Increase Social Advertisement Efficiency with A/B Testing!

Today’s social media profile users are inundated with posts, tweets, and messages, content and of course ads. So how do you break through the clutter? How do you capture enough attention to get users to click on your content, your ad and finally how do you get them to convert or take a desired action?

Simple, you optimize everything! Although best practice will help you create a better post, tweet or ad, it won’t allow you to completely optimize it for your audience. The only way to truly optimize is to create and implement an A/B testing strategy. For those that are less familiar with the concept, an A/B test allows you to run two ads concurrently where only one element is different. Although it’s tempting to test multiple variables at one time, these types of test, multi-variant tests, are actually more difficult to understand and optimize as it could be one or a number of variables that compel the user to convert.

So how do you set up an A/B test?

First consider what you could test.

Here are just a few of the options to consider (but remember to choose only one!)

• Type of advertisement
• Headline
• Copy
• Graphic
• Placement of elements in the advertisement
• Call-to-Action

Second, create the first advertisement using best practice information (how would you create the ad if you weren’t going to do an A/B test?). Then consider what one element you will change, and what that small change would be.

An example would be to test a call-to-action. First create a hypothesis: example – changing the color of the call-to-action will draw more attention and drive a better click through rate. As you’ll note, we did not say change the button entirely. Again the point is to change only one thing, if you were to change the color and the text you wouldn’t know which piece drives more conversions over time. But if you test just the one element, the color of a call-to-action, then over time you’ll be able to note that your audience responds better to that specific variable and can incorporate that winning element in your next campaign.

Over time and with multiple A/B tests you’ll be able to optimize the various elements of your advertisements to drive higher conversions rates and return on investment (ROI). If you have any questions please feel free to comment or contact us to see how we can help you optimize your social media strategies. Happy testing!

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