One ugly price tag turned my entire ad campaign into a clearance bin.
The Setup
I was running Facebook ads for a new skincare bundle priced at $47. The product photo looked clean, but the price overlay screamed “cheap.” Bold red Comic Sans-style text with a yellow background sat right in the middle of the bottle. Click-through rate hovered at 1.1% and add-to-cart events were basically nonexistent.
What I Changed
I replaced the tacky overlay with a thin, semi-transparent dark bar at the bottom using a clean sans-serif font at 60% opacity. The price sat in white with a small strikethrough of the old price in light gray. I also used our AI product photography tool to generate a fresh set of images with consistent lighting so the tag would sit naturally on the bottle. Three versions were tested against the original.
The Results
After four days the best version delivered a 2.3% CTR — a 109% improvement — and cost per purchase dropped from $28 to $19. Total ad spend stayed flat while revenue from the campaign rose $1,840 in the first week.
Quick Rules That Worked
- Keep the tag small and anchored to an edge instead of floating center.
- Use low-opacity backgrounds so the product still shows through.
- Match the font weight to the rest of the ad creative.
- Test the tag color against both light and dark product versions.
Those four tweaks took less than an hour once the images were ready.
I’m Didar, the founder of AdLoft AI — an AI ad creative platform turning product photos into professional ads. I write here about the stuff I’m building and what’s working.