Is Your Facebook Ad Copy Doing Its Job? Check These Two Critical (But Lesser Known) Metrics

It might seem counterintuitive, but with Facebook you do NOT want everyone to click on your ad.

That’s because the Facebook algorithm better optimizes when you give it clean data.

Clean data means Facebook has to do less work to sift through noise to figure out whose news feed should be filled with your ads.

Which means you want to make sure each click to your landing page is from someone who’s actually a good fit for doing business with you. 

To make sure our ad copy is doing its job of getting qualified clicks, we want to keep track of two lesser known metrics:

Unique CTR (All) vs. Unique CTR (Link Clicks)

(CTR = Click Through Rate, the percentage of people who are served the ad and click on it).

These two might seem like the same thing, but the distinction here is important.

Unique CTR (All) counts EVERY click on the ad (whether or not they visited your landing page).

Unique CTR (Link Clicks) counts ONLY clicks that go to your website or landing page.

Here’s why this matters:

If you’re writing ad copy the way I recommend — to both ATTRACT your ideal customer and REPEL people who are the wrong fit — then you’re most likely using longer ad copy.

That means someone engaging with your ad is going to click more than once.

Their first click will be on the “Read more” link that gets put below the ~100 character “above the fold” snippet.

Then after they read the rest of the copy, and assuming your ad does a good job of qualifying them, that reader will click again to visit your landing page.

So, because a qualified click is actually TWO clicks on the ad, Unique CTR (All) should be at least DOUBLE Unique CTR (Link Clicks).

And sometimes it might be more than double. Here are two reasons why:

• If your ad gets a lot of likes, comments and shares (these count as additional clicks on the ad)
• If your ad copy does a lot of qualifying. That might mean people are reading it and disqualifying themselves from visiting the landing page. And if that’s how you wrote the ad copy, that’s a good thing!

In these cases, I’d expect the difference to be about 3-4x.

So if you’re using highly targeted ad copy, it might be okay that you have 8% Unique CTR (All) but just 2% Unique CTR (Link Clicks). 

Even though you’re getting less overall clicks, you’ll likely have a much higher opt-in rate — and a higher sales conversion rate.

Plus, as you get conversions and Facebook optimizes over time, the Unique CTR (Link Clicks) is likely to rise just because Facebook has a better handle on who’s right for your offer and gets your ad in front of similarly qualified people.