When you advertise on social media (in my context, Facebook) three things can happen:
- The audience ignores the ad (ouch!)
- The audience reacts to the ad (with reactions, comments or shares – a positive sign!)
- The audience is very interested, they click and convert (hooray! Goal achieved)
However, as marketers we are always bogged down with one question – The WHY behind our audience’s actions-
– Why do they Ignore?
– Why do they Respond?
– Why do they Click?
And what better way to come to a conclusion and get an answer to all the whys than to do A/B testing!
So what is A/B Testing?
A/B testing involves an experiment where two or more variants of a marketing item are shown to targeted users, and a statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performed better.
During the Goa Biz Fest online marketing campaign, Creometric used the A/B testing method to test 2 areas of the ads:
- Creatives
The psychology of color as it relates to persuasion is one of the most interesting and also the most controversial aspects of marketing.
We created 3 creatives with different backgrounds
- White background with black and red text
- Black background with yellow text
- Yellow background with black text
Among the three ads, we saw that the Ad with the yellow background performed the best.
Why?
A search for what is the most attractive colour in advertising landed me on this answer – The colour yellow is the most visible colour to the eye.
The answer is convincing as this has been true in Creometric’s case of A/B testing for the social media ad.
Three different ad copies were tested. The ad copies were based on these headlines
- Need investors for your startup?
- No money to start your business?
- Can’t get a loan? Meet investors at Goa’s biggest business expo
Among these, the ad containing the following headline worked great – Need investors for your startup?
Why?
A headline in advertising grabs the attention much like a newspaper’s headline. You can write a headline in n number of ways. However, certain types of headlines increase user engagement and contribute to conversions.
Headlines that are simple and direct, state the benefit and tickle one’s curiosity are the ones that work the best.
Social media marketers need to understand that optimization is everything, not only in adverts but also when posting organic posts.
The key to success on social media is to continuously optimize every aspect of your post or advert strategy through A/B tests. This would mean that you must be able to refine even the most minute details of your post. The more you tweak, the more you will be able to reach a “near-perfect” advertisement.
Wondering why I say “near-perfect” and not completely perfect?
Because optimization is a never-ending cycle!