractive than the other.

Here are the 5 Tiny Tweaks we made to drastically improve engagement:

Maximize Real Estate in First 3 Lines

Did that puppy image get your attention?

Good, so should the first three lines of your ad copy.

When you’re running a Facebook ad, keep in mind that all you have is space for three short lines of text to hook a reader and get them to click ‘see more’, to read the rest of your ad.

So it makes sense to pay extra attention to those first three lines and make them hard-hitting, powerful, engaging and succinct. It also makes sense to actually utilize the entire space.

What I’ve seen time and again is ads that just show one short sentence, followed by endless space.

If it were a blog post, yes I would implore and encourage the use of separating out sentences with plenty of while space and separation.

But for an ad where 3 lines is all you have, please utilize all those 3 lines! If it means deleting the empty space following your sentence and moving up the next sentence so that it shows up the in text preview, please do it to give your ad more of a fighting chance.

Use Emojis

Emojis help grab attention, period. We’ve split test enough ads over the last few years to learn that when we use emojis in the headline and in the first 3 lines of primary text, the ad has a higher clickthrough rate.

Keep in mind, emojis work for every industry. You don’t have to use a smiley face or hearts, if it doesn’t suit your brand tone. if you’re in the financial services sector in the UAE, perhaps you just want to add the UAE flag as an emoji. If you’re selling real estate, use an emoji of a house or a building. If you’re selling an online program, use an emoji of a laptop or an iPhone. There’s a very wide range of emojis available to suit every type of business, so I highly encourage you to start exploring!

Select The Right Video Thumbnail

Picture this: you spent $100,000 on an amazing video ad that shows a skydiver jumping off the top of the Burj Khalifa while wearing your product. You upload this ad to Facebook.

On the other side of that Facebook ad, a potential customer scrolls through their feed and for a split-second sees the thumbnail of your video ad. It shows a few blurry clouds. So they shrug and scroll past your ad.

OR, let’s repeat that exercise except this time your potential customer sees a thumbnail of your video ad, and it’s showing the skydiver just about to jump off the Burj Khalifa. Intrigued, they click on your ad.

A video thumbnail can make or break your ad, so you want to be careful to select a thumbnail that creates the highest level of curiosity, intrigue, and the desire to watch the video. Do not let Facebook Ads Manager automatically select a thumbnail, use the manual thumbnail option and preview and test out a few options. I typically test out 3 options at the minimum in preview mode, to see what feels most engaging and works best with the ad copy and headline.

Use The Right Call To Action Button

You know what people hate? Commitment.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like seeing buttons that tell me to ‘sign up or ‘subscribe now’ or ‘register now’ when I’ve only just seen the ad for a split second. Over the years, we’ve noticed that using more high commitment language increases resistance and lowers out clickthrough rate, while using softer call to actions such as ‘learn more’, ‘watch more’ or ‘get offer’ receive more clicks.

Skip The Subhead, Maximize The Headline

When setting up a Facebook or Instagram ad, you’ll see that there’s space to add a headline, and then a ‘description’ underneath which is more of a subhead.

If you want both to show up on your mobile feed, your headline has to be short enough to allow the subhead to also show up.

That being said, the subhead font is pretty small.

And if we want to get the maximum amount of attention in a split-second, it makes sense to skip the subhead and put as much text into the headline option, which has much bigger font, stands out, and is easier to read.

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The Bottom Line

If you’re going to spend all this time on writing good ad copy and designing the perfect creative, put in that extra 15-30 minutes to make the small tweaks above that gives your ad the best possible chance of success. Starting today, put yourself in the customer’s shoes and start assessing every ad you come across and ask yourself what small tweaks you would make to make it stand out further.