Turbo Charged Conversions
February 18, 2022

Split-testing best practice for facebook ads

CRO - Conversion Rate Optimization Digital Marketing Paid Search Social Media

The key to improving your Facebook advertisements is to keep conducting tests. However, you shouldn’t be overoptimizing your advertisements, and making too frequent changes , which will hinder the algorithm from learning properly. Or you might have been frustrated that your facebook ads are not leading to conversions. There could be multiple reasons for low performing Facebook ads.

There are many variables that affect Facebook’s algorithm for ad placement which include the types of types of campaigns and the audiences you select and how engaging your advertisement is. A fundamental rule is Facebook will place a high value on “meaningful interactions”. That is, Facebook wants to create an enjoyable user experience exactly like Google is doing with their advertisements, which is usually measured by the Facebook Ad Relevance Score. If you design ads that never get clicked on (low click-through rates) then you can be certain that you’ll pay a an expensive price for it.

A/B testing, also referred to informally as “split testing,” is the process of studying what kinds of Facebook advertisements are more effective for certain audience segments. Marketers conduct this research by creating two different versions of their post and then displaying the two variations to different groups. As per wordstream, the benefits from Facebook ads include:

  1. Stay current with Facebook algorithm changes. Things that are effective for a period of moment may change suddenly due to algorithmic adjustments or, more often unidentified or inexplicably irrational reasons.
  2. Reach to entire your audience. What can emotionally influence one person in a crowd may not be the same be a hit with the other, which is why it’s recommended to run tests on your advertising campaigns.
  3. Lower costs. Through testing, we learn, gain valuable information regarding our target audience, find out what resonates and what doesn’t resonate to them and reduce the cost of our services as time passes.
  4. Improve lowe performing ads: If your Facebook ads are appearing and you’re getting the number of impressions you’d like but you’re not getting results, there are a variety of ways to address this. It could be because you’re targeting non-relevant audiences that aren’t likely to be interested in your advertisements. If that’s the scenario, it’s time to refresh your audience. Your relevance may not be the issue however, it’s more likely that it’s your advertising copy and design that isn’t working. In either case A/B testing can provide you important insights.

However, do not run these as science experiments. As Neil Patel says, if you dont plan your A/B test well, it is a colossal loss of time. Don’t do split-testing for the sake of split-testing. Each should undergo an initial phase which includes a thorough research of competitors as well as perform website audit, look over the creative assets that exist, then conduct an event on strategy and design their plan. Your campaign manager should get a deep knowledge of the marketplace, buyer personas, the product or service and how to connect the dots. Hub spot provides a great free template to draw up your buyer personas. That will provide the insights on how to strategically create ads that will appeal to customers emotionally. If you’re in the process of creating your advertisements, make sure you don’t create them on the spur of the moment, you should create them or refer to the marketing strategy.

Types of Variables in A/B Testing:

When testing A/B marketers should test only just one factor at a given time instead of testing multiple variables at once to gain more specific information about what kind of ads will work for particular audiences.

Invespcro reports that 60% of businesses believe that A/B testing is essential to convert customers. An Harvard Business Review case study in 2012 involved one Microsoft employee who came up with an idea to alter how headlines appear within Bing. Bing search engine.

An engineer thought the project was easy and cost-effective therefore he tried an A/B test to determine what effect it had on. It was surprising to find out that the result was an increase of revenues by 12 percent. It was among the most effective and speedy advertising tests in the history of Bing. It is proof that the A/B test in marketing strategies are a sure way to boost sales.

A/B testing Facebook Ads requires a different and simpler method. Everything is managed via the Facebook Ads Manager.

As such, Facebook split testing lets marketers alter their variables in order to determine the most effective ads. It’s also a good way to develop more targeted and lucrative marketing strategies in the near future. Users are divided into different groups and presented with variants of a certain characteristic.

Some of the most effective methods for split testing Facebook advertisements include:

PXL Prioritization Framework

A common best practice is to have 3 to eight ads running in an advertising set. We will highlight this aspect of split-testing in this blog article. This allows you to split-test(comparing the different advertisements against each other). This is an advantage for marketers that’s never been this easy. With just a few clicks of the button, we are able to duplicate an ad, modify variables, and then make the changes public. In a matter of minutes, data starts flowing into our system, and we’ll be able to monitor the results until we have an effective combination or winner. 

  1. Change One Variable

At first, you must create adverts that’re as distinct as you can, which might mean changing multiple variables at the same time. However at the point where you want to perform some serious optimization on ads that are performing well You should change just the one element at a go to be able to determine what variables are affecting the effectiveness of your advertisements. The variables that you can alter in the Facebook advertisement are:

If you alter multiple of the above variables within your ad you’ll be unable to tell the one that is affecting performance. Here’s an illustration of what not to do when you’ve come close to optimizing your ads

This is an illustration of how you ought to do:

  1. Create advertisements which are unique in the sense that they’re they can be.

As I’ve mentioned previously it is crucial to design advertisements that are as distinctive as you can, particularly at the beginning of any campaign’s launch. As you begin to connect data from variables that have an positive effect on performance you can begin optimizing the campaigns by changing just one variable at each time. An effective method to design four distinctive advertisements is to create simple two-by-2’scenario maps which has the left and right quadrants representing short-term situations and the upper two quadrants representing the long-term. These two top corners depict positive scenarios after applying your solutions , and the lower two represent the negative situations they’re in prior to applying your solution.

Make the scenarios in every quadrant your customer encounters and then split-test the ones that you think are most persuasive.

Three to eight ads can aid in optimizing your bid. The most important thing to remember is that the Facebook advertising algorithm is that it’s basically one huge auction. When you post ads on Facebook you’re competing against other advertisers, which means that a major factor in the amount you’ll pay is the level of competition among the market that you’re targeting. For instance we know that when you target the population of ‘Parents (All) (All)’ and you’re likely to pay for a higher CPC and CPM since it’s extremely competitive. While there are many methods to bid and numerous ways that you can affect the ad’s algorithm, one easy and efficient strategy is to include between three and eight ads in your ads. If you’re trying to bid with more than 3 ads, you’re not providing your ad set enough ads to try to serve, test, and rotate up to eight ads live at the same time, and you’re providing an algorithm too much choices.

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