Psychology of Ads: How to reduce your paid ads CPA by leveraging psychology.

People today are bombarded online with information, content, and ads from every direction. It’s said that each of us sees up to 10,000 ads online per day. With so much content competing for attention, the only way to make your Meta ads stand out and resonate with your audience is by tapping into their psychology. If your ad doesn’t connect with someone on an emotional, subconscious, or identity-driven level, they’re likely to scroll right past it. That’s why understanding consumer psychology in today's age isn’t just useful, it’s essential.

But one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to Meta ads. Your audience will have different motivations and will respond best to different psychological triggers. The trick is finding what resonates best with the different segments of your audience and the most accurate way to do that is testing. Meta’s algorithm rewards engagement, meaning the more you experiment with different psychological triggers, the more insights you’ll gain. Some approaches will stick, others won’t, but each test gives you a clearer picture of the psychology of your audience. Ultimately, you’ll want to let psychology guide your messaging while using data to refine and optimise your strategy.

Whether you’re a startup looking to kick-start ad messaging tests or an established brand aiming to lower your CPA, leveraging psychology delivers results. We’ve done it, we’ve seen the results firsthand, and we know it works.

Don’t want to just take our word for it? Here’s the data. We took a brand that had never properly leveraged paid social ads before. We launched with Meta ads delivering profitability within the first 30 days, achieving their CPA target of 2 ROAS around a bundle offer we created for new customers. This allowed us to scale, iterate, and refine the messaging using psychology over the following months.

If you would like to find out more about how psychological messaging could boost your Meta ad performance, simply get in touch.

Key Aspects of Psychology

Emotions

Identifying the emotions your target audience is feeling or longing for allows you to target your messaging to meet the needs of those emotions. Not only will this grab their attention, but it’ll help you connect with your audience on a deeper level, ultimately leading to a higher conversion rate and a lower CPA (cost per acquisition). Here are 10 of the key emotions your target audience may be feeling and how to target them.

Esteem

Esteem is all about the need for respect, recognition, and feeling valued, either by oneself or by others. Whether it’s confidence in their appearance, recognition for their efforts, or gaining status among peers, ad messaging works best for this emotion when it’s future-focused. This means helping customers to envision the success, admiration, or validation they crave.

Ancient Cosmetics targets esteem in this Meta ad by acknowledging the viewers confidence, beauty, strength, and radiance, making the viewer feel valued. The ad implies that the body oil product adds all these properties, creating the idea that if the viewer used this body oil, they would be admired more for these qualities.

Nurturance

When people buy based on nurturance, they’re looking for ways to express love, appreciation, and care for themselves or others. But they may struggle to know how to effectively express this in the best way. Therefore, ads that focus on nurturance should provide a clear solution of how to show care with messages of warmth, comfort, and emotional connection, helping the customer feel valued.

For example, feminine care brand Lola ran this Meta ad focusing on self-care. The copy “All is calm, all is soothed” sends a warm, comforting message of how the product can relive pain and help them to really care for themselves.

Competence

When competence is the main emotion, people want to feel capable, informed, and in control of their decisions. Ads that tap into competence should offer reassurance, provide clear information, and encourage a feeling of expertise. Show how your product makes them feel more skilled, knowledgeable, or confident in their choices.

Competence can be found in this Meta ad by Pooch and Mutt. Providing expert information in a clear and concise way helps the user to feel educated and confident about their purchase of the Pooch and Mutt fish hide chews over rawhide chews.

Freedom

Freedom is about breaking free from stress, constraints, or obligations. Ads that resonate with this emotion should highlight how a product provides flexibility, independence, and a sense of adventure. Whether it’s escaping routine, reducing anxiety, or embracing spontaneity, messaging should emphasise how your product lets them live carefree on their own terms.

For example, clothing brand Vuori focuses on the emotion of freedom in this Meta ad by presenting this hoodie as an item that gives you the freedom to “do-anything” you want to do.

Security

Security is a fundamental human need, people want to feel safe, protected, and free from risk or doubt. Ads targeting this emotion should highlight reliability, consistency, and trust. Whether through guarantees, clear explanations, or step-by-step guidance, position your product as the safe, risk-free choice that provides lasting peace of mind.

Guava creates a sense of security in this Meta ad by the words “proven durability” and “peace of mind” which creates a feeling that the product has been thoroughly tested, reducing the risk of the product not meeting their needs and expectations.

Accomplishment

Accomplishment is a popular emotion that ads often focus on, which focuses on the desire to reach a goal or feel successful and the sense of pride that comes along with it. Although this is a popular emotion to focus on, most people often take too shallow an approach with it. Instead of just touching the surface, delve deep into the sense of identity or type of lifestyle your audience is trying to achieve. To do this, focus your messaging on how they can accomplish this identity or lifestyle as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Air Up is a great example of how to target the emotion of accomplishment on a deeper level. In this Meta ad, Air Up hasn’t focused on just achieving a goal, instead they’ve focused on the ability to accomplish anything by overcoming an obstacle the target audience faces. Focusing on overcoming tiredness and gaining energy means the customer would have the energy to do the things they want to achieve and live the life they dream of, creating a deeper longer lasting sense of accomplishment.

Empowerment

With empowerment, people want to feel strong, capable, and in charge of their lives. You may be thinking that this sounds similar to competence. It is similar, but competence is about having the skills to have authority over your life, whereas, empowerment is more about your feelings towards yourself. Empowerment-driven ads should focus on messaging that reassures, uplifts, and reduces anxiety. Ultimately, you don’t want to just sell a product, you want to sell the feeling of independence and control.

Skincare brand D’you targets empowerment by making looking after your skin sound easy. The messaging “only a spritz away” makes the target audience feel capable of taking charge of their skincare, leading to a feeling of empowerment.

Autonomy

When people value autonomy, they want tools and solutions that make them feel independent, to live their lives and make their decisions without limitations. Ads targeting this emotion should highlight how a product enables self-sufficiency, removes restrictions, or gives customers the power to break free from dependence or constraints.

Another example from D’you is this Meta ad focusing on autonomy by creating the idea that this product sets up the customer to independently live their lives, free from any skin issues that could hold them back.

Engagement

Engagement is about seeking out exciting, unique, and interesting experiences. This target audience is curious with a strong sense of adventure and desire to experience more of what life has to offer. Therefore, ads that target engagement should highlight how the product can fulfil the experiences these customers are craving.

For example, this Meta ad by Manta not only focuses on the experience of a good night's sleep, but the messaging “anytime, anywhere” implies that using their sleep mask gives you the good night sleep you need in order to experience more of what life has to offer.

Belonging

Everyone wants to feel like they belong. Whether they’re craving togetherness linked to a niche interest, core values, or cultural identity, ads that tap into belonging should focus on acceptance from others. Position your product as something that strengthens social relationships, fosters a sense of community, and reassures them that they’re not alone.

Riff Raff creates a sense of belonging in this Meta ad by letting new parents know they’re not alone in their struggles, other new parents are experiencing the same challenges and the product is the solution.

Identity

Although we occasionally touched on identity in a couple of the emotions above, identity plays such a big part in consumer psychology that it deserves exploring more. Everyone is made up of a group of identities. Some of these identities are core to who they are as a person, for example identifying with a gender, nationality, or generation. Other identities combine to create their personality, for example identifying with a hobby, lifestyle, or special interest. And then there are smaller identities or traits people have when it comes to purchasing, for example preferring quality over quantity or prioritising eco-friendly products.

Understanding identities is an essential part of understanding the psychology of your target audience because, unlike emotions, identities won’t change much over time. This creates a stable foundation of understanding who your customers are, what’s important to them, and how they think. You can then build upon this identity foundation with the varying emotions your customers may be experiencing at different points of the year, in their life, and in their customer journey.

Gathering Psychology Data

Now you have a better understanding of why you need to understand the psychology of your customers, you’re probably wondering how to gather this data. A good place to start is your customer reviews. Your customer reviews and customer reviews from your competitors will include a wealth of information on the psychological make up of your customers. Going through all of these customer reviews could take you a while. Make life easier by inputting all customer reviews for your business or a competitor into an AI platform to produce a list of the top emotions and identities in the reviews.

It’s important to note here that customer reviews can include company reviews as well as individual product reviews. Depending on your brand, your different products may need messaging based on different emotions. Therefore, it can be useful to gather and analyse this information on an individual product by product basis to get the most out of your individual product Meta ads.

Social media is also a useful tool when it comes to customer psychology research. Use platforms like Tiktok and Facebook groups to see what your target audience are talking about and what their hopes or worries are within your industry.

Another useful tool is to use a 3rd party site like Brandwatch. Through these sites, you’ll be able to see what people are saying about a brand throughout the internet. This is useful to get a general sense of emotions and identities linked to a brand, whether that be your own brand or a competitor.

It’s vital that your messaging stays relevant to the changing psychology of your customers otherwise you’re going to start seeing a dip in your ad performance. Therefore, once you’ve done your research, you need to keep it up to date.

Summary

If you neglect the psychological aspect of messaging when creating your ads, you’re reducing the speed at which you can scale, leading to less purchases and a higher CPA. Remember to do your research, identify your main customer identities and emotions, and test test test.

Looking for guidance on how to successfully bring psychology into your ads and boost your performance? If you want to reduce your CPA so you can scale more (as we achieved with our other clients), simply get in touch to see how we can help your business.