Facebook Ad Testing – Your Key to Better ROI

Facebook Ads have been highly touted by numerous top digital marketing agencies, our included. They offer excellent customer targeting and a huge reach when you consider Facebook’s average monthly user numbers just surpassed 2.41 billion as of June 2019. What you might not be aware of is the importance of Facebook Ad Testing – Your Key to Better ROI.

Measuring ROI is an essential aspect of a well-rounded marketing strategy as it provides important data points and insights into the overall effectiveness of efforts. One of the simplest ways to provide a boost to your bottom line is by increasing the ROI of every marketing campaign your business launches. When it comes to Facebook Ads, we have found that proper Ad Testing can greatly increase the ROI without adding too much time or effort into the overall process.

While in the short term, there is going to be time invested into adding the testing steps into the entire process, when considering it from an annual perspective the total time is minimal compared to the benefits.

How will Facebook Ad Testing Improve ROI?

It is important to understand that over the last few quarters, there has been a shift in the focus of advertising on Facebook. More and more businesses are focusing on producing creative ads that will resonate and engage audiences to help drive the overall performance of their ads. This shift is important to recognize, as the change has increased the need for ad testing. With the overwhelming number of ads consumers face, standing out and grabbing attention is more important than ever.

We have always been strong proponents of testing on everything from web and app design, to headlines, copy, and images. Ads are no different, especially when you consider how much time, energy, and money is being invested.

These are the top reasons why Facebook Ad Testing is important to the overall ROI:

• Provides useful customer insights – Testing has always been a fantastic way to learn more about a customer group. While it is easy to guess and assume what will resonate with a group, testing provides a method to verify ideas. Gaining more information about what customers like and dislike is valuable information which can be applied not only to current campaigns but future ones as well. This information can also be applied in other marketing arenas.
• Provides useful competitor insights – Part of a well-rounded testing process involves taking the time to audit top competitors to better understand what they are doing. In essence, you are using their existing work as part of the overall information pool. If your business uses paid tools, you can even determine which ads are higher performing which gives insights to what works and doesn’t work for their business and customers. This opens the door to integrate useful elements into what your own team is creating.
• Reduces wasteful spending – Ad dollars are usually limited so reducing waste should be a high priority. Testing provides essential information and can help save time, energy, and money in a couple of ways. The most obvious is testing an ad and discovering it does not resonate at all, thus saving money by not putting that ad to market. A secondary way is in the creation process. Testing can be used to quickly identify variations of existing successful ads that will perform reasonably well with minimal spending compared to a new concept. Think of some of the more iconic ad campaigns that use similar concepts and spokesmodels, such as the Allstate “Mayhem” campaign. It is essentially the same ad with slight variations each time.
• Increased opportunity for the “golden” ad – When creating ads, often people work with both existing concepts and new concepts. Ideally, there should be a reasonable split in time and effort with new concepts only taking up 25% of the budget and time. The goal for these new ads should be a home run or the “golden” ad. Testing can greatly aid this process as it allows a method to discover which core elements drive ads such as CTAs, buttons, images, layout, etc. which can then be applied to new concepts for a better chance at hitting it out of the park based solely on the creative aspect.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that running ads is like other repetitive disciplines that utilize creativity, such as golf. Taking the time to improve your swing is going to improve results each time you play a match, no matter where you play or who you are playing with. Facebook Ad Testing is a key to better ROI and it’s a no brainer when you think about it.

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