Answer
Jan 26, 2019 - 12:56 PM
From a brief search about this topic (lots of people seem to have this same question) "link clicks" on a Facebook ad do not always translate into "landing page views".
On mobile especially, people frequently flippantly click on links and then abandon the page before it loads. This is especially true if your landing page takes more than 3 seconds to load.
When you set your goal as "link clicks" Facebook's algorithms optimize to reach people who are likely to click on the link. But when you set it to "landing page views" they target people who have a high likelihood of clicking the link and waiting for the page to fully load.
To determine if optimizing for this new metric will help you, do the following:
1. Set your goal to "link clicks"
2. Add the Facebook pixel to your page so that you also track "landing page views"
3. Add the landing page view metric to your dashboard.
4. Run a campaign for, say $100, and compare the numbers for "link clicks" vs. "landing page views."
5. If the numbers are close do nothing.
6. If there is a large discrepancy, then switch your goal to "landing page views" and run a $100 campaign.
7. Now compare your cost per landing page view in the second campaign to the effective cost per landing page view when you chose "link clicks" as the goal. For example if you got a 100 link clicks but 80 landing page views in the first campaign and each link click cost $1, then your effective landing page view for that campaign is ($100/80) = $1.25
It could be that your effective cost per landing page view is still lower with the first campaign. This is because when you choose "landing page view" as the metric, there is no option to "Pay for landing page views".
You can only set "landing page view" as a goal but you must "pay for impressions". Whenever you set "Pay for impressions" as a goal, Facebook's algorithms are "greedy" and show your ads to many more people because that way, Facebook makes money whether or not people click. You therefore need to be a little more careful.
IMPORTANT: If there is a large discrepancy between "link clicks" and "landing page views" in the first test campaign, run a check your landing page URL on GTMetrix.com. Slow page load time is the number one reason why link clicks don't result in landing page views. Follow the suggestions in the report.
Below is the report on a sample page for one of our clients. It is a page built with Unbounce, the drag and drop tool. Such tools can save you a lot of time and money in development costs but usually have unnecessary overhead that incurs huge performance penalties, as you can see below!
Here are some other articles that discuss the question but there does not seem to be a consensus on which is better:
https://www.adgo.io/blog/optimize-facebook-campaigns-landing-page-views-not-lin
k-clicks-heres-why
https://rickmulready.com/landing-page-views/
https://community.unbounce.com/t/facebook-ads-optimize-for-link-clicks-vs-landi
ng-page-views/7056
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