Your ultimate guide for designing Facebook Ads — Part 3
Make a successful campaign with FB Ad A/B testing!
Hello, good to see you again!
I hope you enjoyed the Part-1 and the Part-2 part of this blog (fingers crossed!) and must be ready to explore a few more areas of FB Ads design!
As you know from the earlier blogs, FB ad designs can be daunting. But there are some formulas that you can use to make your campaign successful. To make a successful campaign, you need to know your users, what they like, things which they want to interact with, their tastes, and what not!
So how do you determine what your users like and what works the best for you?
Well, the answer is A/B testing!
So, without further ado, let’s fasten our seat belts and start the journey!
What is A/B testing?
Well, before we dive into A/B testing, just wanna remind you, they say it right!. ‘There are two kinds of people in the world’ and so are your users on Facebook.
So, what is A/B testing? AdEspresso states A/B testing is a tactic by which you find out which ad headlines, body copy, images, call-to-action, or a combination of the above work best for your target audience. Moreover, you can experiment with several Facebook audiences and ad placements to know who’s your perfect audience and which placements they can be reached with.
Moreover, A and B are the versions of your FB ad where version A acts as the control. While version B implements at least one variable and it is set to compete with version A.
Usually, FB ads are run for a couple of days to a few weeks. Once you have some solid data, a conclusion will be made whether one set performed better than the other set or sets of ads. An advantage of A/B testing is that you can quickly test multiple FB ads’ designs and target audiences to uncover the most effective ones!
Why FB ads AB testing works?
Ohh, by now you must be curious to know why FB ads A/B testing works for your designs and you should run A/B testing for your campaigns at times. Well, as a designer I must say gathering all the vague and general information on ad designs, may it be, colors, layouts, fonts, etc. from Google, Pinterest, Behance or Dribble will give you a hit or miss outcome. And it not only consumes more bandwidth but makes your FB ad designs fail too!
Through A/B testing, you can narrow down your colors, content placement, design element proportions, and whatnot! By knowing which design elements trigger your target audience, your design strategy can give you positive results as well as put a foundation for your future campaign designs.
Would like to know how you can take the guesswork burden off your shoulders?
Well, let’s dive right into that part!
How to do FB AB testing?
From guesswork to data-driven campaigns, FB ads A/B testing shows the winning strategy. For example, by changing design copy, colors, fonts, layouts, etc. you can significantly improve your FB ads performance. But now you must be wondering how to go about it & how we can run A/B testing. Well, let’s break this into few simple pointers which we can implement in the creatives while designing for FB ads.
1. Do one variable at a time:
Colors, image, copy, layout, fonts, logo placement …. (this list goes on!)
Many designers fall into the trap of testing everything in one go. If you A/B test everything at the same time, it will be hard for you to point which change worked and produced great outcomes. Testing multiple variables at once can consume even several weeks to produce any results. Testing just one variable, let’s say background colors would help to create smaller tests that let you successfully track the measurable improvements needed for your campaign.
So remember, Elise Blaha Cripe saying, ‘Focus on one thing at a time!’
2. Test something measurable:
Since you are determining what design works or not, your A/B test results are most valuable to you. In order to analyze your test results, make sure your hypothesis is measurable. In other words, make sure your hypothesis is easy to understand, clear, and can be determined with an A/B test.
For example, your hypothesis can be as simple as ‘What kind of CTA buttons does my target audience response the best to?’ and this can be determined by designing and implementing 2 different styled buttons on the same FB ad creative with the exact same content.
3. Non-design variables:
Well, as you must be aware that we are solely exploring the FB ads A/B testing related to design pointers, there are other variables too that will determine the outcomes of your FB ads. For example the budget, time of the campaign launch, target audience, etc which will have more impact on your ads. You can connect with your Digital Marketing Specialist on this for more!
Best practices of A/B testing:
By now, you must be having some idea about how to do FB ad’s A/B testing. Well, As I have seen having a basic idea won’t bear fruit for your campaigns, you must remember few best practices for better results. Below I’m listing a few pointers which I take into consideration while designing ads for A/B testing:
- Conduct multiple A/B tests for better and more accurate results. And don’t forget to use just one variable for each test.
- Make sure your ad sets are significantly varied from each other.
- If possible, increase your FB marketing budget to avoid under-delivery of your A/B test ad creatives.
- Make sure your digital marketing team targets a large audience.
Design variables:
Well, till now we have seen what FB ads A/B testing is and learned the importance of it in a successful campaign. Well, you already know social media is a highly visual medium. You need to remember users inclined to click on an ad if their eyes are drawn to an eye-catchy creative. You as a designer need to make sure the visuals you design are liked by your target audience. And to determine what visuals work, there is no reason why anyone shouldn’t test certain design variables of their FB ads. Now, let’s see some design variations which I use in my FB ads A/B testing.
1. With the brand logo vs. without the logo:
Well, there are times when people associate a product more than a brand. To know what your audience associates themselves with, you can run a campaign with creatives having the brand logo and without the brand logo.
2. With a CTA button vs. without a CTA button:
Remember earlier we looked into some of the best practices of FB ads that had to have a CTA button? Well, you need to know there isn’t any formula. Sometimes people prefer a cleaner creative without any CTA button. To find out, you can do A/B testing with creatives having a CTA and without a CTA button.
3. Background colors:
Red, yellow, blue, green, or something else? How do you determine which color your audience likes? Well for that, you can make a variation of the same creative with different background colors and see which one has got the most engagement.
4. Content placement:
Just like BG colors, people prefer the placement of the content which they feel is easy to read. For example, for some people, the content on the top left corner grabs their attention more than the content on the top right corner. To know what your audience prefers, run a FB ad A/B test campaign for a certain time period and analyze the results. Remember, you can place your content anywhere, may it on the top left, center, bottom right, or anywhere!
5. Creative with creative content vs. creative without creative content:
As you know, social media is a highly visual medium. Some prefer the ads which are like regular posts on the timeline while the others love to have some information about the product when they see it. Determine the one which will go through FB ads A/B test campaign and use it derivates for your next ones!
6. FB ad creative with illustrations vs. FB ad creative with real-life images:
Well, at times people associate a product with some feelings. In that case, you as a designer need to use a real-life image. On the other hand, some people prefer custom-designed illustrations. Through FB ads A/B test, you can find out the one which works best for your target audience.
7. FB ad creative with people image vs. FB ad creative with product image:
Some analyses have shown people’s images on FB ads work better than a FB ad without people. It’s not about having a specific gender or attractive faces, it’s all about showing people and lifestyles that represent your brand. To have an idea about what kind of audience you have, it’s best to test product images versus images with people and see which one attracts more engagement through FB ad A/B testing.
8. Long video FB ad vs. short video FB ad:
Remember Jeffrey Katzenberg launching Quibi? Although it shut down after few months, one thing is clear that there are people who like shorter videos than a longer ones. Run a FB ad A/B testing campaign when you make a video next time to know which one you have to go with in the future!
9. FB single creative ad vs. FB carousel ad:
Remember seeing different types of FB ads in Part-1? Well, FB allows you to make both a carousel and a single image ad. If your product or service has multiple benefits that can’t be squeezed into a single ad then run an FB ad A/B test. On one hand, keep a single benefit and on the other, keep multiple benefits and see if your audience is dragged to a single benefit or multiple!
10. FB ad creative with product image vs. FB ad creative without product image:
Well, just like we have seen in People image vs. Product image, some target audience groups are inclined towards overall feelings or benefits, a product imprints in their lives rather than the product itself. And if you are wondering about how to check that with your target audience, run a FB ad A/B testing campaign and find it out!
It is up to you now:
Well…
Again…
Oops!!
I’ve written another very long blog and I hope you didn’t doze off or closed the tab!
Remember, here I’ve talked about only a few segments where design can be a part of. But as we have seen earlier, understanding FB ads takes time. Understanding it from the marketing side as well is as important as understanding it from the design side. Well, these blogs were mainly on the design side. If you are a FB ads designer and would like to explore more, then don’t forget to check out:
- Facebook Ads for Business by Facebook
- Facebook & Google Ads Guides by AdEspresso
- 100 Resources for Facebook Advertising Beginners by AdvertiseMint
- Essential Facebook Marketing Resources: A Complete Guide by Lisa D Jenkins on SocialMediaExaminer
Well, it’s up to you now, how creatively you use these pointers and implement them in your next campaign. See how your target audience reacts to it. So, set the sail and explore the world of FB ads!
If you’ve designed a few ads, run an A/B test, find out what worked great for your campaigns, learned some tips and tricks, don’t forget to share and tag me on Twitter @VananidhiKalkur and I will be happy to see!
I hope you guys have really enjoyed as much as me writing 3 blogs on Facebook ad designs.
Well, that’s all from my end for now. But soon I will be coming up with few more blogs.
So, fasten your seat belts and stay tuned!
But until then,
Signing off! 👋
