CTR Case Study: Groupon VS LivingSocial

Posted on Mar 31, 2011 in Facebook Advertising, Marketing | 9 comments

Groupon and LivingSocial are competing on almost every major advertising medium to capture emails. The one i’m most familiar with is Facebook. When advertising to the masses on Facebook, your targeting is slim to none, but you still want mega CTR! Whats the easiest way to achieve this? This was the question Groupon/Living Social were faced with.

They both have been using weird/wacky images or sexy images in their Facebook ads and everyday i see so many of them that i just had to find out for myself how they were performing.

I wanted to know though which types of images will bring in a better CTR when advertising to such a wide demo as the whole United States. So i ran a test with 16 images — 8 wacky images consisting of anything weird/random, and 8 images of good looking women. I used some images directly from the Groupon/LivingSocial campaigns and found some myself. The 5 images below had the top CTR!

As an affiliate it’s hard to turn a profit advertising daily deal offers to the masses (you gotta go niche!), but to Groupon/LivingSocial it’s worth every penny.


After the top 5 images, every ‘wacky’ image outranked every ‘female’ image in CTR.

What To Conclude?
Overall that wacky images do better in terms of CTR! The downside is wacky images usually don’t draw a relation to whatever your advertising (whether it be daily deal offers or anything else), so it’s your job on your landing page to connect a reason behind the wacky images with your offer so you can convert the most amount of leads possible.

The next step is to remix girls and wacky stuff ;)