How to Test Facebook Ads? Complete Step By Step Guide
Why Test Facebook Ads?
By running multiple ads for the same campaign, we can identify which ad will be the most effective at achieving your chosen objective. Whether you’re looking to generate leads or drive traffic to your site (or have one of the many other objectives), we can look at key indicators in Facebook’s Ad Manager to identify your most successful ad.
This article is intended for business owners and marketers who know how to set up basic campaigns. If you’re yet to create your first campaign, check out our how to guide here.
Once you’re most successful Ad and Ad set has been identified, you can confidently increase your ad spend to scale your campaign.
Check out this article for more on scaling Facebook ad campaigns.
What Are We Testing?
Facebook Ad campaigns are composed of 3 main components; audiences, content and ad copy. We can test each of these individual components to compare results. Below we will cover each in turn and will describe the steps required to carry out your test.
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How to Test
When testing any component of your campaign is it important to keep the other components constant in order for us to establish what caused the change in performance. For example, when changing the Content, you keep the Ad Copy and Audience the same.
Content
Content refers to the imagery used in your ad. This can either be video footage or pictures. When choosing your content, you should pick images that clearly show the benefit of your product or service.
How to Test Content:
1) At the Ad Level, select the photo or video you would like to use for your first ad.
2) Assuming you’ve set up your ad with ad copy and at an Ad Set level your now ready to publish your campaign
3) Whilst the campaign is in ‘Review’, click on ‘Edit’. Hover your mouse over the Ad you’ve just created until the Duplicate’ appears. Now select ‘Quickly Duplicate’
4) On the new duplicated Ad, change the imagery to a different video or photo. You may wish to simply change the thumbnail when creating video ads.
5) Click ‘Publish’ on your new ad and rename it to identify the new photo or video. For example, your first ad may be named Text 1 – Video 1 and the new ad with different imagery will be named Text 1 – Video 2.
Ad Copy
This refers to the text you use for your ad. Ad Copy is composed of the Primary Text, Headline and Description. I would recommend making a change to only one of these components for any one test to keep the other factors constant.
How to Test Ad Copy:
1) Fill in your first ads text on each of the 3 components.
2) Publish the ad (assuming audience and content have been set up)
3) Duplicate the ad (following the same process as described above for testing content)
4) Make changes to the text – I usually make changes to the Primary Text as this is the text placed above your ads imagery and is the most likely to be read
5) Change the name of your ad to indicate the change. For example, the duplicated ad with altered text ad could be called Text 2
Audience
There are 3 different types of Facebook audience; custom, lookalike and detailed targeting. Following this method, you will be able to compare the results of each audience type. We will assume you know how to create these types of audiences already. If you would like more info on creating these audiences check out this video.
At the start of each campaign, I would recommend testing all 3 audience groups (in 3 Ad Sets). After 5-7 days pass you should be able to see which audience is generating the best results and can turn off the other 2 Ad Sets. You may find 2 or even all 3 Ad Sets are generating a desirable return and choose to keep all of them running.
How to Test Audiences:
1) Create a detailed targeting audience. This refers to an audience you create using Interest and Demographic-based targeting.
2) Create your Ads within the Ad Set
3) Now duplicate this Ad Set twice within the same campaign.
4) Go into one of the duplicates, remove the current audience, and add a custom audience.
5) Go into the final duplicate, remove the audience and add a lookalike audience
6) Publish your campaign
This picture illustrates how this set up should look within your Ad Manager
Indicators to assess your winning Ad (content & ad copy) and Ad Set (audience)
At an Ad Level (assessing ads performance based on the copy and content) I would recommend leaving your ads to run for a minimum of 3 days before choosing your winning ad. To decide on your best performing Ad Set I would recommend waiting 5-7 days. Usually, the smaller the budget, the longer you will need to wait.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
This is the amount you spend every time someone clicks on your ad. If users are positively engaging then more users will click on it, driving your CPC down. Check out CPC benchmarks by industry here.
Here we can clearly identify the top ad as the more successful Ad based on CPC.
Cost Per Landing Page View
This shows you the cost of each user who waits for your landing page to load. Sometimes a low percentage of users who click on your ad will wait for the landing page to load. The right ad placed in front of the right audience will increase the likelihood of users waiting for your landing page to load.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This is the % of users who see your ad and then proceed to click on it. We can infer that a higher CTR indicates a greater interest in your ad.
Cost Per Purchase
With Conversion ads, Facebook will aim to drive sales of your good or service. The lower your cost per purchase, the more desirable your return on ad spend. Usually, this is one of the most important indicators for entrepreneurs; once cost per purchase is at a profitable level, they can begin to scale their campaigns to generate more revenue.
For more performance indicators check out this video