(1 audience, 1 control ad)
1. Strategy Purpose
The sole purpose of this strategy is to test, test, test creatives…and then test some more. Although you can allow the winners to stay active, it’s better to move them into separate campaigns and try to scale them from there.
2. Strategy Overview
To perform creative ABO testing, you will need a couple of assets:
- A winning audience (a consistently well-performing one)
- A winning creative (a consistently well-performing one)
- The test outcome rule
While the first two points are rather obvious, the test outcome rule may need some explanation. In simple terms, it looks like this:
- Dedicate a percentage of the total available ad spend just for creative testing.
- Decide the number of creatives you want to test (usually measured per month).
- Set your CPA Tolerance. If you have a well-performing funnel, you can set a higher CPA tolerance. If you need to test quickly, you can set a tighter CPA tolerance. As a general rule though, we have a default tolerance of x1.5 CPA before we shut a test.
3. Brainstorming Creative Ideas to Test
3.1 Analyze Your Target Customer Avatar Like A Psychoanalyst
To create content that people engage with instead of scrolling past, you need to know your audience inside and out. Before you start producing any assets, first discover your target customer’s psychographics. The questions below will help you with that:
- What makes them tick?
- What are their core values & beliefs?
- What causes them to become anxious?
- What are their ideal experiences?
- What are they nostalgic about from the past?
- What do they find funny/entertaining?
- What do they find dangerous/risky in their lives?
Check the brands they follow, restaurants they go to, influencers they follow, newsletters they subscribe to, books they read, and memberships they belong to.
At the end of this process, you will understand the core needs and desires of your target audience.
3.2 “Borrow” Some Creative Ideas
If there are creative angles that have worked well for someone else, why not “borrow” these ideas?
Your competitors have spent a fair amount of money testing what worked and what didn’t work. Replicating their best-performing strategies is a simple way to get good results fast. They don’t have to be your direct competitors, by the way.
Check the FB ad library to spy on their ads and reverse engineer what has been working for them. The best indicator of what works/doesn’t work is the length of time an ad has been running. Then think about how you can readapt these strategies while infusing them with your brand’s message.
3.3 Create Your Own Vibe
Once you’re done with your audience’s psychographics and have investigated your competitors as well, it’s time for the next step.
Brainstorm as many fresh ideas as possible. No idea is a bad idea at this stage unless the data (after testing) shows otherwise.
4. How To Structure Campaigns
The campaign structure may look like this:
| Campaign: Creative Testing (apply your naming convention here) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Ad set 1 (control) | 1 | M.F | 18.65 | Broad | OP(PUR) | A.BID | 1 winning ad | Exclusions: 180D engagement; 180D traffic; Customer lists |
| Ad set 2 (test) | 2 | M.F | 18.65 | Broad | OP(PUR) | A.BID | 1 testing ad | Exclusions: 180D traffic; Customer lists |
| Ad set 3 (test) | 3 | M.F | 18.65 | Broad | OP(PUR) | A.BID | 1 testing ad | Exclusions: Customer lists |
| Ad set 4 (test) | 4 | M.F | 18.65 | Broad | OP(PUR) | A.BID | 1 testing ad | Exclusions: Customer lists |
In the setup attached , each ad set represents a single test.
The setup consists of a “control” (the benchmark ad set that the others are compared against), plus exact duplicates for each test. The only variable is the ad (everything else remains the same).
Depending on your preference, there are two ways to perform the test:
- You keep the control running continuously while you rotate creative tests against it. In this scenario, some will argue that the control ad set is more optimized compared to the test, and therefore the test is not valid. If however, you find a creative that outperforms the control in such conditions, you can be 95% sure that this will be your new winner.
- You reset the control every time you run a new test. By doing this, you’ll have a duplicate of the “control” each time you run a new test.
The main thing to remember here is that we always need a “control” and variables to test. In our case, the single variable is on the ad level.
No matter what method you go with, you will need to have your test outcome rule set up beforehand.
This way you can identify potential winners and spot the losers early on.
An example of this would be: Say your target CPA is $40 and you have a x1.5 CPA tolerance. You would be shutting each test whenever it reaches $60 in ad spend.
