he impact of different appeals on the performance of the Facebook advert

Abstract

The advent of the online social media brought many challenges and opportunities for advertisers. While there are multiple online social networks, only a few sell advertising space. However, this few social media reach millions of consumers. This dissertation focused on Facebook, the largest online social network, to study how to optimize the performance of ads by using different combinations of promotional appeals and product types. Two different types of promotional appeals – hard-sell and soft-sell – were compared based on performance (measured by the CTR, Conversion Rate and/or Like Rate). The performances were compared firstly for the same product types, and secondly for different product types. The results from these comparisons were obtained from the statistical analyses of secondary and primary data. The secondary data originated from Facebook advertising campaigns performed by Revshare in 2014 and 2015. The primary data originated from A/B tests of two Facebook advertising campaigns that combined the advertising appeals with the product types. Independent T-test and regression analyses on secondary data presented that none of the appeals led to a better comparative performance, and that none of the product types affected the performance of each appeal. Independent T-test analyses on primary data wield the same results. The main conclusion taken from both secondary data and primary data is that there are no significant changes in performance on Facebook ads for different types of advertising appeals. This finding remained unaltered when the different advertising appeals are combined with different product types.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Fernando Santos Jorge (Supervisor) & Ana Isabel de Almeida Costa (Co-Supervisor)