The Effect of Popularity Cues and Peer Endorsements on Assertive Social Media Ads

Social media platforms, such as Facebook, often display assertive call-to- action ads that encourage direct conversion actions, such as purchasing a product or installing an app. Additionally, these ads can display popularity signals (i.e., “likes”) and social endorsement from friends (i.e., friends’ “likes”). We examine the effectiveness of displaying these different signals on such ads in generating clicks through field tests conducted on Facebook. We collaborated with a mobile app company and conducted a call-to-action ad campaign on Facebook, targeting unique user groups with this type of ads for a mobile app. Our findings reveal that the overall number of “likes” associated with the ad does not impact the user’s decision to click the ad. Additionally, ads endorsed by friends have a lower clicking performance compared with those without such endorsement. Further analyses based on randomized laboratory studies and additional field tests using different products and apps confirm these results and demonstrate that the presence of these cues activates users’ persuasion knowledge of assertive call-to-action ads, resulting in a lower click performance. Furthermore, the negative impact of social cues is particularly pronounced when there is low similarity between users and their friends. These results have significant implications for the design of assertive call-to-action ads on social media platforms.

History: Ram Gopal, Senior Editor; Wenjing Duan, Associate Editor.

Funding: Funding was received from the McCombs Research Excellence Grant.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0606.