How to Test your Facebook Ads

Interested in getting the most out of your ads? Testing is the only way to guarantee your ads are working at their optimal performance. Testing can and should be done with any type of marketing campaign, but here are instructions specifically for Facebook ads.

1. Test your offers.
   Before you can do anything, you need to come up with what you're going to offer. Your ad should be designed to give an offer, the user then clicks your ad to take them to a page on your website to subscribe to that offer. You don't have to be a genius to create great ads, you just have to keep testing until you find something that works.
   
   To do this, start by writing two different headlines for your ad. The headline is the bold blue text that appears above the image. Writing headlines is an art of its own, much too complicated to go over in this article alone. If you don't know where to begin, start looking at other ads to get some ideas.
   
   Next, write two different offers for the body text of the ad (the portion below the image). Your body text should give them a reason to click the ad right then- here's an example of a successful ad I created:
   
   Target: Women within 50 miles of San Diego
   Headline: Become a Jewelry Designer
   Text: Learn to make jewelry for yourself, for friends, or to sell. Click here to sign up for a free class in San Diego.
   
   Now that you have two headlines and two offers, you can pair them up to make four different ads. After a day or two you'll be able to clearly see which headline and which body text is the most effective. Once you see which ads are not performing, immediately delete or pause those ads, as they will bring down your overall CTR.
   
   
2. Test Your Images
   Quite possibly, the greatest benefit of Facebook ads is the ability to display an image with your ad. In my experience, the image you choose will be the largest determinant of your CTR. You may need to purchase stock photos, but the right images will be well worth buying for your ads.
   
   To start, resize several photos to 110x80 pixels (if you don't have an image editing software you can do this free at http://www.photoshop.com or there are several free programs you can download- or your digital camera should come with some basic software which will allow you to resize your images.)
   
   Pick four of the images you think will be the most attention getting for your target market. There's no way to know for sure which ones will be most effective, which is why we test. Now create four ads with your most effective headline and body text (from the testing you described above), each with a different image. After a day or two of the ads running, you'll clearly see which images are drawing a higher CTR. Pause or delete the ads with images that are getting the lowest CTR. You can repeat this process infinitely to constantly refine your ad to have the absolute most effective image.

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.