Increasing the effectiveness of display social media ads for startups: The role of different claims and executional characteristics

Guillaume Hervet and Ivan A. Guitart

Journal of Business Research, 2022, vol. 153, issue C, 467-478

Abstract: Although social media ads are the preferred advertising format for entrepreneurs, the literature has paid little attention to this advertising form in the startup context. In collaboration with a startup, we conducted randomized field experiments reaching more than 800,000 potential customers to assess the effectiveness of display social media ads and explore how different claims and executional characteristics impact this effectiveness. The experiments were the company’s first advertising campaign in an effort to expand to a new country. Our analyses show that the elasticity of display social media ads is equal to 0.815 and 98% of the effect occurs within two hours. We also find that adding informative claims to an ad reduces the click-through rate (CTR) by between 24.8% and 43%. Regarding executional characteristics, we find that ad repetition significantly increases the CTR by 19.9%, whereas including a character and using gender-congruity in ads do not significantly increase their CTR.

Keywords: Social media advertising; Facebook advertising; Ad content; Advertising for new products; Advertising elasticity and duration; Display ads (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014829632200741X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:153:y:2022:i:c:p:467-478

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.08.052

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().