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How important is Facebook creative optimisation really in order to run a profitable Facebook marketing campaign?
This article is for DTC eCommerce brands that are in the six to seven-figure range in annual revenue. If you meet one of these two criteria, this is for you:
It’s commonly known that Facebook’s advertising platform that has been around since 2004 and is more powerful than ever and that their platform is pretty good at optimizing your campaign based user behavior.
But how important is creative testing in that whole framework?
It’s been proven that your testing velocity is directly correlated with the growth in your business. As you can see within the graphic from Twitter’s growth below. Long story short - the testing of your creative within in your campaign has become increasingly more important as Facebook’s ad platform matures and competition grows, meanwhile creative is your main differentiating factor.
By the end of this article, you will not only know why creative testing is key for the success of your advertising campaign and overall business, but you will also have a clear guideline of the metrics that are important to keep in mind when evaluating your creative’s performance and why ROAS is not a determining factor when it comes to your creative.
Let’s dive in first on why creative testing is crucial for your campaign’s success and if you are already familiar with the importance of testing, feel free to move on.
Here is what we are going to cover. Skip ahead 👇🏼
It doesn’t matter whether it’s product marketing, brand marketing or creative marketing it’s been proven that testing is directly correlated with achieving your growth KPIs.
In recent history, we have seen it multiple times: companies that nobody knew a week before, are suddenly in everybody’s conversation.
Companies like Airbnb, Uber or Twitter are prime examples of this.
However, you might be asking yourself now: “Why did they actually outpace their competitors and became industry leaders?”
Well, the answer is simple: The key to unlocking that type of growth is high velocity testing.
Morgan Brown, VP of Growth at Shopify, actually studied more than 20 of those fast growing companies by conducting detailed research, interviews and case studies.
He was kind enough to share the conclusion of his dedicated research.
“The punchline, after all of that research, is rapid experimentation across the entire company is how these companies win and create breakout growth.”
- Morgan Brown, VP of Growth at Shopify
His statement is re-emphasised by the research conducted by Sean Ellis, founder and former CEO of GrowthHackers that inspected the rapid growth of Twitter from the years 2010 to 2012. He found out that the correlation between the increased growth rate was their increased testing velocity. Twitter moved from 0.5 tests per week to 10 test per week…
So ok, it’s incremental for your growth to continuously test new ideas and concepts, but why is creative optimisation so important?
Creative is what moves the needle within your account. Obviously other factors, like targeting, optimization or bidding strategy are important, but based upon research conducted by technology company Nielsen about 47% of your overall campaign performance by advertising element can be attributed to creative.
The good old days of “hacking” your way to a profitable ROAS by dividing interests into different ad sets and distributing your daily budget into several different campaigns are long gone. The sooner you realise that, the better your campaigns will perform.
Having this mind: how should you go about your testing cycles within your ad account?
Let’s dive into this...
Pssst... if you want the full break-down on our testing methodology, then here is the link to the full blog article.
If you are just starting to run your Facebook Ads, you probably have seen a lot of contradictory advice on the web and many tips you’ll find online, and even here are tips that have worked for that person, that business, and that moment.
So, instead of trying to keep up with the ever-moving Facebook advertising algorithm, the best thing you can do is to establish general principles that help you run your ad account based upon your industry or product and you start testing.
It’s next to impossible to keep up with all the nitty-gritty tactics and things that have worked tremendously well six months ago, but might not lead to success anymore.
When we at VictoryMedia want to validate an idea, concept or iteration, we use a basic testing cycle. This method cannot only be applied to your Facebook Ads, but to testing across your organization as a whole at any point.
We will divide each step into their respective section for you to have a clear understanding of what goes into each step.
Technically, in order to analyse a set of data or outcomes you first need to have data which you can only obtain by running a test prior to this date. However, the majority of our clients at VictoryMedia have previously run Facebooks Ads.
In case you don’t have any data to analyse, make sure to have your Facebook pixel installed properly, so you can start tracking your performance website-wide.
If you already have an idea of a hypothesis, then you can start with that test, however, keep in mind that this is a cycle! You’ll end up in the analysis phase sooner or later.
With that being said: you want to analyse your data based upon the key metrics that we talk about further down in this article.
Based upon that data, you want to identify the biggest drop-off with the greatest potential impact for your campaign.
The best way to do this is to establish a baseline metric prior to your analysis and actively articulate a measurable goal for your creative. We call this an “A-Grade” creative.
Remember your testing goal is to see if your hypothesis was right.
Pro Tip: In order to make sure to accurately measure your creative’s performance, use UTM tags. With UTM tags and the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to filter your data accurately.
After you have analysed your data and identified a drop-off you want to make sure to form a proper hypothesis. Determine your main goal and go from there.
Here you go with our full blog article on forming proper hypothesis for your creative tests.
Do you think that your video could do a better job at successfully grabbing the attention of your audience based upon the data you collected?
Then come up with ideas and keep track of them. It helps to formulate your ideas in an action/consequence format: If [we do this action], then [our audience will behave this way].
Congrats! You have identified multiple hypotheses that you want to test, but unfortunately there is only so much budget and so much time to test all of these hypotheses. Therefore you need to decide which one you want to test first. Easier said than done…
We usually work with the RICE model in order to figure out the effort it takes to launch that particular hypothesis and the possible results this idea can generate.
Of course, if you have the budget and time, you can test multiple hypotheses at once, however, make sure to test them separately, change only one thing and have a large enough sample size to be able to identify a statistically significant outcome.
Here you go with an article on how we normally start our testing hierarchy based upon their importance and historical lift in outcome.
We have finally arrived at the final destination of this never-ending iteration cycle.🥳
Facebook natively gives you the option to run an A/B split-test. However, I would not suggest you do this. Not because they don’t work, actually they tend to bring really clear and significant outcomes, however, they require a lot of budget to be completed.
Therefore, if you are not spending six figures on Facebook already, I would recommend you to run your own A/B split-test.
One thing that you have to keep in mind is that, in order for the test to be accurate, you can only test one thing at a time. What you decide to change is based upon your prior hypotheses that you have set yourself after the analysis of your data.
You can run two different images for example, but then the ad copy, audience and CTA needs to stay the same in order to accurately attribute the uplift or decrease in performance that results from this test.
Pro Tip: Start out by using “bigger” elements. One of the first tests we tend to launch at VictoryMedia after having onboarded a new client is the “Type of creative”-test.
In this test we use different types of content, for example: UGC; a static image and a mashable creative to see how the target audience engages with the particular type of content.
In this scenario we then can steer towards that overall direction rather than launching marginal tests, like CTA button tests.
The advantage of this approach is that we also tend to see greater discrepancies at a lower spend level. Meaning, in order to identify a statistically significant result with a CTA button test, you need to spend a decent amount of time and money.
With “bigger” elements which have a higher impact on the creative experience, you are able to identify uplifts or decreases in performance a lot quicker.
Additionally to this, we have then also successfully tested different “bigger” routes. Because imagine the example of you constantly trying to increase the performance of your UGC content, by launching a new ad copy test and in the meanwhile you would have been able to double your performance right out of the gate if you were to run a static image instead, because your audience just tends to engage with this type of creative a lot better.
How do you measure the performance of your creative?
Seems like an obvious question isn’t? Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), right?
Unfortunately, although seemingly everybody tells you that ROAS is the most important metric to keep track of, especially for your creative evaluation, it is merely an indicator.
I mean, taking a look at ROAS… what does it really tell you? Obviously, it lets you know whether your campaign, ad set or creative is performing profitably, but afterwards?
An unprofitable ROAS does not tell you what is going wrong with your campaign, neither does a profitable ROAS.
That is the reason why we at VictoryMedia have moved away from evaluating campaigns on merely a ROAS-basis and moved to more specific values.
Let me introduce you to our adjusted AIDA formula: attention, interest, desire and action.
AIDA gives you the opportunity to analyse your creative and its different parts and put it into an analytical framework that is relative to the journey you need to put your customers through. This is the exact same framework that we as a Facebook agency that works with eCommerce brands from the pet supply niche to the fashion niche, use on a daily basis.
The metrics that are measured with the AIDA framework are directly correlated with ROAS. Therefore to evaluate and improve those metrics, you indirectly improve your ROAS metrics as well.
At the very top of every sales funnel is attention…
It doesn’t matter how great of a product you have, what value-proposition you have formed or what audience you are targeting, if you are not getting your prospects’ attention, you are literally throwing money out of the window.
This is when we asked ourselves the question: “When can we be certain to have grabbed the attention of a prospect and what metric that is available in the Facebook ad manager can we rely upon to measure this metric and its performance?”
Although we hate to generalise things across different accounts, we normally want to see this metric at least at 25%-30%, if you’re below that you are paying a ton of money for nobody to watch your ad.
According to Elmo Lewis who introduced the original AIDA framework in 1898, we also move to interest.
The core question is: “Does this creative hold the attention of your prospect?” It goes beyond the three-second video view mark and takes the overall average into consideration.
You have successfully grabbed the attention of your prospect and maintained their interest, however, in order for your ad to actually move your prospect through your consumer journey, you need to be able to spike their desire to want to know more about your product or service.
Desire is measured in outbound click-through rates. How many of the people that you have displayed your ad to actually want to know more about your product, its details and how to use it.
Although our benchmark is at around 1%-1.5%, you should always evaluate that metric relative to your own ad account’s average.
Action is measured in the final outcome that you want to achieve with your campaign and creative. In 99% of the cases here at VictoryMedia this means purchases - naturally this metric is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
You might be saying right now: “Well, I though ROAS cannot really tell you anything about what is actually going wrong within your campaign”
And this is completely true and this why you have to take this metric with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, even the best Facebook marketing campaign and creative can only drive the most qualified and cheapest clicks. If the website is unable to let somebody checkout then this metric is natively going to be bad.
However, clicks don’t pay the bills. Just like you, we obsess over profitability and long-term growth of your company. Unfortunately, though if you are not responsible for the complete consumer journey within your company which entails landing page- and conversion-rate optimisation then this metric is not necessarily one that you can influence directly.
But as we have mentioned previously, it is an indicator, so you need to make sure to accurately keep track of this metrics.
Having discussed, how to properly measure your account’s performance: what are the most common mistakes that we see when we onboard a new account or talk to somebody who is struggling with their paid advertising performance.
Get a free 30 minute marketing consultation with a Facebook growth expert
How important is Facebook creative optimisation really in order to run a profitable Facebook marketing campaign?
This article is for DTC eCommerce brands that are in the six to seven-figure range in annual revenue. If you meet one of these two criteria, this is for you:
It’s commonly known that Facebook’s advertising platform that has been around since 2004 and is more powerful than ever and that their platform is pretty good at optimizing your campaign based user behavior.
But how important is creative testing in that whole framework?
It’s been proven that your testing velocity is directly correlated with the growth in your business. As you can see within the graphic from Twitter’s growth below. Long story short - the testing of your creative within in your campaign has become increasingly more important as Facebook’s ad platform matures and competition grows, meanwhile creative is your main differentiating factor.
By the end of this article, you will not only know why creative testing is key for the success of your advertising campaign and overall business, but you will also have a clear guideline of the metrics that are important to keep in mind when evaluating your creative’s performance and why ROAS is not a determining factor when it comes to your creative.
Let’s dive in first on why creative testing is crucial for your campaign’s success and if you are already familiar with the importance of testing, feel free to move on.
Here is what we are going to cover. Skip ahead 👇🏼
It doesn’t matter whether it’s product marketing, brand marketing or creative marketing it’s been proven that testing is directly correlated with achieving your growth KPIs.
In recent history, we have seen it multiple times: companies that nobody knew a week before, are suddenly in everybody’s conversation.
Companies like Airbnb, Uber or Twitter are prime examples of this.
However, you might be asking yourself now: “Why did they actually outpace their competitors and became industry leaders?”
Well, the answer is simple: The key to unlocking that type of growth is high velocity testing.
Morgan Brown, VP of Growth at Shopify, actually studied more than 20 of those fast growing companies by conducting detailed research, interviews and case studies.
He was kind enough to share the conclusion of his dedicated research.
“The punchline, after all of that research, is rapid experimentation across the entire company is how these companies win and create breakout growth.”
- Morgan Brown, VP of Growth at Shopify
His statement is re-emphasised by the research conducted by Sean Ellis, founder and former CEO of GrowthHackers that inspected the rapid growth of Twitter from the years 2010 to 2012. He found out that the correlation between the increased growth rate was their increased testing velocity. Twitter moved from 0.5 tests per week to 10 test per week…
So ok, it’s incremental for your growth to continuously test new ideas and concepts, but why is creative optimisation so important?
Creative is what moves the needle within your account. Obviously other factors, like targeting, optimization or bidding strategy are important, but based upon research conducted by technology company Nielsen about 47% of your overall campaign performance by advertising element can be attributed to creative.
The good old days of “hacking” your way to a profitable ROAS by dividing interests into different ad sets and distributing your daily budget into several different campaigns are long gone. The sooner you realise that, the better your campaigns will perform.
Having this mind: how should you go about your testing cycles within your ad account?
Let’s dive into this...
Pssst... if you want the full break-down on our testing methodology, then here is the link to the full blog article.
If you are just starting to run your Facebook Ads, you probably have seen a lot of contradictory advice on the web and many tips you’ll find online, and even here are tips that have worked for that person, that business, and that moment.
So, instead of trying to keep up with the ever-moving Facebook advertising algorithm, the best thing you can do is to establish general principles that help you run your ad account based upon your industry or product and you start testing.
It’s next to impossible to keep up with all the nitty-gritty tactics and things that have worked tremendously well six months ago, but might not lead to success anymore.
When we at VictoryMedia want to validate an idea, concept or iteration, we use a basic testing cycle. This method cannot only be applied to your Facebook Ads, but to testing across your organization as a whole at any point.
We will divide each step into their respective section for you to have a clear understanding of what goes into each step.
Technically, in order to analyse a set of data or outcomes you first need to have data which you can only obtain by running a test prior to this date. However, the majority of our clients at VictoryMedia have previously run Facebooks Ads.
In case you don’t have any data to analyse, make sure to have your Facebook pixel installed properly, so you can start tracking your performance website-wide.
If you already have an idea of a hypothesis, then you can start with that test, however, keep in mind that this is a cycle! You’ll end up in the analysis phase sooner or later.
With that being said: you want to analyse your data based upon the key metrics that we talk about further down in this article.
Based upon that data, you want to identify the biggest drop-off with the greatest potential impact for your campaign.
The best way to do this is to establish a baseline metric prior to your analysis and actively articulate a measurable goal for your creative. We call this an “A-Grade” creative.
Remember your testing goal is to see if your hypothesis was right.
Pro Tip: In order to make sure to accurately measure your creative’s performance, use UTM tags. With UTM tags and the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to filter your data accurately.
After you have analysed your data and identified a drop-off you want to make sure to form a proper hypothesis. Determine your main goal and go from there.
Here you go with our full blog article on forming proper hypothesis for your creative tests.
Do you think that your video could do a better job at successfully grabbing the attention of your audience based upon the data you collected?
Then come up with ideas and keep track of them. It helps to formulate your ideas in an action/consequence format: If [we do this action], then [our audience will behave this way].
Congrats! You have identified multiple hypotheses that you want to test, but unfortunately there is only so much budget and so much time to test all of these hypotheses. Therefore you need to decide which one you want to test first. Easier said than done…
We usually work with the RICE model in order to figure out the effort it takes to launch that particular hypothesis and the possible results this idea can generate.
Of course, if you have the budget and time, you can test multiple hypotheses at once, however, make sure to test them separately, change only one thing and have a large enough sample size to be able to identify a statistically significant outcome.
Here you go with an article on how we normally start our testing hierarchy based upon their importance and historical lift in outcome.
We have finally arrived at the final destination of this never-ending iteration cycle.🥳
Facebook natively gives you the option to run an A/B split-test. However, I would not suggest you do this. Not because they don’t work, actually they tend to bring really clear and significant outcomes, however, they require a lot of budget to be completed.
Therefore, if you are not spending six figures on Facebook already, I would recommend you to run your own A/B split-test.
One thing that you have to keep in mind is that, in order for the test to be accurate, you can only test one thing at a time. What you decide to change is based upon your prior hypotheses that you have set yourself after the analysis of your data.
You can run two different images for example, but then the ad copy, audience and CTA needs to stay the same in order to accurately attribute the uplift or decrease in performance that results from this test.
Pro Tip: Start out by using “bigger” elements. One of the first tests we tend to launch at VictoryMedia after having onboarded a new client is the “Type of creative”-test.
In this test we use different types of content, for example: UGC; a static image and a mashable creative to see how the target audience engages with the particular type of content.
In this scenario we then can steer towards that overall direction rather than launching marginal tests, like CTA button tests.
The advantage of this approach is that we also tend to see greater discrepancies at a lower spend level. Meaning, in order to identify a statistically significant result with a CTA button test, you need to spend a decent amount of time and money.
With “bigger” elements which have a higher impact on the creative experience, you are able to identify uplifts or decreases in performance a lot quicker.
Additionally to this, we have then also successfully tested different “bigger” routes. Because imagine the example of you constantly trying to increase the performance of your UGC content, by launching a new ad copy test and in the meanwhile you would have been able to double your performance right out of the gate if you were to run a static image instead, because your audience just tends to engage with this type of creative a lot better.
How do you measure the performance of your creative?
Seems like an obvious question isn’t? Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), right?
Unfortunately, although seemingly everybody tells you that ROAS is the most important metric to keep track of, especially for your creative evaluation, it is merely an indicator.
I mean, taking a look at ROAS… what does it really tell you? Obviously, it lets you know whether your campaign, ad set or creative is performing profitably, but afterwards?
An unprofitable ROAS does not tell you what is going wrong with your campaign, neither does a profitable ROAS.
That is the reason why we at VictoryMedia have moved away from evaluating campaigns on merely a ROAS-basis and moved to more specific values.
Let me introduce you to our adjusted AIDA formula: attention, interest, desire and action.
AIDA gives you the opportunity to analyse your creative and its different parts and put it into an analytical framework that is relative to the journey you need to put your customers through. This is the exact same framework that we as a Facebook agency that works with eCommerce brands from the pet supply niche to the fashion niche, use on a daily basis.
The metrics that are measured with the AIDA framework are directly correlated with ROAS. Therefore to evaluate and improve those metrics, you indirectly improve your ROAS metrics as well.
At the very top of every sales funnel is attention…
It doesn’t matter how great of a product you have, what value-proposition you have formed or what audience you are targeting, if you are not getting your prospects’ attention, you are literally throwing money out of the window.
This is when we asked ourselves the question: “When can we be certain to have grabbed the attention of a prospect and what metric that is available in the Facebook ad manager can we rely upon to measure this metric and its performance?”
Although we hate to generalise things across different accounts, we normally want to see this metric at least at 25%-30%, if you’re below that you are paying a ton of money for nobody to watch your ad.
According to Elmo Lewis who introduced the original AIDA framework in 1898, we also move to interest.
The core question is: “Does this creative hold the attention of your prospect?” It goes beyond the three-second video view mark and takes the overall average into consideration.
You have successfully grabbed the attention of your prospect and maintained their interest, however, in order for your ad to actually move your prospect through your consumer journey, you need to be able to spike their desire to want to know more about your product or service.
Desire is measured in outbound click-through rates. How many of the people that you have displayed your ad to actually want to know more about your product, its details and how to use it.
Although our benchmark is at around 1%-1.5%, you should always evaluate that metric relative to your own ad account’s average.
Action is measured in the final outcome that you want to achieve with your campaign and creative. In 99% of the cases here at VictoryMedia this means purchases - naturally this metric is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
You might be saying right now: “Well, I though ROAS cannot really tell you anything about what is actually going wrong within your campaign”
And this is completely true and this why you have to take this metric with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, even the best Facebook marketing campaign and creative can only drive the most qualified and cheapest clicks. If the website is unable to let somebody checkout then this metric is natively going to be bad.
However, clicks don’t pay the bills. Just like you, we obsess over profitability and long-term growth of your company. Unfortunately, though if you are not responsible for the complete consumer journey within your company which entails landing page- and conversion-rate optimisation then this metric is not necessarily one that you can influence directly.
But as we have mentioned previously, it is an indicator, so you need to make sure to accurately keep track of this metrics.
Having discussed, how to properly measure your account’s performance: what are the most common mistakes that we see when we onboard a new account or talk to somebody who is struggling with their paid advertising performance.
How important is Facebook creative optimisation really in order to run a profitable Facebook marketing campaign?
This article is for DTC eCommerce brands that are in the six to seven-figure range in annual revenue. If you meet one of these two criteria, this is for you:
It’s commonly known that Facebook’s advertising platform that has been around since 2004 and is more powerful than ever and that their platform is pretty good at optimizing your campaign based user behavior.
But how important is creative testing in that whole framework?
It’s been proven that your testing velocity is directly correlated with the growth in your business. As you can see within the graphic from Twitter’s growth below. Long story short - the testing of your creative within in your campaign has become increasingly more important as Facebook’s ad platform matures and competition grows, meanwhile creative is your main differentiating factor.
By the end of this article, you will not only know why creative testing is key for the success of your advertising campaign and overall business, but you will also have a clear guideline of the metrics that are important to keep in mind when evaluating your creative’s performance and why ROAS is not a determining factor when it comes to your creative.
Let’s dive in first on why creative testing is crucial for your campaign’s success and if you are already familiar with the importance of testing, feel free to move on.
Here is what we are going to cover. Skip ahead 👇🏼
It doesn’t matter whether it’s product marketing, brand marketing or creative marketing it’s been proven that testing is directly correlated with achieving your growth KPIs.
In recent history, we have seen it multiple times: companies that nobody knew a week before, are suddenly in everybody’s conversation.
Companies like Airbnb, Uber or Twitter are prime examples of this.
However, you might be asking yourself now: “Why did they actually outpace their competitors and became industry leaders?”
Well, the answer is simple: The key to unlocking that type of growth is high velocity testing.
Morgan Brown, VP of Growth at Shopify, actually studied more than 20 of those fast growing companies by conducting detailed research, interviews and case studies.
He was kind enough to share the conclusion of his dedicated research.
“The punchline, after all of that research, is rapid experimentation across the entire company is how these companies win and create breakout growth.”
- Morgan Brown, VP of Growth at Shopify
His statement is re-emphasised by the research conducted by Sean Ellis, founder and former CEO of GrowthHackers that inspected the rapid growth of Twitter from the years 2010 to 2012. He found out that the correlation between the increased growth rate was their increased testing velocity. Twitter moved from 0.5 tests per week to 10 test per week…
So ok, it’s incremental for your growth to continuously test new ideas and concepts, but why is creative optimisation so important?
Creative is what moves the needle within your account. Obviously other factors, like targeting, optimization or bidding strategy are important, but based upon research conducted by technology company Nielsen about 47% of your overall campaign performance by advertising element can be attributed to creative.
The good old days of “hacking” your way to a profitable ROAS by dividing interests into different ad sets and distributing your daily budget into several different campaigns are long gone. The sooner you realise that, the better your campaigns will perform.
Having this mind: how should you go about your testing cycles within your ad account?
Let’s dive into this...
Pssst... if you want the full break-down on our testing methodology, then here is the link to the full blog article.
If you are just starting to run your Facebook Ads, you probably have seen a lot of contradictory advice on the web and many tips you’ll find online, and even here are tips that have worked for that person, that business, and that moment.
So, instead of trying to keep up with the ever-moving Facebook advertising algorithm, the best thing you can do is to establish general principles that help you run your ad account based upon your industry or product and you start testing.
It’s next to impossible to keep up with all the nitty-gritty tactics and things that have worked tremendously well six months ago, but might not lead to success anymore.
When we at VictoryMedia want to validate an idea, concept or iteration, we use a basic testing cycle. This method cannot only be applied to your Facebook Ads, but to testing across your organization as a whole at any point.
We will divide each step into their respective section for you to have a clear understanding of what goes into each step.
Technically, in order to analyse a set of data or outcomes you first need to have data which you can only obtain by running a test prior to this date. However, the majority of our clients at VictoryMedia have previously run Facebooks Ads.
In case you don’t have any data to analyse, make sure to have your Facebook pixel installed properly, so you can start tracking your performance website-wide.
If you already have an idea of a hypothesis, then you can start with that test, however, keep in mind that this is a cycle! You’ll end up in the analysis phase sooner or later.
With that being said: you want to analyse your data based upon the key metrics that we talk about further down in this article.
Based upon that data, you want to identify the biggest drop-off with the greatest potential impact for your campaign.
The best way to do this is to establish a baseline metric prior to your analysis and actively articulate a measurable goal for your creative. We call this an “A-Grade” creative.
Remember your testing goal is to see if your hypothesis was right.
Pro Tip: In order to make sure to accurately measure your creative’s performance, use UTM tags. With UTM tags and the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to filter your data accurately.
After you have analysed your data and identified a drop-off you want to make sure to form a proper hypothesis. Determine your main goal and go from there.
Here you go with our full blog article on forming proper hypothesis for your creative tests.
Do you think that your video could do a better job at successfully grabbing the attention of your audience based upon the data you collected?
Then come up with ideas and keep track of them. It helps to formulate your ideas in an action/consequence format: If [we do this action], then [our audience will behave this way].
Congrats! You have identified multiple hypotheses that you want to test, but unfortunately there is only so much budget and so much time to test all of these hypotheses. Therefore you need to decide which one you want to test first. Easier said than done…
We usually work with the RICE model in order to figure out the effort it takes to launch that particular hypothesis and the possible results this idea can generate.
Of course, if you have the budget and time, you can test multiple hypotheses at once, however, make sure to test them separately, change only one thing and have a large enough sample size to be able to identify a statistically significant outcome.
Here you go with an article on how we normally start our testing hierarchy based upon their importance and historical lift in outcome.
We have finally arrived at the final destination of this never-ending iteration cycle.🥳
Facebook natively gives you the option to run an A/B split-test. However, I would not suggest you do this. Not because they don’t work, actually they tend to bring really clear and significant outcomes, however, they require a lot of budget to be completed.
Therefore, if you are not spending six figures on Facebook already, I would recommend you to run your own A/B split-test.
One thing that you have to keep in mind is that, in order for the test to be accurate, you can only test one thing at a time. What you decide to change is based upon your prior hypotheses that you have set yourself after the analysis of your data.
You can run two different images for example, but then the ad copy, audience and CTA needs to stay the same in order to accurately attribute the uplift or decrease in performance that results from this test.
Pro Tip: Start out by using “bigger” elements. One of the first tests we tend to launch at VictoryMedia after having onboarded a new client is the “Type of creative”-test.
In this test we use different types of content, for example: UGC; a static image and a mashable creative to see how the target audience engages with the particular type of content.
In this scenario we then can steer towards that overall direction rather than launching marginal tests, like CTA button tests.
The advantage of this approach is that we also tend to see greater discrepancies at a lower spend level. Meaning, in order to identify a statistically significant result with a CTA button test, you need to spend a decent amount of time and money.
With “bigger” elements which have a higher impact on the creative experience, you are able to identify uplifts or decreases in performance a lot quicker.
Additionally to this, we have then also successfully tested different “bigger” routes. Because imagine the example of you constantly trying to increase the performance of your UGC content, by launching a new ad copy test and in the meanwhile you would have been able to double your performance right out of the gate if you were to run a static image instead, because your audience just tends to engage with this type of creative a lot better.
How do you measure the performance of your creative?
Seems like an obvious question isn’t? Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), right?
Unfortunately, although seemingly everybody tells you that ROAS is the most important metric to keep track of, especially for your creative evaluation, it is merely an indicator.
I mean, taking a look at ROAS… what does it really tell you? Obviously, it lets you know whether your campaign, ad set or creative is performing profitably, but afterwards?
An unprofitable ROAS does not tell you what is going wrong with your campaign, neither does a profitable ROAS.
That is the reason why we at VictoryMedia have moved away from evaluating campaigns on merely a ROAS-basis and moved to more specific values.
Let me introduce you to our adjusted AIDA formula: attention, interest, desire and action.
AIDA gives you the opportunity to analyse your creative and its different parts and put it into an analytical framework that is relative to the journey you need to put your customers through. This is the exact same framework that we as a Facebook agency that works with eCommerce brands from the pet supply niche to the fashion niche, use on a daily basis.
The metrics that are measured with the AIDA framework are directly correlated with ROAS. Therefore to evaluate and improve those metrics, you indirectly improve your ROAS metrics as well.
At the very top of every sales funnel is attention…
It doesn’t matter how great of a product you have, what value-proposition you have formed or what audience you are targeting, if you are not getting your prospects’ attention, you are literally throwing money out of the window.
This is when we asked ourselves the question: “When can we be certain to have grabbed the attention of a prospect and what metric that is available in the Facebook ad manager can we rely upon to measure this metric and its performance?”
Although we hate to generalise things across different accounts, we normally want to see this metric at least at 25%-30%, if you’re below that you are paying a ton of money for nobody to watch your ad.
According to Elmo Lewis who introduced the original AIDA framework in 1898, we also move to interest.
The core question is: “Does this creative hold the attention of your prospect?” It goes beyond the three-second video view mark and takes the overall average into consideration.
You have successfully grabbed the attention of your prospect and maintained their interest, however, in order for your ad to actually move your prospect through your consumer journey, you need to be able to spike their desire to want to know more about your product or service.
Desire is measured in outbound click-through rates. How many of the people that you have displayed your ad to actually want to know more about your product, its details and how to use it.
Although our benchmark is at around 1%-1.5%, you should always evaluate that metric relative to your own ad account’s average.
Action is measured in the final outcome that you want to achieve with your campaign and creative. In 99% of the cases here at VictoryMedia this means purchases - naturally this metric is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
You might be saying right now: “Well, I though ROAS cannot really tell you anything about what is actually going wrong within your campaign”
And this is completely true and this why you have to take this metric with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, even the best Facebook marketing campaign and creative can only drive the most qualified and cheapest clicks. If the website is unable to let somebody checkout then this metric is natively going to be bad.
However, clicks don’t pay the bills. Just like you, we obsess over profitability and long-term growth of your company. Unfortunately, though if you are not responsible for the complete consumer journey within your company which entails landing page- and conversion-rate optimisation then this metric is not necessarily one that you can influence directly.
But as we have mentioned previously, it is an indicator, so you need to make sure to accurately keep track of this metrics.
Having discussed, how to properly measure your account’s performance: what are the most common mistakes that we see when we onboard a new account or talk to somebody who is struggling with their paid advertising performance.
How important is Facebook creative optimisation really in order to run a profitable Facebook marketing campaign?
This article is for DTC eCommerce brands that are in the six to seven-figure range in annual revenue. If you meet one of these two criteria, this is for you:
It’s commonly known that Facebook’s advertising platform that has been around since 2004 and is more powerful than ever and that their platform is pretty good at optimizing your campaign based user behavior.
But how important is creative testing in that whole framework?
It’s been proven that your testing velocity is directly correlated with the growth in your business. As you can see within the graphic from Twitter’s growth below. Long story short - the testing of your creative within in your campaign has become increasingly more important as Facebook’s ad platform matures and competition grows, meanwhile creative is your main differentiating factor.
By the end of this article, you will not only know why creative testing is key for the success of your advertising campaign and overall business, but you will also have a clear guideline of the metrics that are important to keep in mind when evaluating your creative’s performance and why ROAS is not a determining factor when it comes to your creative.
Let’s dive in first on why creative testing is crucial for your campaign’s success and if you are already familiar with the importance of testing, feel free to move on.
Here is what we are going to cover. Skip ahead 👇🏼
It doesn’t matter whether it’s product marketing, brand marketing or creative marketing it’s been proven that testing is directly correlated with achieving your growth KPIs.
In recent history, we have seen it multiple times: companies that nobody knew a week before, are suddenly in everybody’s conversation.
Companies like Airbnb, Uber or Twitter are prime examples of this.
However, you might be asking yourself now: “Why did they actually outpace their competitors and became industry leaders?”
Well, the answer is simple: The key to unlocking that type of growth is high velocity testing.
Morgan Brown, VP of Growth at Shopify, actually studied more than 20 of those fast growing companies by conducting detailed research, interviews and case studies.
He was kind enough to share the conclusion of his dedicated research.
“The punchline, after all of that research, is rapid experimentation across the entire company is how these companies win and create breakout growth.”
- Morgan Brown, VP of Growth at Shopify
His statement is re-emphasised by the research conducted by Sean Ellis, founder and former CEO of GrowthHackers that inspected the rapid growth of Twitter from the years 2010 to 2012. He found out that the correlation between the increased growth rate was their increased testing velocity. Twitter moved from 0.5 tests per week to 10 test per week…
So ok, it’s incremental for your growth to continuously test new ideas and concepts, but why is creative optimisation so important?
Creative is what moves the needle within your account. Obviously other factors, like targeting, optimization or bidding strategy are important, but based upon research conducted by technology company Nielsen about 47% of your overall campaign performance by advertising element can be attributed to creative.
The good old days of “hacking” your way to a profitable ROAS by dividing interests into different ad sets and distributing your daily budget into several different campaigns are long gone. The sooner you realise that, the better your campaigns will perform.
Having this mind: how should you go about your testing cycles within your ad account?
Let’s dive into this...
Pssst... if you want the full break-down on our testing methodology, then here is the link to the full blog article.
If you are just starting to run your Facebook Ads, you probably have seen a lot of contradictory advice on the web and many tips you’ll find online, and even here are tips that have worked for that person, that business, and that moment.
So, instead of trying to keep up with the ever-moving Facebook advertising algorithm, the best thing you can do is to establish general principles that help you run your ad account based upon your industry or product and you start testing.
It’s next to impossible to keep up with all the nitty-gritty tactics and things that have worked tremendously well six months ago, but might not lead to success anymore.
When we at VictoryMedia want to validate an idea, concept or iteration, we use a basic testing cycle. This method cannot only be applied to your Facebook Ads, but to testing across your organization as a whole at any point.
We will divide each step into their respective section for you to have a clear understanding of what goes into each step.
Technically, in order to analyse a set of data or outcomes you first need to have data which you can only obtain by running a test prior to this date. However, the majority of our clients at VictoryMedia have previously run Facebooks Ads.
In case you don’t have any data to analyse, make sure to have your Facebook pixel installed properly, so you can start tracking your performance website-wide.
If you already have an idea of a hypothesis, then you can start with that test, however, keep in mind that this is a cycle! You’ll end up in the analysis phase sooner or later.
With that being said: you want to analyse your data based upon the key metrics that we talk about further down in this article.
Based upon that data, you want to identify the biggest drop-off with the greatest potential impact for your campaign.
The best way to do this is to establish a baseline metric prior to your analysis and actively articulate a measurable goal for your creative. We call this an “A-Grade” creative.
Remember your testing goal is to see if your hypothesis was right.
Pro Tip: In order to make sure to accurately measure your creative’s performance, use UTM tags. With UTM tags and the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to filter your data accurately.
After you have analysed your data and identified a drop-off you want to make sure to form a proper hypothesis. Determine your main goal and go from there.
Here you go with our full blog article on forming proper hypothesis for your creative tests.
Do you think that your video could do a better job at successfully grabbing the attention of your audience based upon the data you collected?
Then come up with ideas and keep track of them. It helps to formulate your ideas in an action/consequence format: If [we do this action], then [our audience will behave this way].
Congrats! You have identified multiple hypotheses that you want to test, but unfortunately there is only so much budget and so much time to test all of these hypotheses. Therefore you need to decide which one you want to test first. Easier said than done…
We usually work with the RICE model in order to figure out the effort it takes to launch that particular hypothesis and the possible results this idea can generate.
Of course, if you have the budget and time, you can test multiple hypotheses at once, however, make sure to test them separately, change only one thing and have a large enough sample size to be able to identify a statistically significant outcome.
Here you go with an article on how we normally start our testing hierarchy based upon their importance and historical lift in outcome.
We have finally arrived at the final destination of this never-ending iteration cycle.🥳
Facebook natively gives you the option to run an A/B split-test. However, I would not suggest you do this. Not because they don’t work, actually they tend to bring really clear and significant outcomes, however, they require a lot of budget to be completed.
Therefore, if you are not spending six figures on Facebook already, I would recommend you to run your own A/B split-test.
One thing that you have to keep in mind is that, in order for the test to be accurate, you can only test one thing at a time. What you decide to change is based upon your prior hypotheses that you have set yourself after the analysis of your data.
You can run two different images for example, but then the ad copy, audience and CTA needs to stay the same in order to accurately attribute the uplift or decrease in performance that results from this test.
Pro Tip: Start out by using “bigger” elements. One of the first tests we tend to launch at VictoryMedia after having onboarded a new client is the “Type of creative”-test.
In this test we use different types of content, for example: UGC; a static image and a mashable creative to see how the target audience engages with the particular type of content.
In this scenario we then can steer towards that overall direction rather than launching marginal tests, like CTA button tests.
The advantage of this approach is that we also tend to see greater discrepancies at a lower spend level. Meaning, in order to identify a statistically significant result with a CTA button test, you need to spend a decent amount of time and money.
With “bigger” elements which have a higher impact on the creative experience, you are able to identify uplifts or decreases in performance a lot quicker.
Additionally to this, we have then also successfully tested different “bigger” routes. Because imagine the example of you constantly trying to increase the performance of your UGC content, by launching a new ad copy test and in the meanwhile you would have been able to double your performance right out of the gate if you were to run a static image instead, because your audience just tends to engage with this type of creative a lot better.
How do you measure the performance of your creative?
Seems like an obvious question isn’t? Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), right?
Unfortunately, although seemingly everybody tells you that ROAS is the most important metric to keep track of, especially for your creative evaluation, it is merely an indicator.
I mean, taking a look at ROAS… what does it really tell you? Obviously, it lets you know whether your campaign, ad set or creative is performing profitably, but afterwards?
An unprofitable ROAS does not tell you what is going wrong with your campaign, neither does a profitable ROAS.
That is the reason why we at VictoryMedia have moved away from evaluating campaigns on merely a ROAS-basis and moved to more specific values.
Let me introduce you to our adjusted AIDA formula: attention, interest, desire and action.
AIDA gives you the opportunity to analyse your creative and its different parts and put it into an analytical framework that is relative to the journey you need to put your customers through. This is the exact same framework that we as a Facebook agency that works with eCommerce brands from the pet supply niche to the fashion niche, use on a daily basis.
The metrics that are measured with the AIDA framework are directly correlated with ROAS. Therefore to evaluate and improve those metrics, you indirectly improve your ROAS metrics as well.
At the very top of every sales funnel is attention…
It doesn’t matter how great of a product you have, what value-proposition you have formed or what audience you are targeting, if you are not getting your prospects’ attention, you are literally throwing money out of the window.
This is when we asked ourselves the question: “When can we be certain to have grabbed the attention of a prospect and what metric that is available in the Facebook ad manager can we rely upon to measure this metric and its performance?”
Although we hate to generalise things across different accounts, we normally want to see this metric at least at 25%-30%, if you’re below that you are paying a ton of money for nobody to watch your ad.
According to Elmo Lewis who introduced the original AIDA framework in 1898, we also move to interest.
The core question is: “Does this creative hold the attention of your prospect?” It goes beyond the three-second video view mark and takes the overall average into consideration.
You have successfully grabbed the attention of your prospect and maintained their interest, however, in order for your ad to actually move your prospect through your consumer journey, you need to be able to spike their desire to want to know more about your product or service.
Desire is measured in outbound click-through rates. How many of the people that you have displayed your ad to actually want to know more about your product, its details and how to use it.
Although our benchmark is at around 1%-1.5%, you should always evaluate that metric relative to your own ad account’s average.
Action is measured in the final outcome that you want to achieve with your campaign and creative. In 99% of the cases here at VictoryMedia this means purchases - naturally this metric is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
You might be saying right now: “Well, I though ROAS cannot really tell you anything about what is actually going wrong within your campaign”
And this is completely true and this why you have to take this metric with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, even the best Facebook marketing campaign and creative can only drive the most qualified and cheapest clicks. If the website is unable to let somebody checkout then this metric is natively going to be bad.
However, clicks don’t pay the bills. Just like you, we obsess over profitability and long-term growth of your company. Unfortunately, though if you are not responsible for the complete consumer journey within your company which entails landing page- and conversion-rate optimisation then this metric is not necessarily one that you can influence directly.
But as we have mentioned previously, it is an indicator, so you need to make sure to accurately keep track of this metrics.
Having discussed, how to properly measure your account’s performance: what are the most common mistakes that we see when we onboard a new account or talk to somebody who is struggling with their paid advertising performance.
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