The Science Of Popular Facebook Ads
In 2013 Enfusen Digital Marketing tested Facebook Ad popularity with a picture of a baby monkey. The results, thousands of views, were amazing.
How a Baby Monkey Became the Most Popular Ad a Company ran in 2013
In late 2013 Enfusen Digital Marketing decided to test people's interaction with Facebook Ads. Most of us ignore Facebook Ads, those little boxes that pop up on our sidebar suggesting a company, product, or service. They prompt us to like pages, visit websites, and try new products. Sometimes, though, something catches our eye and we find ourselves clicking on these paid advertisements that have been strategically placed next to our usual Facebook content.
When Roger Bryan, managing partner of Enfusen, used a picture of a cute baby monkey as one of his ads he was testing how different pictures would affect how many views, clicks, and engagements an ad would get. His theory, that things most people enjoy, like baby animals would get more interactions, he was correct.
The ad was for a marketing resource that Enfusen featured on their website, a digital marketing checklist geared towards small businesses. Roger Bryan decided to use the picture of the baby monkey not because it was at all relevant to the content the ad would take you to, but because it draws more people in initially.
The result was an amazing 1,800 engagements for under $250. Of those 1,800 engagements there were over 1,100 picture views, over 400 likes, and 200 shares! That's amazing considering the fact that this all occurred in a span of ten days.
So, why was this ad so popular? The cute picture, of course. It's a fact that the majority of people like things like small animals and especially baby animals. It's part of our human nature to enjoy things like that. Borrowed visual interest, the practice of using a piece of media that's visually interesting but not necessarily related to the content it's connected to or representing.
To prove that this ad was, in fact, popular because of the baby monkey picture further experimentation was done with a different picture. The same exact ad was run, but the monkey was replaced with a stock photo of a business man writing on a dry erase board. When this ad ran for the same time span, targeting the same demographic it didn't even get a quarter of the engagements that the baby monkey did.
The conclusion is this: Borrowed visual interest is key to successful Facebook advertising. Choose a picture you know people want to see; something cute, funny, sexy, or shocking will bring you clicks, likes, shares, and overall more interaction than something boring and run of the mill.
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