Meta A/B Test: Do Contact Details in an Ad Affect CPR?
- €0.77 CPR with Call now CTA
- €0.82 CPR with email in copy
- ~6% lower CPR without email
Context
We ran an awareness campaign for a restaurant, with the additional goal of generating interest in renting the venue for private and corporate events, receptions, and other gatherings.
Since the restaurant was already well-known and regularly visited, the primary goal of the campaign was to inform existing and potential customers about the venue rental option. At the same time, we wanted to make it easy for interested users to contact the restaurant directly if they were already looking for a venue for their event.
For this reason, we included direct contact information, specifically an email address, in one version of the ad to give users an easy way to submit an inquiry.
Challenge
When setting up the campaign, I hypothesized that including contact details directly in the ad could negatively affect its distribution.
The reasoning was simple: an email address, phone number, or other elements that encourage users to leave Facebook or Instagram could potentially influence how Meta evaluates the ad and its relevance within the platform.
Rather than relying on an assumption, I decided to test the hypothesis through a simple creative A/B test.
Strategy & Execution
We tested two nearly identical versions of the ad, with one key difference in how users could get in touch:
- Creative A included an email address directly in the ad copy.
- Creative B did not include contact details in the copy. Instead, users were offered a “Call now” CTA for direct phone contact.
This allowed us to maintain a direct contact option in both versions while testing how the way that option was presented affected campaign performance.
The primary metric we used for comparison was CPR (Cost per Result), which in this awareness campaign represented the cost per 1,000 people reached.
Results
The A/B test showed a difference in cost per result between the two ad variations.
- The creative featuring an email address achieved a CPR of €0.82
- The creative without contact details in the copy, using the “Call now” CTA, achieved a lower CPR of €0.77
In other words, the “Call now” version achieved approximately a 6% lower cost per result. At the same time, the email version generated a higher number of results — 22K compared to 19K — but at a slightly higher total spend and higher cost per result.
Key Learnings
The results partially supported the initial hypothesis. In this particular test, the ad containing an email address in the copy had a higher cost per result than the ad that offered users the option to contact the restaurant via the “Call now” button.
This result alone is not enough to conclude that Meta systematically penalizes ads containing email addresses or other contact details. However, it provides a useful hypothesis to consider in future testing and an opportunity to determine whether the same pattern occurs across other campaigns.