Acquired Taste: How The Right Creative Drives Leads

November 2, 2021

Choosing the right calls to action. Finding new ways to engage audiences. The digital advocacy game isn’t for the faint of heart: there are many variables that impact a user’s decision to click, donate or sign up.

With extensive experience in digital grassroots advocacy, PLUS has developed a set of best practices when it comes to acquisition ads. To keep this regimen in top shape for our clients, our digital advertising team took a deeper look into one crucial factor in generating leads – creative.

See our findings below:

The Ads

First, we selected Facebook acquisition campaigns that stood out in terms of design, with variants that featured contrasting colors and other marked differences. From there, we compiled a tracker that compared the following data for each ad:

Number of leads
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
Impressions
Amount spent

The Comparison

Next, we identified the top-performing creative and lowest-performing creative in each campaign by comparing the number of leads generated per ad by the ad’s CPA.*

*Note: The ads below are mockups based on the creative we studied.

The Findings

Based on our analysis, we found:

Bold and bright is best: A color scheme with bold, bright colors is associated with a higher number of leads and a lower CPA. In the example below, the bright, colorful top-performing ad generated 115 leads. The lower-performing ad with more muted tones garnered only 18.

Top-Performing:

Lowest-Performing

Write with an eraser: Less post copy is better when it comes to social ads – even when there is significant copy within the creative itself. The top performing variant below garnered 535 leads, while the lowest-performing ad garnered only six leads with a higher CPA.

Top-Performing

Lowest-Perfoming

Calls-to-action belong in creative: Your call-to-action (CTA) is your direct ask to your audience. Putting it front-and-center in creative – and making it punchy – captures users’ attention.

Top-Performing