How to Test Facebook Ads - Best Facebook Ad Testing Strategy for 2021

Key Takeaways

in this video i'm going to show you how to test your facebook ads effectively that means testing them in a way that gets you better results faster and how to do it in a way that doesn't burn cash because you want to get to that end result of a successful facebook ad campaign as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible right so despite what some people may have you believe there is no secret hack or no special boxes to tick in the right order inside the facebook ad manager in order to succeed with facebook ads what it really comes down to is having a strategic and well thought out approach to testing and then following through with that so you can continually improve your results meaning lower your cost increase your return on ad spend until you get to where you need to be and then you can scale when it comes to testing facebook ads there are three things you need to get right audience creative and copy get all three things right and you'll have a very successful facebook ad campaign on your hands here's how you do it first make sure you hit that like button for the youtube algorithm look it really does help the channel and i would really appreciate it if you enjoyed this video just to hit the like button and if you want to hear more from me hit subscribe and hit the little bell to get notified whenever i release a new video now on a serious note let's look at how we actually get this testing process right the first thing i want to say to you is if you already have data if you already have audiences that work or you already know what creatives work or you already have some copy that works don't start there use what you already know and start testing the other areas now that said the first thing that i like to test when i'm starting from scratch is audiences and the reason for that is because i want to test the things that make the biggest difference first and then move down and targeting the right audiences has a huge impact on your campaign if you're not targeting the right people with your ads then your chances of success are very small so here's how i like to test audiences to start with first thing you're going to do is set up a new campaign and use ad set budget so i don't use campaign budget optimization at this stage simply because when you use cbo facebook decides which ad set to allocate the budget to and if we're testing audiences then we're going to have one ad set per audience that we want to test and we want to make sure that each of those ad sets gets the same amount of spend going to it because when we look at our data we need to make sure that we have a reasonable volume for each ad set or audience so that we can make smart decisions if we went with cbo what might end up happening is some ad sets might end up getting a lot of money spent on them and some might get very little or even no money spent on them so we wouldn't be able to then make a judgment as to whether they were good or bad so we want to choose ad set budgeting in our campaign now inside that campaign we're going to create our very first ad set and inside that ad set you're going to set up your targeting for the first audience that you want to test then when it comes to budget i recommend a daily budget and setting it to 5 to 10 times the desired cost per lead that you're looking for so if you're running to a webinar or let's say a pdf or a checklist or a cheat sheet and you're bringing in leads meaning email subscribers and let's say you want to get an email subscriber for five dollars each you should set your ad set budget to five to ten times that amount so if five dollars was your desired cost per lead you would set the budget between 25 and 50 so if you're selling a 50 product and the most you want to pay per customer is 20 then you would set your ad set budget to somewhere between 20 and 40. one to two times your desired cost per purchase now when it comes to placements i like to choose manual placements and just remove the audience network the reason for that is it's one less variable and i don't generally see great results on the audience network so i like to go in and remove that and then just set everything else up as you normally would for your campaigns if you've got specific audiences you need to exclude do that if there are specific demographics that you need to target go ahead and set that up all as you usually would the next thing to do is set up three to four ads inside your new ad set so go in set up these ads each one with a different creative meaning image or video now i like to do it so i've got a mix maybe it's two images and a video maybe it's an image a video and a carousel but make sure you have a good mix of creative in there and also use the same copy for each ad in this first case the reason being because we don't want too many variables and we don't want any more than three to four ads inside the ad set because otherwise what happens is again facebook doesn't allocate budget evenly so if we have more than three to four ads in an ad set what you'll end up finding is facebook allocates a lot of budget to some of the ads and then not very much to others so we don't get any meaningful data from that test now once you've got that set up simply duplicate the ad set somewhere between two and four times depending on how many audiences you would like to test now generally the number of audiences that you want to test comes back to the total budget that you have available for testing so if you have a large budget for testing you're going to test more audiences if you have a small budget then obviously you're going to be able to run fewer tests at any given time let's go back to our example where we were using 25 a day for that first ad set if you have let's say a total daily budget of 100 that means you can have four different ad sets running at 25 a day each to reach your maximum daily spend now if you only had a 50 a day maximum budget and you're running 25 per ad set then obviously you could only have two ad sets running many could only test two audiences at a time the number of tests you can run is directly related to your total daily budget so once you duplicate the ad set in the new ad sets meaning the duplicates just change the audience in each one to a different audience that you would like to test so what you should have are a series of ad sets each one with a different audience now a couple of tips on setting up your audience as well first thing i will say is don't go all 2015 on me and set up individual interests for each headset okay that used to be a thing way back it's not anymore what i like to do with interest instead is bunch them into logical groups so let's say you have one ad set with a bunch of interests that are all influencers in your industry you might have another ad set that contains tools that your particular avatar uses and then maybe another ad set that is a look-alike audience of your customers that's the other thing i'll say here is you should have an ad set that targets a look-alike and then you should have another ad set for example that has a bunch of interests in it and then you know under the look like or whatever you want but inside your campaign you should have some ad sets that target lookalikes and some ad sets that target interest the next thing you're going to do is start your ads okay start running the ads and i want you to leave them for five days minimum five to seven days is how long you want to run these because that's how long it's going to take you to get reliable data now if after three days you do notice that maybe one ad set is really bad like the performance is terrible then i might go in and turn that individual ad set off okay but generally i let them run for five days unless there's something in there that's just so bad you know it's not going to ever be anywhere near your desired kpi now after that five day testing period you're going to notice that some of your ad sets have outperformed others by quite a margin those are your winners they're your better audiences out of the ones that you tested okay so what you've just done there is you've run your first audience test and you've found that out of all the audiences you've tested you know which ones are the best performers and which ones weren't so great so before you go making any changes turning ad sets off and things like that i want you to understand a really important concept here because it often gets overlooked now you should have gone into the testing process with a series of kpis already set kpis meaning goals so like let's say you want to achieve leads for less than five dollars your kpi is a lead cost of five dollars if you wanted to acquire a customer for less than twenty dollars then your kpi there would be a cost per purchase of under twenty dollars anything below that is good anything above that is not good so i want you to look at these audiences and you should be paying attention to the ones that are beating your kpi that are better than your goal anything that is better than your goal where you're going to reuse those audiences anything that is not then we can scrap those audiences and deem them as a failed test and now that takes us to the second part of the testing process which is testing your creatives what you'll notice after doing that first round of testing is you'll also see that some of your ads have performed better than others and i want you to look at this in aggregate so let's say you've run five different ad sets meaning you tested five different audiences and you've had the same three to four ads in each of those ad sets i want you to roll up the data and look at all of the data for each ad in an aggregate setting and that will allow you to pull the data together and see which ads perform the best and which ad didn't perform so well what we're trying to see here is if one type of creative outperformed another or if one particular creative outperformed everything else so if for example you see that your video ad greatly outperformed all of the other ad types or if your carousel outperformed everything for example what you can do is then double down on that in this next round of creative testing if you see a particular ad worked really well pay attention to that style and you can try different variations of that and what you're going to do here is get another three to four creatives ready for your testing so here's how we set this up in a way that minimizes variables remember we always want to run these tests in a clean environment meaning we want to remove as many variables as possible so what we're going to do here is take your best performing audience from the last test we're going to duplicate that ad set meaning it's going to be a brand new ad set but targeting that same top performing audience from our first test and we're going to create three to four new ads inside the ad test with our three to four new creatives so let's say your videos outperformed everything else in the first round we might double down on that and in this round of testing we might test two new video creatives and one new image okay that's the advantage of the last round and having that data available to us now if you want to test more creatives let's say you've got the budget to test six or even nine new creatives at a time then go ahead and just duplicate that ad set multiple times and have three different ads inside each ad set and each ad set can target the same audience that's totally fine for the purpose of these tests what you don't want to do in this case though is have the same ads running in multiple ad sets targeting the same audiences because then you're not really testing anything in those duplicate ad sets okay so get your new ad sets and your new ads up and running and the same thing happens we run them for five to seven days then we come back and we make a decision as to which one performed the best once you can see which creatives then performed the best it's time to test your headlines and copy and i like to do exactly the same thing here so here's how this would look you would again duplicate your ad set with your best performing audience inside that ad set you'll then have your ads you want to have four ads inside this new ad set so if you only had three last time just duplicate one create a fourth so you're going to take your two best creatives two of the ads inside the ad set will have creative number one and the other two ads inside the ad set will have creative number two now what you're going to do is for creative number one you'll test new copy number one and you'll test new copy number two for the other version of creative number one then again we'll do creative number two and it will have the new copy piece number one and then creative number two again will have the second new piece of copy so you're going to have your ad set with four ads two creatives and two pieces of new copy again if you want to run more you can simply duplicate that ad set which will have another four ads in it and do the same in there with your third and fourth piece of copy run those for five days check out your results see which ones are the winner and you can keep iterating from here now if you want to learn more about this i actually have a video where i walked through how to use the data to then know what to test next so once you've done these first few rounds of testing and this is a process that lasts for weeks if not months to get it really dialed in and then it's a lifelong process after that to continually improve and to scale and to keep your campaigns running but you can actually start to decide what to test next in an intelligent way so i've got a video on that i'll put a link up to that very shortly but before i do just remember if you enjoyed this video please just hit the like button it does mean a lot it really helps out the channel and if you want to hear more from me hit subscribe hit the little bell and you'll just get notified on youtube whenever i release a new video on marketing or digital advertising now as i said if you want to check out that video on how to use data to decide what to test next that should be popping up somewhere around here and i've also got another video on how to write better facebook ad copy that might help you as well so that should be popping up about here that you can check out now all right as always thank you for watching take care bye [Music] you