How to Test Facebook Ads Creative in 2024

what's up marketers I'm going to show you how to test your Facebook ads creative in 2024 I'm going to show you the exact framework that the brands that I work with used to test thousands of AD creatives every single month so let's break down exactly what we're going to be learning today number one I'm going to show you exactly how to structure these tests inside of ads manager and how when and if I'm using Advantage Plus I'm also going to show you how to strategize and develop an effective creative test this happens before you get

an ads manager I'm also going to talk about which creatives you should test first or next and how I balance iterations versus Net new testing there's going to be a ton to go over in this video so let's go ahead and hop inside of ads manager and I can show you exactly how this test is structured so first we're going to start off with a really quick account structure overview now I am going to be updating my account structures for 2024 but the real basic structure is you're seeing one advantage plus shopping campaign in there

and then you're also seeing a testing campaign in there now this has not changed since I created my last creative testing video for every single creative test let's go ahead and hop in here you are going to be actually creating a new ads set for every single creative test so you can see in here we got test one this is a features point out image we have test two in US versus them let's go ahead and hop in this test really quickly and what it looks like oh okay we have a few different ads in

there we have up to three versions and we can also see okay there's a little test description of how we are actually making these variants a better example of this would be something like okay for this US versus them we're going to be comparing against a generic industry maybe we'll include a customer quote um or also be comparing that against a direct competitor now a few big questions to answer about this structure number one why should you segment your creative test versus your other campaigns number one this is to protect performance performance what you'll see

when you are adding new creatives into adsets or campaigns that you already have running that is going to affect the performance sometimes it'll be positive sometimes it'll be negative you don't want to unintentionally tank the performance of an adset or a campaign that's working well by adding in Creative that doesn't actually end up being effective also you want to make sure that your test actually gets spend a lot of times what's really common is if you take a creative and add it into an already performing adet or even an ASC campaign you'll see that your

new creative will not get any spend so you won't get any learnings from it so that's why we keep it in its own campaign and intentionally throttle money into it and number two for me personally it's just way easier to read and digest data and it's also really easy to break down hey how much did we spend on testing this month versus our business as usual campaigns and finally it is easier to scale this way in my experience because you will be in in essence scaling in a few different places I call this horizontal scaling

right you're not just scaling vertically with the budgets but if you are able to scale up a specific creative inside its own campaign and inside its own asset while also dripping that creative into the ASC Advantage Plus shopping campaign or also putting it into your other campaigns if you have those going that is also another reason why I like having both of those there cuz you're also able to reach new audiences too inside of the creative testing campaign I am primarily testing on a completely broad audience but maybe for some of my other brands they

have other campaigns where they are using some targeting not as common these days but they definitely have the ASC campaigns and because of the nature of the ads that are inside of those campaigns are different you are reaching different audiences and number two just to underscore this all of the targeting inside of the creative testing campaign is Broad the reason why we do this is because broad is the most scalable audience and also if you have other targeting inside side of your Facebook ads manager broad is also more likely to work on those other audiences

and honestly this is not something that I fret over very much even for brands that are spending as little as $5,000 per month they are also testing their creatives on Broad now another thing I want to talk about really quickly are the variations of ads so when we hopped into the creative testing campaign you saw the different ad sets and we went to see how many ads were inside of that creative testing campaign you could see that there were three variations for most of them I am generally recommending Brands now do two to four variations

of every single creative test and one of the differences I've seen this year is that these variations need to be much bigger swings in order for you to get the best chance of actually getting a winning creative more on that in the next section about how to actually develop an effective test another reason why I like to add variations into every single creative test is this bakes in iterative testing even into net New Concepts which means no matter what even if a creative doesn't ultimately do that well for you you're able to walk away with

concrete data from every single test regardless of the results you can see oh this one had a better clickthrough rate it was better at actually driving traffic to the website or it had higher hook rates so we were able to see oh this one did a much better job at getting attention and you can document those learnings from every single test now another thing I want to talk about is the budget how much should you budget for these creative tests now generally I work with brands that are spending more than 100K per month on their

Facebook ads and I almost always start my creative tests at $200 a day this is going to help most brands get out of the learning phase or learning Limited in a good amount of time however I know that that's not super accessible for a lot of Brands what I will say is that the days of the micro budgets like the $5 adset those are totally over that does not work at all anymore in 2024 but I have still seen success for Brands trying their testing at $50 today or up to 100 so that's that's really

the absolute minimum I'd say for a creative test and ultimately you're going to want to let that run for about 7 days and sometimes I'm getting really early reads on a creative and if I see that it's doing really really well after 3 to 4 days I'll go ahead and start to scale it up 20% to pressure test it and see if we can get a little more scale out of it in place or if it totally flunks and all metrics are bad after 3 4 days I just go ahead and turn it off I

don't stress about it another big question I get asked is should you use or should you use CBO this is honestly a media buyer's dealer's Choice it really depends on the media buyer I have seen both strategies work really really well what I will say if you're using CBO you really need to make sure that you are adding adset minimums and maximums so that you can make sure that you're throttling certain spin through there I personally use because I think it's a lot easier to get the read on what's working if I am manually increasing

and decreasing the budgets but that's just cuz I'm a bit of an old school media buyer and I like to have the pulse acutely on the performance of a creative test but a lot of people would disagree with me Charlie the disruptor now let's talk about how to strategize and develop a great creative test now if you're going to be developing a creative test the first thing you really need to do is look at the big picture of what you want to be testing so are you going to be testing a new format are you

going to be conducting a messaging test are you going to be trying out a new angle or potenti a new hook or a new Creator I find that most of the time people want to try out a new format right so oh maybe they've tried a features point out or an S versus them but now they want to try a Founders ad and they want to try a bullet point style ad something like that so once you decide okay this is the overarching type of test that I want to conduct then you're going to need

to do two things you're going to need to first come up with a hypothesis and essentially what the hypothesis is going to answer is why do you want to make this test and why do you think it's a good idea I'm going to show you an example in a second the second thing that you're going to want to consider are the variables that you want to test or the variations that you want to test a lot of times this ends up being a messaging test but more and more since we're taking bigger swings it's going

to be a combination of messaging and imagery tests sometimes the variations look very very different there's a few reasons why you should always come up with a hypothesis before you make a creative test number one it's going to make you a much more critical thinker and it's going to allow you to prioritize which creative tests you should be doing first versus which ones maybe you should develop more over the longer period so here's what it actually looks like in my reporting right this is an example of a creative test where we had the testing criteria

so the hypothesis here was hey maybe if we reference Tik Tok and twitch we will drive an increase in sales now this isn't actually a good one what a much better one would be would be also giving insight to why this would be be a creative test I think that this is a good creative test because we're seeing a lot of our users mentioning Tik Tok and twitch on their other organic communities or this seems to be a trend that's working more broadly on the platform and we want to see if it can work with

us something like that and then of course you can see the variations and variables right there too back to the idea of having bigger swings in your iterations or your variations these bigger swing tests seem to have much better results so when you were thinking about the different variations that you want to test especially if you're just starting out you don't want to do as many one variable testing again unless you're a more experienced brand and there's a very specific type of learning that you're after if you're going after a Pure Performance play your variations

should honestly be as different as possible so that you have the best chance of actually reaching a pocket of users that ends up with a creative that is more scalable and in the end it's mostly about creating uniquely high potential ad creatives especially in the beginning you're going to be able to get messaging learnings from your test especially as you do more and more and those same light bulb messaging learnings that you could get from split testing things really concretely you're going to learn those things anyways after a longer period of time and I'm going

to show you a few examples of this towards the end yeah so it's interesting M and bow is doing a test right here these are the really typical super split test they are only split testing the messaging again they're a bigger brand so they probably have something really concrete to learn here I generally wouldn't recommend this for brand starting off or for most brands really again unless you want to have a super concrete learning I actually really like the other tests that they're doing here where the background and the setting is different and they also

have a different testimonial with each one which I actually think is giving them a much better opportunity to succeed and since they already have so many creative tests and learnings in the mix they're probably going to be able to to and extract a learning from that test while also having the most potential for success another example of a really good creative test is this Croc's example right here right so they wanted to test some Nostalgia Microsoft Paint style esque marketing that is targeting both more gen Z as well as Millennial right because of that nod

to Microsoft Paint and what I think is really cool here is they could have just split tested the language but since they were able to do honestly really different formats within the same strategy they were able to position themselves for a higher chance of success okay so what creatives should you test first or what creatives should you test next generally when I first start working with a brand or if a brand is brand new I like to conduct what I call Rapid format testing and this is where I generally find the most success and and

what that means is if we hop back into this ad account you can see oh she's conducting a whole bunch of different format tests here it's not really a messaging test even even though that is happening in the different variations in the ad level now the reason why I conduct rapid format testing is because the new hook rate is more like 1 second so how your ad actually just shows up on someone's phone is actually going to be a pretty big determination if they're going to engage with it or not so the way that I

prioritize you know deciding which formats to test first is number one is there any low hanging fruit what haven't they tested yet that seems like it could be a potentially big win there a certain format that I've seen work across the board that they haven't tried that's definitely something that I would have them try then and then it's going to be a combination of hey what do I think is going to have the biggest performance gains and also what is going to take the shortest amount of time to make because some things are going to

take more time so first I'm going to prioritize everything by potential performance gains and then I'm going to reorganize it by okay what can we actually execute on in the shortest amount of time sure a Founders ad might be a huge unlock for a brand especially if it's a huge Studio shoot and they're investing a lot of time and money into it but most brands can't do that tomorrow they could do an ugly ad tomorrow and get really great results out of that so I really like to prioritize based on a Confluence of performance and

time and for most brands I'm making sure that they've tested out these formats that I see convert again and again across Industries so things like a features benefit point out US versus them before and afters problem solution ugc Founders ads testimonial ads statistic ads ugly ad ads now let's talk about iterations so going back to our creative testing campaign so let's say that we conducted a few creative tests and we're starting to see results and we have a few winners and a few things that didn't work so well the first thing you're going to do

is you're going to analyze the tests on an individual level why do you think that this specific creative one out over this creative generally there's going to be one to two really clear winners very very seldom do I see all variations win so I think a really good example of this is like this array bullet point Point ad okay so we're looking at this ad and let's say that the D blow in under 1 hour one okay interesting we are seeing that this specific headline worked for them cool now what you're going to do is

you're going to go through the rest of your creative tests and you're going to do that and extract learnings across all of them and then you're going to take a step back and see if there are similarities across all of the winning ad creative was there anything similar in the messaging in the imagery in the Creator in the angle or even the format that could ultimately signal a larger learning so say we take a look at the bullet point ad right along with a winning ugly ad and a winning ugc ad and we look at

these together and say okay is there a larger learning here and interestingly enough there is a learning that we can see from this is actually within the messaging which is hey using the phrase debloating in under 1 hour seems to really increase conversions for us probably because number one it's solving a problem but it's also giving a time frame for that problem and that time frame is really really attractive just 1 hour that's awesome so having that learning and knowing that that type of message is resonating within a certain audience I would then think okay

what other types of formats can we spin up quickly and effectively that could also increase conversions something like a headline style ad or even a gif ad that has a little bit more movement and longer term as we're also creating more Creator content and developing bigger content across platforms maybe even across TV across whatever how can we include that learning so that we can not only continue building off of it but also continuing to pressure test it and to challenge our assumptions about that learning now another thing too when you're thinking about iterations is you

know if you're a multi-product business and you see oh this specific format works for this product that's another iteration you should make you should do it for all your other products again this is something that aray is doing really really well you know I wish that I could tell you guys oh yeah you know test these 10 creatives and then do messaging testing and it's it's super different for every single brand and the beauty of it is is that every single strategist is going to approach it in a little bit different way but I really

believe that by starting off with the format and then taking those learnings those broader learnings that you see repeating as you do more and more tests and enveloping those into your larger strategy that's where I tend to see the most success but again and you need to continuously challenge those learnings which is why you do iteration testing within every single net New Concept so even though we saw hey this deblo in under 1 hour is working we're going to test that with a really new statement or a new Golden Nugget thought or idea or review

from our users this is also why research and going over your comments and your reviews over the long term and as a long-term strategy is really important because as long as you keep building off of what your customers are telling you and what your customers are reacting to aka the data that's how you're going to continually build your creative strategy and that's honestly the only way that you should be testing your creatives in 2024 if you guys liked this video please give me a like And subscribe those small things really really do help me out

with me and my channel I love you I'll see you next week