What can Open Graph Tags mean for conversion rates?

You've probably spent a lot of time and effort building a website that you want people to share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. But have you tested that the technical foundation is in place for your pages to be shared optimally?

You may not be familiar with the term Open Graph tags, but you've probably come across the feature when you share content from websites on social media. For example, when you share content on FB or LinkedIn, a small image/thumbnail and a short text describing what you are sharing is about.

With Open Graph Tags, Facebook has made it possible to display an image, a headline and a text description, so it's crucial that you take action and define WHAT to display.

What are Open Graph Tags?

You can think of Open Graph Tags as a placeholder, designed to tell the reader about the content being shared or linked to. What Facebook or other social media shows in the placeholder is up to you.

In most Content Management Systems, you can easily define the Open Graph image, title and description.

If you do not define OG tags, Facebook will find some information on the page and display it in connection with the link to the page. The coherence of the message of the page you want to link to can easily be lost when Facebook itself retrieves content from a random context.

Here's how to do it

As a minimum, you should define Open Graph tags for all the pages that you think are shareable and try to create a connection between the image, headline and descriptive text. Together, these elements provide a clear message, which is crucial for the link to drive traffic to your website.

How do I check the Open Graph display on my pages?

Facebook has an excellent Sharing Debugger tool that gives you a preview of your Open Graph data. Simply enter a URL and you'll get an Open Graph view. If the view doesn't match the Open Graph data you've entered for your page, it's because Facebook is showing you 'old' data that is stored. By pressing 'scrap again', Facebook will retrieve the latest Open Graph data for your page and your content is now ready to be shared.

LinkedIn has a similar tool called Post Inspector.

The impact of Open Graph Tags on your CTR and conversion rate

If you don't create Open Graph Tags, Facebook will search for information that can be shown when sharing - and the results are not always favourable. An inappropriate choice of content where there is a mismatch between headline, image and text can have a big negative impact on readers' perception of your brand identity.

Taking the time to define Open Graph Tags, on the other hand, can lead to a higher CTR - click through rate - for your website, which also affects your ranking in the news feed.