How to use AB testing in your Facebook Ads

Are you using Facebook Ads to market your business? Whether you are spending ten, hundreds or thousands of pounds you should be A/B testing your Facebook Ads. In this post, I will be sharing a few different ways you can A/B test your ads to maximise your conversion rate and your return on investment (ROI).

Marketing is forever evolving and what works for one business doesn’t necessarily work for another. Whilst as a marketing consultant I share my best advice with my clients, I would also recommend that you A/B test your marketing wherever possible. This allows you to learn what works best specifically in your business and will help you to continually improve your marketing.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing (sometimes called split testing) is where you compare two versions of a piece of marketing in order to analyse which version performs best.

Where can A/B testing be used?

If you have a large enough budget and the means to track then technically anything can be A/B tested. However, A/B testing is most commonly used in digital marketing, especially on websites, sales pages, email marketing and social media advertising.

How does A/B testing work?

Ideally in an A/B test, you should be just changing one element. Changing one element makes it easy for you to know exactly why one version performs better than another. There are so many elements that you could test, but some common elements that marketers will change in order to test are: images, fonts, copy, colours and the placement of items within a layout.

A/B TESTING YOUR FACEBOOK ADS

As I just mentioned earlier, social media advertising is one of the areas that A/B testing is often done and luckily for you, it is fairly easy. Facebook makes it super easy to copy an advert so to run an A/B test all you have to do is copy and advert and then decide what element you would like to change. 3 elements you could change in order to A/B test your Facebook Ads are:

Element 1: The Copy

The first part of your Facebook Advert is your copy. When it comes to copy, you can play around with the length. Some people swear by short and sweet copy, but others recommend writing paragraphs and paragraphs. So why not try both and see what works?

Another way you can change your copy is thinking about the introduction line. Should you start with a question or a statement? Would including emojis help grab attention?

Element 2: The Visual

The second part of your Facebook Advert is the visual element. This can be an image, a carousel of images or a video. At the time of writing top marketers are all recommending that you use video. However, maybe you haven’t created any videos yet. Don’t use that as an excuse to not run Facebook Ads. Instead, run an A/B test with two different images and see which one performs best. Or try one image versus a carousel of images.

Or if you do have video content then you can test an image versus the video, test two different videos or the same video but one with captions and one without. Again, lots of marketers say videos with captions perform better, but why not give it a go for yourself.

Element 3: The Targeting

Targeting is where I get super excited. One of the reasons why Facebook Ads are amazing for small business owners and entrepreneurs is because you can create highly targeted adverts, which makes it a highly cost-effective form of advertising. Facebook knows so much information about its users that it is scary. On a personal level it totally freaks me out, but as a marketer it is an amazing opportunity.

Some A/B testing you can run in terms of targeting are:

Demographics – try a different age bracket, single v married or level of education
Location – if you provide a service worldwide then try targeting different countries or even cities
Interests – think of crossover interests and then actually test to find out if your inclinations are true

WHAT TO DO AFTER YOU HAVE RAN YOUR A/B TESTING

So you have taken my advice and ran an A/B test… Now what next? Now you can use that learning to improve your future advertising and other forms of marketing.

For example, if you are running an ongoing Facebook Ads campaign then I would recommend that you run an A/B test for at least a week and then after the week you review and keep the better performing ad running. Then depending on your budget, you can run a new A/B test every month, just a few days, so you can be continually tweaking and improving your ad.

Or maybe you are using your Facebook Ads for defined periods of time, like a launch. Then it that case I would recommend you run an A/B test for 1-3 days and then run the best performing ad for the rest of the launch. However, keep a note of what you learned so next time you launch you can be starting with the better ad and then testing to hopefully to make it even better!

Ready to run an A/B test for yourself ?

I know I covered a lot in this post. However, I really wanted you to understand why A/B testing is important for your business, but also see that it is easy to implement. Whilst A/B testing is commonly used by big businesses, it is rarely used by small businesses and that doesn’t make sense. A/B testing allows you to see what performs best. By running a test for just a few days you can then be confident when you are spending more money in the future that the money is being used as efficiently as possible. Also, you can take the learnings from a Facebook A/B test to your other marketing channels. Maybe an image or headline performed better? Use that in an organic post, a blog post or even your sales page.