AB Testing Facebook Ads
A Facebook Advertising Strategy That Works
Here is a basic Facebook ad testing strategy that is simple to implement and works well.
Let’s say that you’re about to launch a brand new campaign that you’ve never run before.
The best way to structure the testing is to pick one interest closely related to your audience, or use a lookalike file if you have one. Within the first adset, you will have 4-5 images or creatives and ONE headline for that set of creatives.
The key aspect of this Facebook advertising strategy is to not overcomplicate things.
After the first adset goes live you will have 1 Audience -> 1 Headline -> 4-5 image/video creatives.
Next, you duplicate the original adset and swap the audience for a different one to start testing; also, you should preferably change the headline on all of the creatives. This second adset will have its own daily budget, and be tested side by side with the first one launched.
Now, your second adset will have 1 new audience being tested -> 1 new headline -> and 4-5 of the original creatives launched in adset 1.
After letting these ads run for 3-5 days, you can start to make informed decisions on what you want to keep and what you should kill.
Was the audience in adset 1 cheaper? Was there an image or video that stood out of the 4-5 tested? Which headline did better?
After you identify what performed best, you can kill off everything else.
You will then be left with a single adset with 1 winning audience, 1 winning headline, and 1 winning creative.
Refine it further
The next step in this FB ad testing strategy is to do another round of testing. Maybe I come up with a completely different headline and 4-5 other images to cross-test. I would then go through the same process, letting those ads run for 3-5 days; killing off everything that failed to perform.
If the winner of that wasn’t better than the winner from the first round of testing, then I would just kill it, and I would conduct another round of ad tests.
This is how your tests are structured and how you move through different phases of testing. As said before, it’s possible that nothing will work out at first, in which case kill all ads and conduct a completely new test.
A word on adset budgets and CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)
If you’re testing with adset budgets or CBO, the only difference is how the budget should get allocated to the adset. If you have adset budgets still in your account, then our preferred method is to use them; they spread the budget more evenly.
CBO is not an ideal strategy for testing ads as the budget may become misallocated, spending a lot more on something and not as much on something else.
If you’re forced to use CBO, limit the number of adsets within the CBO that you’re testing.
Closing thoughts
This is the most basic way in which you should be structuring a Facebook advertising test strategy. As far as having one interest per adset, and then having 3-4 creatives in an adset that you test.
Always keep in mind that once you find a winning adset, you should limit how many adjustments you make to it, and preferably never adjust the adset. The only exception will be if everything in the adset were to fail, and you’re just uploading an entirely new batch of things to test.
I hope this was helpful and answers a few questions you may have had about this common Facebook advertising strategy. Once you have gone through this process several times, you will notice that the structure is not as complicated as you may have initially thought.
Are you seeking additional training in regards to scaling ad campaigns? Read this next!
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-Tyler