For the amount of time and money we spend on advertising, it should make sense that we try and know for sure we’re receiving the most “bang for our buck.” The easiest way to find out if your advertising campaign is receiving the maximum return on investment is to conduct testing. There’s no simpler way to see what marketing tactics work best with your targeted audience then to test out different elements. It could be as simple as testing out different ad copy, targeting different devices, or even sending the traffic to different landing pages.
Testing also helps to find out how effective a new campaign will be without blindly blowing the budget. The results will lead to insights about how to target your market more effectively and will also help your business work through problems your ads or website might be having to get people to convert into customers.
A/B Testing Creative
Photo credit: visioncritical.com
This simple test gauges the best elements of different pages or advertisements by comparing each element to one another. In order to see the best results, testing one element at a time will produce the best data. Testing multiple elements at once will prevent you from seeing which specific element is receiving the better results. Conduct A/B tests as much and as often as possible because the more you test, the more you learn about what your target audience wants to see.
Testing Elements
- Demographics – I would recommend starting out testing different demographic targeting methods first. This way you find out if you’re targeting the correct people. If you’re targeting the wrong audience, your advertisement is already doomed and further testing won’t give you the insight you’re looking for.
- Geos – Location testing provides insight to where most of your customers are coming from.
- Day Parting – It’s important to look into which days and specific times of the day are performing the best. On most platforms you can then increase your budget to serve more during these times, or even serve only at these times.
- Devices – Testing different devices will give you results on which device your customers are most likely to respond.
- Content – Testing the content of an ad should be performed after you have defined your targeted audience. Content elements that are being tested and compared should be key performance indicators. Think headers of ads or visuals, not small, less significant elements like colors or font types. Testing different content elements will then provide insight to what exactly grabs your audience’s attention and makes them want to respond.
- Landing Pages – Does the home page get a better time on site result? Does the “About Us” page see a lower bounce rate? Or maybe sending your customers directly to the shopping page results in more conversions. Testing out different landing pages will give insight to when visitors are more likely to complete conversions or when they are more likely to exit your website.
What you’re looking for?
In order to know that you’re testing the correct elements, you want to look for certain results. To see these results you’ll want to utilize your business’ advertising and website analytics. Then look into the data and ask the follow questions:
- Which demos, geos, and ads are receiving the most engagement and most clicks to the website?
- Which landing pages are receiving the most time spent on each page?
- Which landing pages are receiving the highest bounce rate?
- Which pages are assisting in the path to a conversion?
- Which ads led to the most completed conversions?
These questions will lead to either knowledge of knowing your efforts are working or changes you should make within your advertisements or website. And one thing you should always remember, never stop testing and you’ll never stop learning.
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