Myth or Fact: The price should always be included in your ad copy before your audience clicks through, because it will result in better ad performance over time…What do you think? Does including the price really make a difference? I’ll give you a hint: it does!! We’ll consider this a marketing FACT for 2023. Keep reading to understand why you should

Always Include the Price in Your Facebook and Instagram Advertisements in 2023

I’m here to finally settle a long-time debate on whether or not you should be including pricing in ad copy. Until recently the answer to this question, like many questions that arise in marketing, was "it depends"  An expert marketer, like me, would advise a company to "test" their digital ads and see what works best for their product, with their specific customers at that specific point in time.  But with more recent changes to our digital landscape, it seems that overall including the price in your ad copy will benefit you and your business in the long run. 

Apple ioS14

Let me explain! As consumers are increasing their time spent in the digital world they are also demanding more control of their privacy online. In response, Apple implemented a new policy that allowed users to choose whether an application tracked their movement accous the world wide web after they left that application.  The changes were outlined in their iOS terms, version 14, which consumers began downloading in early 2021.  

The industry reports that Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram)  spent over One Billion dollars on a failed attempt to stop Apple from updating its privacy policies with ioS14. As a daily user of Meta's Ad Manager and witness of this monumental policy change, I am here to say that Facebook must have been counting on stopping Apple from going through with this because it was Crazy Town last April when the updates started rolling out on people's Apple devices.

By changing their terms, Apple has made it more difficult for Facebook to see who is actually purchasing from which ad  (if a user has "opted out" of tracking, a website can no longer report back to FB that said user was the person to make the purchase)  We call this attribution. Without great "attribution reports" we can't 1) Retarget potential buyers who have shown interest in an item on our website or (2) Target similar people based on the demographics of our current purchasers.  Without these demographics for targeting purposes, Facebook can not "optimize" our ad campaigns as well as they could in the past, prior to the ioS14 update. As a result, Meta keeps changing their advertising requirements and suggested advertising best practices and it has been a lot for us users to keep up with!

But here's what we know!

Meta still has the ability to track all activity that happens on their applications, i.e. "First Party Data." So the better first-party data we users/advertisers can give Meta, the better experience they can give us in our Ad Campaigns. That makes sense, right?

This brings me back to the price in your ad! By initially putting the price on the ad, it helps weed out individuals who are not interested in purchasing. Now that has always been true- it's just that marketers used to think maybe this could be a good thing because on the website we have more space to WOW consumers with the value of our offer and "hook" them before we tell them the price.

Effectively with the price on the advertisement, "before the click" we are decreasing your Link  Clicks and "Click Through Rate" but increasing your Opt-in Rate. This means that those people that click on our link are more likely to buy so the demographics of those that click are more similar to our Buyer's Demographics. So we have BETTER first-party data for Facebook to use to our optimize our ad campaigns. 

THUS, while Meta is making all of those crazy changes to their advertising policies, lets just all PUT THE PRICE IN OUR ADVERTISEMENTS, so we can get better results in our expensive ad campaigns.

via GIPHY

For more tips on how to get your audience to convert, keep following my blog! You might also enjoy this article about my favorite places to find inspiration for ad campaigns in 2023.