What is Split Testing?

Split testing is an extremely important step in running successful social media ad campaigns. It is a method of conducting a controlled experiment of learning what ads perform the best for your campaign. Split testing can also be referred to as A/B testing since you are comparing one setting against another. If you aren’t familiar with split testing and why you should do it, we will go over all of that and more!

The goal of split testing is to compare pictures, text, or links to find the top-performing ad for your business. By comparing these different variables, you can see that a graphic might not be performing as well as an image or that your headline with an emoji seems to be capturing more views than one without. 

Here are some common split tests to try for your next campaign:

• Creative: Try using different images, fonts, text, and calls to action to see what draws the most attention of your audience. 
• Landing Page: The page you are sending your audience to can make a big difference. Certain pages will encourage them to take the action while others might not. Try out different pages or even make edits to your landing page to help with conversion.
• Audience: You want to target the right audience for your campaign. Try out different demographics to see what is the best fit.
• Placements: Facebook offers automatic vs manual placements. You can split test this to see if the automatic placement performs better or if your specific placements do.

It is important to make sure that when conducting a split test, you pick one variable to track at a time. This lets you understand what is making a difference and what is not. If you change two things on the ads, then you won’t know what specific variable is making the difference. Finding the ad that outperforms the others is important because it can increase ROI by 10 times!

What should I look for when comparing the split test?

Three major metrics to monitor are click-through rate, click-to-submission rate, and view-to-submission rate.

• Click through rate: Percentage of people who have seen the call to action and clicked on it
• Click to submission rate: Amount of visitors that filled out the lead form
• View to submission rate: Amount of people that saw your initial CTA and filled your the form on the landing page

Want to have a little more hands-on help when creating your next social media advertising campaign? First, check out our post on ‘Facebook Advertising Objectives’ and then send us a message to start chatting!