How to Test Your Facebook Ads for The Best Results?
Are you looking at running Facebook ads to help drive more traffic to you website/Service or Product?
Why Testing Facebook Ads is Important
Testing your Facebook ads let us know what works best for your ads so we can help generate more business or increase leads for your business.
Quite often people will think an Ad is not working and change too much all at once, you need to simply test your Ad against all the variables.
Just look at all the elements individually and make small adjustments until it starts producing the results.
The Budget
When looking at your budget to spend on Facebook Ad testing, there are several factors you need to consider, such as niche, your product or service, the market and the audience. But you should also look at your results and the cost of your objectives when setting your testing budget.
In my opinion you should set between 10% - 20% of your advertising budget on testing ads, but remember your first ads will unlikely produce the results you are looking for, so use it as an investment, and run test ads over a long period of time to help gather the information you need.
A Means for Testing Facebook Ads
When you want to test anything, we recommended creating a completely new ad set over using an exciting ad set.
If you make changes to an exciting ad set, it will affect its momentum, and make it problematic to track changes in performance.
If you want to reuse creative that’s already published on your business profile, do so by selecting "Use Existing Post" at the ad level within Facebook Ads Manager. From there, you can build a new test around a different audience or placement without losing all the social proof of the original post.
Identify Responsive Audiences
Our method for testing Facebook ads begins with creating potential audiences, using keywords, targeting and interests.
Try to narrow these down the best way possible, the narrower they are the more accurate your results will be.
Then test the ad across multiple audiences to find out which responds best.
The number of different audiences and variables that can be tested will greatly depend on the size of your budget. While a large budget (£1000, for instance) allows you to continually test and optimize your ads and your audiences, a smaller budget might limit you to testing against 10–20 ad variables with five different audiences.
We also recommend testing potential audiences you have created using interests or keywords against lookalike audiences.
Analyse Test Results
After setting up some tests, the next step is to analyse the results and then use this information to perfect your Ads.
This can be done within Facebook Ads Manager.
Having a good naming convention for your ad sets helps to streamline this process.
Allow your test ad to run for 3-4 days, this amount of time allows for a good baseline for the performance of the ad.
Running the results can take up to an hour depending on the number of ad sets you are checking the results on.
Cerebral can help with setting up and running your test ads for you. Please get in touch to find out more.
Written by Jay Cook, Social Media & Communications Director. 21-05-19
Jay is cerebrals leading Social Media Manager and has provided digital marketing for some of the UK leading businesses. Jay's one goal is to help your business grow.