🧑‍🔬 How To Increase Clicks On Your Ad

Brand: Happy Mammoth

Psychology Concept: Hyperbolic Discounting

Days Running: 650 Days
(This gives an indication of how it’s performing)

🧪 Hyperbolic Discounting

Hyperbolic Discounting is a cognitive bias that explains how we prefer more immediate rewards over future benefits.

🤳 How Happy Mammoth Uses Hyperbolic Discounting

Happy Mammoth uses Hyperbolic Discounting in two ways:

1. By specifying "4 weeks," the ad leverages this bias by providing a relatively short, concrete time frame for achieving the desired results.

2. By dividing the 4-week period into smaller, specific intervals, the ad creates the sense of a potential immediate gratification from day one (“feeling the first calming effects”).

The copy on the ad makes the benefit of the product seem more immediate and attainable, encouraging potential customers to commit to it because they can expect to see benefits in a predictable and relatively short period.

🧠 How You Can Use Hyperbolic Discounting

The key to using Hyperbolic Discounting is to show how your product can provide immediate benefit to your customers. Many of you may be selling products or services where the customer doesn’t see or feel the benefit for weeks, if not months. But think about how you can emphasis some form of immediate benefit.

One way to do this, like Happy Mammoth did, is to be concrete and specific in your copy. Instead of “lose weight”, they specified that you’ll lose weight in 4 weeks (and went even further by specifying the positive benefits you’ll feel on Day 1, Day 7, Day 14, and Day 28).

Another way to use Hyperbolic Discounting is to actually change your offer to give your customers an immediate reward. For example, in this ad AG1 promotes their free welcome kit with a subscription to their drink. While the benefits of drinking AG1 may take a month or more to kick in, they use Hyperbolic Discounting by emphasizing that you’ll get a free welcome kit today when subscribing, providing an immediate reward to customers.

Or you can use the reverse and allow customers to push something more painful into the future, decreasing present pain and friction of purchase. For example, the clothing brand Everlane uses a “buy now, pay later” checkout process to help customers push the pain of actual payment.

When creating your next ad, think about how you can really highlight the immediate benefit of your product.