How to test your Facebook Ads: A 5-step strategy

Don't believe that Facebook advertising is dying out — that's only what people who fail to run it say. Otherwise, there wouldn't be more than 10 million active advertisers on Facebook.

It’s true that not all the ads are effective there: The problem may be in the picture, in the text, or in the choice of the target audience. There's only one way to find out — testing.

In this column, we will tell you how startups can use a technique called Creative Factory to test their ads on Facebook.

This strategy works best for B2C startups, especially those who have a wide audience and a small average cheque. Usually, it’s about startups in insurance, e-commerce, restaurants, tourism, sports, and beauty services.

There are four factors that indicate that Creative Factory can work for you.

1. You are looking to scale your business. 2. You run a business with a potentially big target audience. 3. You are ready to invest in testing. Budgets depend on the market, product, funnel and other factors, but you can start with $500. 4. You have a marketer and designer on your team.

5 steps to start testing Facebook Ads with the Creative Factory technique

Step 1. Deep market research. To start your creative testing journey off the right foot, you need to indicate trends and understand what your competitors do. A marketer should carry out market research — collect references and prepare technical assignments for a designer.

Step 2. Creatives production. This is a major part of the process: a designer generates up to a hundred creatives a week. One-quarter of them is usually original concepts. The rest will be variations of similar ideas.

Step 3. Launching ads. In the beginning, let Facebook have as much freedom as possible and run all the creatives that the designer created.

When setting up the ad campaign on Facebook for the first test, put minimal audience limits (gender, age, country). Add no more than 4-5 ads to a single Facebook Ads Group.

Step 4. Analyze advertising campaigns. A marketer analyzes the results and determines the best creatives to scale. It will help understand which ads you should keep running and which you should turn off.

The main metric for evaluating the effectiveness of an advertising campaign is ROI, but there is a variety of other markers that help determine the best creatives. Among them are CPA (cost per action), CPC (cost per click), CTR (average click-through rate), and CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Beware that an ad with a clickbait headline can have a high CTR but bring no sales.

Running a test for Liki24.com, the marketing team at Flyer One Ventures evaluated the cost to add to the cart, cost to buy, and conversion rate from ad display to purchase.

Before the first test, we determined that if the CPA (cost per item added to cart) was less than $0.15, we would move the creatives into a separate campaign with a larger budget. In the end, we identified 4 creatives with the best metrics that scaled well.

Step 5. Working out successful concepts. The best creatives are handed over to the creative team for further modification.

A marketer, designer, and copywriter should prepare as many variations of the successful concepts as possible to be able to run the next campaign longer.

Keep in mind, that whether you have found a creative that performs or not, you should immediately start generating new ideas for the next tests and go through all the steps all over again.

If you don’t have a functional ad creative yet, keep looking for a solution. But even if you found successful creatives — they will soon burn out, it’s a matter of weeks or months.

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