One of the most important things when running Facebook Ads, is split testing. Not only does this help you find big winners more easily, but it also gives you valuable data that can be used in your future Facebook marketing campaigns.
So what is split testing?
In ads, split testing is when you run the same exact ad more than once, but each time there is only 1 variable that changes. By changing that 1 variable, we then know exactly what is benefiting or hurting that ads performance. Some of the most basic variables to test are age and gender.
Facebook allows us to target like no other advertising platform available. Split testing allows us to take that advertising power to the next level and really dial in our audience.
TeeSpring has been very big lately, so I will use an example about selling a TeeSpring shirt. Let’s say we are selling a shirt that revolves around Breaking Bad. If I simply make an ad to only target people who show an interest in Breaking Bad, Facebook will give me an audience size of about 8 million. Now that is very a large. How do we know if women or men purchase more? How do we know if the younger folks buy more then the older folks? We don’t! But we can easily figure this out.
Instead of running 1 ad to the whole audience of 8 million people, we will run about 8 ads.
First we will split test Male vs Female. From there each gender will have 4 age groups. 18-25, 26-35, 36-45, 46+. So now our ads will look like this.
Ad #1 Male 18-25
Ad #2 Male 26-35
Ad #3 Male 36-45
Ad #4 Male 46+
Ad #5 Female 18-25
Ad #6 Female 26-35
Ad #7 Female 36-45
Ad #8 Female 46+
By doing this, we will be able to raise our ROI tremendously. Depending on your niche, different age groups or genders will bring in a better ROI. You may have 1 group that converts terribly and it could be bringing down your profit, but you would never know unless you do a split test.
Moving on. Now we have all 8 ads up, a day has passed and we notice Ad # 3, Ad# 4, and Ad #8 are not performing well. We would pause those ads, and start raising our daily budget on the ads that are performing well. By doing this, we are minimizing our losses, and raising our profits.
I’m going to wrap things up since this got a bit long. I just want you to know that split testing goes well beyond the example I gave you here. This was more geared towards people trying to make money with TeeSpring on Facebook. Split testing can be done with the picture you use in your ad, call to actions, colors, button placement, literally EVERYTHING can be split test. It all just depends on what your working on. If you have any questions, leave a comment below.
-Pat Imperiale
