Want to drive sales, increase loyalty signups, or encourage more mobile app downloads? Facebook ads are a powerful way to reach your customers because most of them use the Facebook platform.

The challenge is to offer them a unique, compelling reason to click on your promoted story instead of scrolling past it.

This article comes packed with ideas to increase your Facebook ad click-through rate or the number of times your content is clicked compared to the number of people who see the ad. Ideally, the more people who click it, the more likely your ad will be successful.

There are several Facebook ad types, and this article will focus on the promoted post. This ad type appears in the Facebook news feed and is more likely to be seen and clicked than any other ad type.

1. Target the Right Audience

Facebook offers dozens of ways to slice and dice the audience that will see the ad so that you can target your marketing to the right audience and give them the message you know will resonate. Serve your ad to the people most likely to engage or click. Get as specific as you can about your ideal audience before you serve your ad. You can target by age, gender, location, interests and more. Targeting a specific audience has an added bonus of reducing your costs because you are only serving ads to specific people, which should reduce the size of the potential audience you would pay to see your ad.

This is a great place to use your existing data. Use your loyalty data to build a custom audience to target ads that are relevant just to your loyal customers. CTR will skyrocket.

2. A/B Test

Facebook lets you serve as many ads as you want, so take advantage by creating ads with slight variations in photos, copy, and other factors to test which works best for your audience. Track performance of these tests in Facebook Ad Manager and compare results against your goals. Some ads may get lots of clicks to a website but not convert, whereas other ads may have a low CTR rate but high conversions. Decide which is more important.

Once you have found the right mix of photos, videos, copy, and links for your audience, you can expand the size of that audience to produce a higher volume of clicks, knowing that you are serving the best ad possible.

3. Keep Them on Facebook

People are far more likely to stay engaged with your ad if it keeps them on the Facebook platform. When users scroll through their Facebook feed, they want to catch all of the days’ news shared by family and friends. Jumping off Facebook to an external site makes that harder, so they are less likely to do it, especially for a piece of promoted content or ad.

Photos and videos are good ways to keep them. A quick video that offers a sneak peak at your promotion or giveaway will be just the teaser they need to move to your site. A composite photo of several food items or promotions will also keep engagement high.

Helpful tip: Keep the number of words or copy on your photo ad to a minimum. Facebook has strict guidelines about the amount of copy you can place in a promoted story. For more on that, visit Facebook here.

4. Keep it Local

Even with multiple locations in different cities, your ads will run better using location-targeted audiences, ad copy, and photos. There are two ways to keep it local. During the audience selection process, limit the ad to be shown to a specific state, city, or even zip code. Create copy and links for that ad specific to that city.

The photo you use can show local landmarks and icons, and the ad copy you use can include the city name, local events, or known landmarks as well. Showing an ad tailored to your audience will go a long way to improving click-through rates.

5. Create Compelling Content

People love to watch and share great content. Use this to drive clicks on your ads by offering content made for your target audience. Show the human side of your business by featuring an employee with a great success story. Highlight a menu item and give the backstory of how it was created. Tell the audience the reason you chose one of your locations and offer a history of the surrounding area. Anything you can do to educate and entertain your audience to their benefit will encourage content sharing and increase ad clicks.

Bonus tip: Show real people and their faces. People want to connect with other people, not logos or products. The more you show people in your ads, especially close-ups of faces, the more likely people will be interested in your ad. As best as you can, have those faces and people looking towards your ad copy or links, not away. It’s subtle, but people naturally follow what someone else is looking at, so use that to your advantage.

So what are the keys to a successful Facebook ad to increase click-through rate? know your audience and target them as narrowly as possible using Facebook Ads Manager. Make sure you have found the right audience by A/B testing your ads using a diverse number of variables. When possible, keep them on Facebook with compelling content.

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