Your advertising shouldn’t ever fall short of your chosen outcome. Whether you’re trying to increase brand awareness or drive leads in your sales funnel, A/B testing is a great way to determine the most effective marketing strategies for a business.
While this article will walk through the steps of A/B testing with display ads, remember that it can be used to test everything from email subject lines to SEM copy and more. As with all things, some aspects of your campaign will perform better than others. When developing all your marketing materials, consider using a A/B testing as a tactic to determine which preforms better.
Don’t Just Choose, Get Feedback
Say you are a pet grooming service, and you have a display campaign in mind. You know what you want the ads to say- but you just can’t choose a creative style. On one hand, a clean and minimalist look represents the cleanliness of your store. On the other hand, the ads with pictures of happy dogs also represents the fun atmosphere of your store. Which one do you choose?
The answer: don’t.
Build out both versions of those ads and launch them at the same time, with the same targeting and budget behind them. One of those campaigns will have higher results in areas such as click-throughs and conversions, giving you valuable market research.
How to Make Edits During A/B Testing
Here are the four things in an ad that you should A/B test:
- The image- Try changing up the subject of the image. If you have people, try change around the age or ethnicities.
- The headline- What can you change in the dominant copy of the ad? What exactly do you want to call out to the customer?
- Call the Action- Try testing the different things you want customers to do. Think along the lines of “Learn More” vs “Make a Reservation Now”.
- Ad Target/Ad Network Placement- Some ads are going to do well when targeted to a specific behavior in a specific location; other ads are going to do better with less targeting.
Look at the Results and Make More Edits
When you get those results back for your pet grooming ads and see that the modern and clean design is creating more conversions in the form of dog-grooming reservations, don’t just choose that one ad and move along. Make small edits.
Try seeing if adding a dog to the picture makes any difference. Once you see that the picture of the dog increases conversions even more, try putting a cat on there as well to increase cat grooming services. When this actually decreases the amount of click-through’s the ads have, re-edit back to the modern ad with the cute dog. Make a few more rounds of small edits. Eventually, you will find the right one for this campaign.
When conducting market research is as easy as launch two versions of a campaign, it is a no brainer to decide to A/B test. Don’t let an opportunity to create the most impact marketing campaign that you can go by. Reach out to the staff at MassLive Media Group for help in creating the best campaign with A/B testing for your needs today.