Fanatical, a PC game key retailer, spent an estimated $102 million on display advertising over the last twelve months across the markets Adbeat tracks. It did that with 254 creatives — but the top-spending one, a 320×100 banner, carries five words of copy: the brand name, “SAVE BIG,” and “SHOP NOW.” That single unit absorbed an estimated $15.9 million.
Meanwhile, Adobe ran 2,117 separate creatives containing the words “learn more,” and American Express ran 1,478. Between them, they put an estimated $33.5 million behind that phrasing — about a third of what Fanatical spent in total.
That contrast is not about budget size or category. It’s about the verb. And once you start reading display ads by their verbs, a pattern shows up that most CTA advice completely misses: the verb you use to ask for the click is a statement about how much you already know. Advertisers who know exactly what a click is worth ask for big things in few words. Advertisers who don’t ask for small things in a thousand variations.
All figures below are Adbeat estimates for display and native activity between August 2025 and July 2026, across the roughly 35 countries in Adbeat’s coverage network and the 939,712 advertisers tracked in them.
The concept: every CTA is a price quote
A call to action is usually taught as a conversion mechanic — make it contrasting, make it a button, make it urgent. That framing treats the CTA as a piece of interface design.
It’s better understood as a negotiation. Your ad has spent 1.5 seconds building a small amount of interest. The CTA is where you name your price for that interest. “Learn more” is a cheap ask: give me thirty seconds of reading. “Join now” is an expensive one: give me your email, your identity, and a slot in your life.
Readers price these asks instantly and unconsciously. They are comparing what the ad has promised against what the CTA demands. When those two numbers don’t match, the click doesn’t happen — not because the button was the wrong color, but because the deal was bad.
This is why the same three words can be brilliant on one campaign and disastrous on another. There is no “best” CTA verb. There is only a verb that is correctly priced for the interest the creative has actually generated.
The principle: labor verbs versus reward verbs
The strongest predictor of whether a CTA verb feels expensive isn’t its length or its urgency. It’s whether the verb describes what the reader has to do or what the reader gets to be.
“Sign up” is a labor verb. It describes form-filling. “Register” is a labor verb. “Submit,” “apply,” “download,” “complete” — all labor.
“Join” is a reward verb. It describes membership. “Book” is a reward verb — it describes having a trip locked in. “Play” is a reward verb. “Get started” splits the difference, describing forward motion rather than effort.
The mechanism is straightforward: a labor verb asks the reader to picture the work, while a reward verb asks them to picture the payoff. Same click, different mental rehearsal — but the labor-verb version has to overcome the friction it just described. That’s a strategic argument about what the ad is asking a stranger to imagine, not a claim that one framing always outperforms the other; process-focused language has its place, and it usually belongs after the click rather than before it.
The pattern is easiest to see in the CTA copy of the market’s biggest-spending display campaigns, where the verb choice is carrying real budget.
The ladder: how five CTA verbs sort the market
Ranked by how many advertisers used each phrasing in their tracked creative text over the past year:
| CTA phrasing | Advertisers using it | Ask level |
|---|---|---|
| Learn more | 79,896 | Lowest |
| Shop now | 33,524 | Low |
| Book now | 20,275 | Medium |
| Get started | 10,823 | Medium-high |
| Sign up | 8,417 | High |
| Join now | 5,624 | Highest |
The curve is almost perfectly inverse: the more a verb asks for, the fewer advertisers are willing to use it. Roughly fourteen times more advertisers say “learn more” than say “join now.”
The obvious read is that most advertisers are being sensibly cautious. The more useful read is that most advertisers are hedging — and hedging has a cost, which shows up when you look at what each group does with its media.
Rung one: “Learn more” and the cost of a vague ask
“Learn more” is the default of display advertising. It is also the verb of advertisers who have not yet decided what they want.
Look at the spend leaders. Adobe ran 2,117 creatives containing it. American Express ran 1,478. AT&T ran 878. Ford ran 482. These are sophisticated advertisers with real budgets — an estimated $19.7 million, $13.8 million, $10.3 million and $14.9 million respectively — and they are all doing the same thing: spreading spend across enormous creative libraries behind a CTA that commits to nothing.
That isn’t incompetence. For brand-heavy campaigns where the goal is reach and the next step genuinely is a content page, “learn more” is honest. But it also means the CTA is doing no selecting. Everybody mildly curious is invited. The qualification burden gets pushed downstream to the landing page.
The lesson: if your CTA doesn’t filter, your landing page has to. Advertisers who lean on “learn more” should be measuring landing page engagement quality, not click volume — because a cheap ask buys cheap clicks by design.
Rung two: “Shop now” and the verb that matches the store
33,524 advertisers used “shop now.” The top spenders are exactly who you’d expect — Amazon, On, Pandora, Ford, Mattress Firm, James Avery — and the verb is doing something specific: it tells the reader that the destination is a store, not an article.
That’s the entire function. “Shop” pre-loads the mental model of browsing merchandise. Readers who don’t want to shop don’t click, which is the point.
Fanatical is the extreme case. Just 19 of its creatives carry “SHOP NOW,” and those 19 account for an estimated $97.0 million — nearly its entire tracked budget. Every one is a variation on savings plus the same two-word ask. No product education, no benefit copy beyond “GREAT PC GAMES. FANTASTIC VALUE.” When your offer is discount and your destination is a catalog, the verb and the offer are the whole ad — and the creative testing problem effectively disappears.
Note what happens to creative volume when the ask sharpens. Amazon ran 12,171 “shop now” creatives; Fanatical ran 19 and outspent them on that phrasing by more than seven to one. Creative sprawl is a symptom of uncertainty, not of scale.
Rung three: “Book now,” where the verb is the product
20,275 advertisers used “book now,” and the concentration at the top is striking: Hertz at an estimated $27.0 million, Hotels.com at $17.8 million, Vrbo at $10.3 million.
One of Hertz’s biggest banners behind that CTA carries seven words total: a discount, the verb, the logo. An estimated $2.1 million behind it.
Travel is the cleanest example of a reward verb because in travel, booking is the purchase. There’s no gap between the action named in the ad and the thing the customer wants. Compare that to a SaaS ad that says “book a demo” — same verb, but now it names a meeting the reader doesn’t want in order to get software they might. The verb only works when it points at the reward.
The lesson: before choosing a CTA verb, finish this sentence — “clicking this gets me ___.” If the verb in your CTA isn’t the thing in that blank, you’ve named the labor instead of the reward.
Rung four: “Get started” and the psychology of momentum
10,823 advertisers used “get started,” and the spend leader is instructive: Hims, at an estimated $15.1 million from just 29 creatives. Its top unit is a 970×250 banner pairing a price point with “Get started today.”
“Get started” is the verb of choice for businesses whose next step is an intake flow rather than a purchase — telehealth, tax prep, financial services. Hers, H&R Block and Intuit all appear in the same top ten.
It works because it is deliberately ambiguous about the finish line. It promises the first step, not the whole journey, which is a textbook foot-in-the-door structure: secure a small, low-risk commitment, then let consistency pressure carry the person forward. Someone who has answered three questions in a health quiz has already begun behaving like a customer.
The landing page data confirms the design. Hims’s highest-spend destination is its own homepage, absorbing an estimated $12.4 million — a page built to route people into a quiz, not to close a sale. The verb and the destination agree.
Rung five: “Join now” and the identity ask
Only 5,624 advertisers used “join now” — the smallest club on the ladder. But the ones who do share a trait: they are selling membership in something, not access to something.
FaithGateway is the clearest case, with an estimated $7.4 million across 35 creatives. Among its top-spending “join” banners is a 160×600 offering a free online Bible study with Max Lucado and a blunt “JOIN NOW.”
Now look at where those ads land. FaithGateway’s top five destinations are all pages titled “Online Bible Study Registration.” The ad says join. The page says register.
That split is the single most transferable thing in this analysis. The ad uses the reward verb to earn the click; the page uses the labor verb because by then the reader has already decided and just needs to know what to do. Reward verb to open, labor verb to execute.
Discord shows the same instinct with almost no copy at all. Its top display creative — an estimated $1.8 million behind a single 300×250 — lists three game genres, a server invite link, and “JOIN NOW.”
There is no product description because the product isn’t the point. The ask is to become part of a group of people who like those genres. “Join” is the only verb that can carry that, and it’s why the ad needs no explanation.
What about “now”? Less than you think
Urgency modifiers get treated as the active ingredient in CTA copy. The data suggests they’re closer to punctuation.
The word “now” appears in the tracked creative text of 130,182 advertisers — roughly one in seven of every advertiser in the index. “Today” appears for 80,807. When a device is that widely deployed, it isn’t a differentiator; it’s the ambient noise your ad has to be heard over.
More telling is how the modifier splits by verb. “Shop now” outnumbers “shop today” by roughly three to one (33,524 advertisers to 11,973). But “join now” and “join today” are nearly tied (5,624 to 5,074).
That asymmetry makes sense. Retail urgency is real — the sale ends, the stock runs out — so “now” carries information. Membership urgency usually isn’t real. Nothing about a community or a subscription expires tonight, and readers know it, so the harder urgency word buys nothing and advertisers drift toward the softer one.
The lesson: test your verb before you test your modifier. Changing “learn more” to “join now” changes what you’re asking for. Changing “join today” to “join now” changes almost nothing.
The counterexample worth studying
The highest-spending creative behind any join-verb CTA in this analysis doesn’t sit on the ladder at all. Running under Google’s advertiser domain, a 300×250 Candy Crush promotion absorbed an estimated $31.1 million on its own — more than four times the entire tracked “join now” budget of FaithGateway. Its copy: “JOIN THE FUN” and “Play Now.”
Two reward verbs stacked. “Join the fun” supplies the belonging; “Play now” supplies the action, and crucially, playing is the reward. Nothing in the ad mentions downloading, installing, or creating an account — all of which the user will actually have to do.
That’s the ceiling of this technique: name the reward twice, and let the labor stay invisible until the reader has already committed.
How to apply this
- Write your CTA last, not first. The verb has to be priced against the interest your creative actually generates. A vague brand banner cannot support “join now”; a discount-led retail banner is wasted on “learn more.”
- Audit your verbs for labor. Go through your live creative and flag every CTA that describes an effort — sign up, register, apply, submit, download. Each is a candidate for a reward-verb rewrite.
- Keep the labor verb on the landing page. Once someone has clicked, clarity beats seduction. FaithGateway’s ad-to-page handoff is the model.
- Match verb to destination. “Shop” must land on a catalog. “Book” must land on a booking widget. “Get started” must land on step one of something. A mismatch reads as bait.
- Watch your creative count as a diagnostic. If you’re running hundreds of variants behind a low-commitment CTA, you may be solving a creative problem that is actually an offer problem.
- Check what your category defaults to — then decide whether to break it. If every competitor in your vertical says “learn more,” the reward verb is unclaimed territory.
Conclusion
The verb is the smallest unit of strategy in a display ad and one of the most revealing. It tells you whether an advertiser is fishing or closing, whether they’ve priced the click, and whether they know what their audience actually wants to become.
The advertisers spending the most per creative in this dataset — Fanatical, Hertz, Hims, Discord — all did the same thing. They picked a verb that named the reward, matched it to a destination that delivered it, and then stopped writing.
Want to see which CTA verbs your competitors are putting real money behind — and which creatives they’ve scaled? Take Adbeat’s live demo for a spin and search their ad copy for yourself.