The Best Facebook Ads Testing Strategy (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

So you're running Facebook ads, but you have no idea if they're actually working. You're getting some clicks, maybe even a sale or two, but you're also watching your budget disappear and that can be stressful. I get it. Facebook ads can feel like a money pit when you're not sure what's working. But there is a smart, low budget way to test your ads before spending big. In this video, I'm breaking down a five phase Facebook ads testing strategy to help you figure out what actually works so you can scale the winners and ditch the dud. By the end, you'll know exactly how to plan, test and track your ads without burning your budget. Let's dive right in with the number one reason most business owners fail with Facebook ads and how you can avoid it. Most business owners make this mistake testing too many things at once. If you change your creative copy and audience at the same time, you'll have no idea what change actually caused the results. The Fix Test one variable at a time. Find a winning creative, then find the best audience, then refine your copy, then choose the best performing placements and scale from there. These are the five phases that we'll go through in this video so your ads do not fail. Now, before we dive into the five phase testing strategy, there's something you absolutely need to get right first. Think about this. When someone sees a really cool ad from you and they want to see more content, where do they go? If your social media pages, your website and your brand presence aren't optimized, you're leaving money on the table. People check out your profile, your posts, and your reviews before deciding to trust you. That's why setting up a strong online presence is just as important as running great ads. If you want to know the exact strategies to organically set up your presence online, you're going to want to grab the free marketer's guide to Meta that I have linked in the description. This guide doesn't just teach you how to run ads, it walks you through how to set up your business properly online, grow your audience organically, and make sure that your brand looks legit it when people check you out because ads bring people in, but your digital presence, that's what makes them stay. So if you want to build a brand that actually converts traffic into customers, then grab that guide. It is linked in the description. Now let's get in to tracking your ad performance. Before we even run an ad, we need a tracking system in place. If you're not tracking, you won't know what's actually driving results. And that's how budgets disappear fast. The best way to track ad tests is with a simple spreadsheet. So let's jump into the one that I've set up for this video. Here I have columns for Ad Creative. So this will be a description of the image, video or carousel that we use for the ad audience. Here we will put who we're targeting copy. This is the different headlines and primary text that we're testing. And then we have various columns for metrics like click through rate and cost per click. We'll go through what those mean shortly. Now, if you're thinking, what if I don't want to just throw money behind something I don't know will actually work, here's the secret. Instead of guessing which creative will perform well, test them organically. First, the posts that naturally get the most engagement, Those are the ones worth boosting with paid ads. This way, you're investing into concepts that already resonate with your audience, increasing the chances of a strong return on ad spend. For more tips like this on making your paid ads more profitable, check out chapter four of that guide that we just talked about. Now you'll see along the bottom here that I have different tabs for the first three phases, and each of these tabs are identical to the first page we looked at. We're going to be filling this out as we go, so let's get into phase one. The biggest driver of success in Facebook ads is the creative itself. That's why we test visuals first while keeping everything else the same. Let's pretend that we are a small coffee shop in downtown Toronto and we want to promote our pumpkin Spice Latte. Here are three different creative variations. We have a static image of the drink, a short cozy video of the drink, and a cute carousel with drink ingredients. You'll see the descriptions of these creatives are all inserted into the spreadsheet, but the audience and the copy are all the same. Here's how to set up this test in Facebook Ads Manager. Create one campaign with your goal. Since we want to make people more aware and build excitement for our pumpkin Spice Latte, we'll set the campaign objective to engagement. Within that campaign, we'll create one ad set focused on our target audience, which is coffee lovers in downtown Toronto. And now we will create three ad variations. Only change the creative for each ad and keep everything else the same. Let these ads run for three to five days with a small budget, $5 to $20 per day per ad to gather data. Stick with me through this Next part, it is crucial to understand what each metric means to make sure that your ads are successful. So three to five days later, after we've run our first test with different creatives, it's time to analyze the results. But what numbers actually matter? Here's how to choose the right metrics based on your campaign goal. For awareness campaigns, you'll want to look at Ad Recall Lift. So this measures how many people remember your ad after seeing it. Engagement Rate this tracks likes, comments, shares and other interactions. Cost per 1000 impressions or CPM shows how cost efficiently your ad is being delivered. Below $10 is ideal for most industries. For traffic and engagement campaigns, look at Click through Rate or ctr. This measures the percentage of people that are clicking on your ad. 1% to 3% is considered standard. Cost per click or CPC shows how much you pay per click. Under $1 is optimal, but it depends on your industry. For leads, app promotion and sales campaigns, look at Conversion Rate. This measures the percentage of users who take the desired action. So buy, sign up, download, etc. 2% to 5% is strong, but again it depends on the industry. Return on ad spend or ROAS. This shows how much revenue you earn for every $1 spent on ads. A ROAS above 3 indicates a profitable campaign, while below 2 suggests that adjustments are needed. Seeing as we're doing an engagement campaign, let's take a look at our click through rate and cost per click. You can see here that for the Click through rates, AD1A had 2% pretty decent engagement AD1B had 4.5%. This means more people clicked so the ad is more engaging and AD1C had 1.2%. This ad is less engaging and because we're only testing the creative right now, we can narrow the cost down to that. Now if we look at our cost per click, you can see here that AD1A cost $0.80, AD1B was $0.40 and AD1C was $1.20. So if you have a high cost per click, your ad isn't resonating with the audience and Facebook charges more. If you have a lower cost per click, Facebook sees your ad as relevant and charges you less. So from all of this we can clearly see that AD1 be the video performed the best because it has the best cost per click and click through rate of all three ads. So we'll move on to phase two with this creative. The ones that didn't perform as well can get paused, adjusted or deleted. But before we move on to phase two, you may have a couple questions what if two ADs perform equally well? If two creatives are tied in performance, extend the test for another two to three days. Or analyze deeper engagement metrics like comments and shares to find the stronger performer. What if an ad performs well in every relevant metric except conversions? If an ad gets tons of clicks but no conversions, the problem may not be your ad, it could be your landing page. Make sure that your offer, website speed and checkout process are optimized before pausing the ad. Now, what if all ads underperform? If none of your ads are performing well, don't scale yet. Instead, tweak the creative, the messaging or the audience before moving on to the next phase. So now that we've got that out of the way, let's move on to phase two. We found the best creative, so now let's test different audiences. In the phase two tab of the spreadsheet, we have three new ads all with the same creative and now we are just editing the audience type. I have three different audiences here in the spreadsheet. To set this up on Facebook, duplicate the ad set to create two more ad sets each targeting a different audience. For AD Set 1, we'll keep it the same to local coffee lovers. AD Set 2 will be local students and young professionals in Toronto. And Ad set three will be a lookalike audience of past customers. This is one of the most powerful ways to find high quality leads. If you have HubSpot, you can actually sync your customer data to meta ads and let Facebook find similar people for you. This is a game changer for improving ad performance. Make sure within each ad set to pause the losing ads from the previous test. If you haven't already deleted them again, run each ad for three to five days at five to twenty dollars per day per ad. After three to five days we analyze performance and choose the best performing audience. So we can see here from looking at the same metrics as before that ad number one, Local Coffee Lovers is the winner. So this ad will move on to phase three. Now we take our best creative, which is our video and our winning audience which is Local Coffee Lovers. And now we will test copy variations. If you want to learn how to write engaging ad copy, the Marketer's guide to Meta covers that too. As you can see we have these all listed here in the spreadsheet. Easy enough to copy and paste into Facebook Ads Manager. Now within our winning ad set. So video targeted at local coffee lovers. We will duplicate the ad twice to create three ads and then I will change only the copy of each ad. Ad One is relatable copy. Ad two is engagement driving. Ad three is pushing urgency. Again, run each ad five to twenty dollars per day and after three to five days we check our metrics to find the best performing copy. We can see that AD3, the one that created urgency, is the winner. Disable all your lower performing ads and let's move on to the next phase. Now we are testing where your ad works best. Keep the best performing ad running with the same budget of five to twenty dollars a day. Run this ad on all placements, feeds, stories, etc. Then in a few days take a look at where your ad is being placed and turn off the underperforming placements. This allows your budget to go further on the placements that actually work. Once you've narrowed down your placements, it's time to scale. So we found a winning ad. We have the best creative, the best audience and the best copy and where to place the ad. So it's time to scale our budget. Carefully duplicate the winning ad set into a new campaign for fresh results. Increase your budget by 20 to 30% every three to five days. Scaling too fast resets performance. So you want to do this slowly and intentionally. During this phase you can continue to test small tweaks so different call to action buttons, slight copy variations until you find the ultimate winning Facebook ad. So there you go. We just covered a complete Facebook ads testing strategy that helps you find high converting ads without wasting money. If you want to make sure that your ads don't just bring in clicks but actually turn into real business growth, then grab the Marketer's guide to Meta in the description. It covers everything from setting up a high converting ad strategy to tracking the right data so you're not just guessing, you're making smarter, more profitable decisions. If this was helpful, hit that like button and consider subscribing because I'm breaking down more must know digital marketing strategies every week. Thanks so much for hanging out with me. My name is Bridget o' Rourke and I will see you in the next one. Bye Sam.