The ultimate guide for using prices in Catalog Ads

Fundamentally, any offer has two main aspects; the benefit and the cost.

Almost certainly, your Catalog Ads already focus on the product, its features and unique selling points. But if you stop at that, you might be leaving out a key piece of information - the price.

The goal of advertising is not only to attract users interested in the offer, but to attract users interested AND willing to pay the price for your product.

A customer who loves your product but finds your price too high is not going to convert at the end of the day.

The lower your customer is in your marketing funnel, the better Catalog Ads with prices typically perform compared to Catalog Ads without prices.

• Top-funnel ads see a +31% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing prices
• Bottom-funnel ads see a +54% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing prices

You might be tempted to play around with your targeting settings and try out new audiences, but in reality, the biggest increase in performance comes from improved content. Not many advertisers realise that 47% of the ad's effectiveness comes from the quality of the creative, while only about 9% comes from targeting.

So when trying to reach better results, putting work into your designs should be the first step - and lucky for you, we've got over 1.3B impressions worth of data to share.

Here's how showing prices on average influence Catalog Ads:

Showing prices in your Catalog Ads makes sure that customer expectations are aligned from the moment they first see your ad.

No more bouncing off the product page because the price was higher than expected.

Showing price in your catalog ads

The argument behind showing prices in your paid social content is rather simple, and can be summed up with just two words: "qualified traffic".

As we mentioned in the introduction, it often happens that a user clicks on a Catalog Ad, only to bounce off as soon as he finds that the price is not as low as expected. But this can be fixed by setting the expectations early - directly in the design.

In our analysis, catalog ads that show price information in the design reached a 41% higher ROAS on average.

That's quite the improvement for such a simple change.

We also found the following when showing the price:

• 2% lower Cost per action
• 5% lower Cost per click
• 10% higher on-site Conversion rate
• 16% lower Click-through rate

This just goes to show that getting as many clicks as possible is not the key to success. Instead, it is important to make sure that the right people click, and that the traffic coming to your store is actually qualified to buy your items.

Different ways to show the price

A price splash

A very common way to show prices in ads is what we call "a price splash".

It is basically placing the price on top of a circle, rectangle, or a custom shape to make it more noticeable.

This has the benefit of drawing more attention it, as the shape can have a vibrant colour and pop out of the design clearly. Additionally, many users will recognise a price splash, instantly knowing where to look for the price information.

The more affordable your products are, the better performance you will typically see showing prices.

• Affordable shops see a +60% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing prices
• Mid-end shops see a +43% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing prices
• High-end/ Luxury shops see a +35% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing prices

Text-integrated price

In certain cases, a price splash may not fit your design, or brand identity.

In those scenarios, you can create a beautiful ad by simply integrating the price into the text in your ad.

It can still be valuable to visually separate the price from all other text by perhaps giving it a different colour, different size or font. That way, users will notice it subconsciously and don't need to spend effort actively looking for it.

Even though prices are effective for brands themselves, multi-brand retailers see the biggest improvement in performance when showing prices in their Catalog Ads.

• Brands and DTC companies see a +25% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing prices
• Multi-brand stores see a +56% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing prices

Decimal places

Another thing to consider is the use of decimal spaces for your in-content prices.

This decision mainly boils down to your marketing and pricing choices. Some advertisers choose to price their items using decimals (i.e. 9.95$) to influence the cost perception. You can read more about that in out Pricing psychology article.

More options to consider

• Stating "low price" or "sharp price (skarp pris in DK)"
• Offering a price guarantee, or "price match"
• Showing off "Buy now, Pay later" options
• Runing "Price focused" designs - i.e. a campaign

Create designs with prices in minutes

Here at Confect, it's our mission to make it as simple as possible to reach higher performance through improved designs for Catalog Ads.

What if we told you that you could make your ads 41% more effective (on average), in just 4 simple steps?

1. New design
2. Insert text layer
3. Insert the product field "price"
4. Voila!

Read the  full how-to guide here - or learn how to customize your Catalog Ads designs with Confect here.

If you want all the data and insights we have about designing Catalog Ads, based on billions of impressions, you can see it right here.