What you Must Know Before Testing Facebook Ads

If you're an experienced marketer, you probably know the value of testing your ads and email campaigns. If you're a novice, testing might sound like difficult chore, more complicated than you're willing to try. In either case, you will definitely benefit from doing some simple testing of your facebook ads. This process is simple and easy, and will improve your results dramatically.

Some things to know when testing Facebook ads:

• Your CTR will decrease over time as your target market becomes familiar with your ad. This means you have to test quickly and rotate your successful ads. Once an ad starts to decrease its CTR over time you should pause it, then restart it again after a few weeks. If the CTR continues decreasing, pause the ad for even longer before starting it again.
• Your test ads will compete against your successful ads. In most cases, your target market will be small and not all of the users will be online at the same time. This means that if you keep your poorly performing ads running, they will hurt your successful ads and lower your CTR overall. For this reason, you cannot test your ads for too long. As soon as you can see which ads that are underperfoming, pause or delete them, as they will dilute your click through rate.
• Facebook intelligently distributes more successful ads. I haven't found any literature from Facebook describing exactly how they distribute the ads- but through testing its obvious that they give more impressions to ads with a higher CTR. If users don't start clicking your ad right away, its likely that Facebook will not distribute this ad very much. You can use their intelligence to determine whether your ads are successful or not, usually in the first couple days of testing. Again, if your ads are underperforming, get rid of them- they are just watering down your results.
• Don't test too many ads within the same target market at the same time. For the same reason as what is described above- if you have too many ads showing to the same market at the same time, they will be fighting against your successful ads. I never test more than 4 ads against each other. A way to work around this is creating a new campaign for your test ads with a much smaller daily budget. This way your budget will max out on those test ads early in the day and leave time for your best ads to display. This won't work if your target group is too small.

For instructions on creating your test ads, please read our post about How to Test your Facebook Ads.