Happy Sunday! I'm in the back seat of the car writing this; on my way scoping out a potential new retail location with my daughter watching Ms Rachel next to me. Hope you're having a great weekend. Thanks for the positive feedback on the hiring tips last week; I'll definitely be writing more about that kind of stuff now that I know people find it helpful from me. It's become a bigger and bigger part of what I do, but I guess I get imposter syndrome taking about it because I still have so much to learn. Back to something I am more familiar with; Meta ads and creative testing. Much is talked about creative testing and how important it is. Let's go over some nuances and tips about it.
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How Much Creative Do You Need?
Depends on how much you spend. A decent rule of thumb is to spend 10% on creative testing. The more you spend on it, the more creative you will need. You want to make sure you can get 50 conversions per week, per ad set. I like to group concepts by ad set. So if you have budget to have 5 creative testing ad sets, you should prepare 5 batches of creative to test a week. In each batch or concept, 3-6 variations is good.
How Do You Structure Your Testing Campaign?
If you aren't spending enough to have 50 conversions per week in a dedicated testing campaign, you shouldn't have one Just upload a few new ads in your main campaign each week as you pause down underperformers. If your budget allows for it, you should have a testing campaign. I personally currently prefer to test in a CBO with multiple ads sets because I want to see where Meta gives spend, plus I think the overall efficiency of this campaign will be better this way. But I know plenty of people who test on ABO, and like to force spend to it. Both can work, just make sure you have enough budget per ad set.
What Do You Test?
This is probably the most important part. You want a combination of net new creatives and iterations. This isn't a creative strategy issue, so I won't go too much detail here. But I will say that you want to be testing big swings; don't forget about the creative part of creative testing. As long as it's close enough to on-brand, you want to make sure you are testing varying different asset types and formats, length, production syles, offers, and most importantly messaging. Test little changes, get little improvement. If you test big changes, you have the opportunity for big changes.
How Do You Test?
I like to launch tests the same day each week. You can do once or twice a week; depending on how much creative you have. Let's say you launch on a Monday. You want to let the tests run for at least 5 days; hopefull a week. I think there are three categories. First is green; these ads are winners and you want to scale them. This probably happens less than 10% of the time on the first go round; to be honest. But when it does it's glorious. They eat up all the spend in the the testing campaign, have solid engagement metrics, and most importantly have good roas. Copy post IDs ad put them in your main campaigns; just be sure to consolidate when you do that and make other changes so you don't reset learning too often.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have red ads. These maybe don't spend much, or if they do they have poor engagement metrics and very poor ROAS. They just didn't land, and they are not worth iterating on. In our Notion, we move them to a "Graveyard" section and try to learn something from it. This might be another 10% of ads.
The large majority of ads will be yellow ads. These maybe did ok. but not up to standard to scale. They likely got some spend, which means Meta doesn't hate them. But they maybe were just below the ROAS and spend you'd need to scale. You want to iterate on these. Your creative strategist and media buyer should work together to analyze the data, hypothesizie where it can be improved, and plan it out. Hopefully you can have a VA pull the data, have your media buyer analyze it and communicate any findings to your creative strategist, and then your creative strategist can be creative and come up with ways to iterate and hopefully improve upon the asset.
There is a lot more that goes into it, but didn't wnat to make this too long or nuanced so this is a good system for a lot of brands. Just scale output and bandwidth with spend and you should be good.
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Alright, that is it for the week, have a great one!
-Cody