Some marketers will throw up one or two ad copies, then be satisfied with their results. This is one of the best ways to fail as an internet marketer and almost never have a long term ad campaign that continues to generate profits. Not only will your banners go stale and people will keep seeing the same ads over and over again, but your CPM costs will continue increase as less people click, but still see your ad.
I wrote a post a while back on split testing Facebook ads, and thought it would make for a great recap post on PPC.org, simply because of the importance of testing and how it can affect your bottom line.
Let’s take a look at a weight loss campaign that I was running on Facebook a while back. In this specific campaign I was able to run over 30,324,503 impressions and receive 27,538 clicks to my offer. As mentioned, this was a weight loss related offer and Facebook isn’t approving as many of these type of offers as they used to, but the concept of split testing the images is still the same.
There were a bunch of different images used in this campaign, but the ones below were the top performers. It’s also very important to know that these ads were to a very generic audience, which was just “males” and certain age groups. Also, the text for all five campaigns were the same, only the images were different.
Before looking at the actual numbers, take a look at the images and see which you would be most likely to click.
Just take a look at the numbers for the top image and the bottom image. The top image received nearly 600,000 less impressions than the bottom image, but it had over 1,000 more clicks, which is around 40% more clicks. All of this was due to the fact that the top image had a click through rate of .12, and the bottom image had a lower ctr of .07.
The actual difference in performance and profit would be huge. Imagine settling with only using two of these images for testing, instead of all five?
For those of you wondering what the total campaign stats looked like, here are the figures straight from Facebook. And yes, this was a direct linking ad campaign.
I can not stress enough how important it is to continually split test your ad copy and remove under performing banners and ad copy.
