To show price or not to show price? A cross-channel success story
Published: October 28, 2016
Author: Monica Madrigal
One of our clients is an eCommerce company selling a single high-end product with a relatively big price tag. Campaigns launched on June 21st and products started shipping last week, so they’d previously been pre-order only.
During the pre-order we had issues with low conversion rate and were running a number of tests in different channels (display, paid social, and SEM among them).
During the initial launch, we ran Facebook ads that showed the product but no price, similar to this ad (note: this isn’t our client):
One of the great benefits of advertising on Facebook is the ability to collect and assess user feedback right on your ad’s comments section; for this ad, we got a lot of feedback that the price point was too high – which meant that, with relatively good CTR and poor CVR, we were spending for a lot of wasted clicks.
The Social team decided to run some ads with the price in order to pull in potential buyers who were already aware of the price point before clicking through to learn more about the product – essentially, qualifying our click traffic. As expected, Facebook saw a decline in CTR with the price ads but a lift in CVR, which prompted the SEM team to launch this same test in Google.
The results (for both channels):
The upshot: including price in ads continues to be a click qualifier that works across channels. Always be ready to leverage one channel’s successful techniques in your other channels – but be sure to test before full roll-out.
