For those very familiar with Facebook ads, link clicks vs landing page views comparison should not be strange to you.
Anyway, in course of this article, you’ll understand the difference between link clicks vs landing page views and which one you should choose for your Facebook ad campaign.
Contents
Link clicks vs Landing page views: The Meaning
Link Click is a performance goal in the Facebook ads manager that measures how many times the link on your ad is clicked in a given campaign.
Landing Page view, on the other hand, is a performance goal in the Facebook ads manager that measures how many times a user actually lands on your website after clicking the ad.
As you may have observed, both performance goals are different nonetheless, they have a lot of similarities.
Some unconfirmed reports say that Facebook’s algorithm records any tap on the ad (especially on mobile) as ‘link clicks’.
What this means is that when a Facebook user taps on an ad to expand it or ‘see more’ of the ad copy, without clicking the link on the ad, the algorithm records this as ‘link clicks’.
The Similarities Between Link clicks and landing page views
Link clicks and landing page views have many similarities but the most obvious similarity is that they are both campaign performance goals settings for Facebook ads.
In addition, both goals require action from a Facebook user.
Link clicks vs landing page views: The Difference
The major difference between the two is that Link Clicks records unique clicks on ad link while landing page views records the unique number of people who actually landed on your website after clicking the ad.
Link Clicks reports are always lesser than those of landing page views because not all who click on the ad link actually land on your website.
One major reason that accounts for the difference between the two is network issues. Sometimes, the network doesn’t load the website on time and the user leaves.
In this case, link clicks would be recorded and landing page views would not be accounted for.
At other times, the issue could be the poor loading speed of a website even if the network is good.
Many people do not have the patience to wait.
A survey by Digital.com found 52% of online shoppers will leave a website if they have to wait more than six seconds for a page to load.
Even after the page loads but it’s not fully interactive, users will leave and this leads to a higher bounce rate.
How To Select Link Clicks or Landing Page Views Goal In Facebook Ads Manager
After setting up your campaign settings, at the Adset level, you’ll see the ‘performance goal’ option.

Select either landing page views or link clicks.
[Similar performance goal should be used when directing traffic to a WhatsApp group from Facebook Ads.]
link clicks vs landing page views: Which Is Better?
Both optimization goals are unique with different purposes.
If you are keen on more accurate reporting on your actual landing page views, you should select the option.
However, if your utmost concern is how to maximize your budget, you should be sticking with the ‘Link clicks’ optimization goal.
In my experience with Facebook ads over the years, link clicks optimization goals are usually way cheaper than landing page views, irrespective of the ad sizes.
Like me, I know, most people are more concerned about maximizing their Facebook ad budget.
In that case, I’d say the link click ads optimization goal is better than landing page views. This is a very unpopular opinion.
Final Thought
I am confident that this article puts the link click ads vs landing page views in comparison to bed.
To be clear, I’d rather select link clink ads optimization goal than landing page view especially when my overall campaign goal is to drive traffic.
If you enjoyed reading this, you may also like to learn what invalid traffic is, new ways to monetize a blog, and how to improve your SEO CTR.