Facebook make it extremely easy for you to create adverts that are targeted towards your specific audience.
You can create an advert to promote your Facebook page or websites outside of Facebook.
These adverts can generate a surprisingly high number of click through rates if they are created correctly.
One method to make sure that you have the most effective advert is to create split tests.
What is split testing?
Split testing your Facebook ads means creating variations of your original advert.
This allows you to directly compare the different adverts to see which is performing best.
You can then leave the better advert as it is, and adjust the under-performing one to see if it can beat the other.
What you should split test your Facebook ad
When split testing your adverts you MUST only change one element of the advert at a time.
E.G. if you have an advert with the title ‘this is my product’ try changing the title to something different like ‘My product’ or ‘Product for you’.
By changing one element at a time, you can work out exactly which elements have increased the performance over the others
The steps you need to take
Once you have created your advert, you will be taken to the page where you manage your adverts.
If you haven’t set up any adverts then you can’t see this at the moment but hopefully the screen shots will make sense.
From the ads page, if you click on the adverts name, you will be shown a preview of it.
Under the ad, there will be a link called ‘Create a similar advert’.
If you click that link, you will be taken back to the Facebook advert creation page, however the fields will be pre-filled in with the same details as your current advert.
Identify which section you are going to change; is it the audience, headline, description or image?
Change that one section and then save the advert.
You will now have two adverts within the same campaign.
What information you should monitor
Leave the advert so it is running for a complete 24 hour day and then check to see which advert has performed better.
To do this, you will need to do a direct comparison so if you set the date to ‘Yesterday’ you should see each of the adverts data for yesterday only.
From this data (for Natasha Baker’s Facebook page), you should be able to easily spot which one is more efficient, however before you dismiss one because it reached less people, go into the ‘Full report’ and take a look at the complete stats.
This will tell you which advert have generated the largest reach, the most likes and which cost the most.
Depending on the goal of your advert will tell you which is performing better.
The goal for the advert in this example was to generate likes; therefore as you can see, the first advert is performing better despite having fewer impressions.
However if the goal was to get the most impressions, the second advert would be more efficient.
Other things you should know
There are a couple of things to be aware of when creating the duplicate adverts, even though you have to set a bid for each individual advert, the cost will come out of the campaign budget.
This means that you can create as many adverts within a Facebook campaign as you would like as long as you have credit for your campaign.
I would recommend you create four versions of the advert and amend them each according to which is providing the best results.
The final thing to be aware of is that you should never delete one of the adverts, this does mean the lifetime stats won’t be correct, however as your adverts generate more clicks, Facebook will reduce your costs.
If you delete an advert you will lose any cost savings you have earned.
Instead of deleting, just edit existing adverts.
Have you had any success with Facebook ads? If so, what was your strategy? I would love to hear from you in the comments below.
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