A/B Test like a boss with Madgicx

Three main areas should be analyzed when performing A/B testing:

🎨 your creatives

📜 your ad copy 

🥸 your target audiences

But, how do you find the data that determines winning performance in a sea of analytics? Keep reading.

One of Meta advertisers' greatest stumbling blocks is figuring out which ads bring in the bucks and which ones burn money. 

A/B testing is achieved by comparing the performance of two versions of the same ad to see which version performs better with your audience. You no longer need to use your 6th sense or a crystal ball to determine the dud ads that should be paused, and the gems that should be scaled. In addition, you don’t need to run Meta’s A/B test to do this. 

It can also be costly to run these campaigns the way Meta structures these tests. This is why at Madgicx, we have multiple ways of testing ads to find our diamonds in the rough.

Creative testing

It’s no secret that your ad creative is the secret sauce to a successful campaign. Your ad creative elements include your images or videos, your ad copy and emojis, and call-to-actions.

It’s important to test as many different versions as possible every week (our media-buying team recommends 15+) to consistently have more scalable ads. This means constantly being on the lookout for fresh ad ideas. 

Utilizing Madgicx to streamline your creative process can shave hours off this process. Here’s how to use Madgicx's Creative Workflow to generate even more creatives for testing:

  1. Search for inspiration in the Ad Library - browse ads and brands in your niche by ad type, platform, and category for ideas for your next ad campaign.
View of the Ad Library with the Filter popup.
  1. Save ads for inspiration and send briefs directly to Sparkle - save your favorite ads to boards so you can find them later and send a design brief while browsing.
Send brief straight from Madgicx Ad Library.
  1. Get your ads designed in 48 hours and launch them straight from the Ad Launcher - Sparkle designs your ads within 2 days, and they are then saved to your Meta media library, ready for you to launch directly from the Madgicx app.

You can chat with the designer to finalize your design on the Sparkle page where you will be able to download your finished designs too.

Manage design briefs in Sparkle easily.
  1. Duplicate ads for testing with the Ad Creation tool in the Ad Launcher - simply copy your ad or ad set to create the different versions for your A/B test. We’ve got a great video that shows you how to do this from one of our Madgicxians, Dani.

Once you’re satisfied that you have enough ad variations to test, you should:

  • Name your test campaigns accordingly to make them easily identifiable for everyone working on your ad account
  • Use broad audiences - this gives Meta a larger audience pool to apply its logic so it learns quickly the type of accounts that respond to your ad.
  • Set up stop-loss automation to protect your budget - this controls your budget when an ad isn’t performing well so you minimize budget leakage. See some examples of the types of conditions you can add to your ad accounts to limit any unnecessary spending. You can set these automation tactics in ‘Automation Overview.’
Stop loss automation tactic in Madgicx Automation Overview.
  • Set up automation to turn off ads at bad hours of the day (discover these on Auction Analytics under 360° Meta Audit) and turn them on again when they're profitable.
Schedule ads to run at the best times in Automation Overview.

A creative test should run for at least a week or until you spend at least twice your average cost per purchase.

Once you have some data in your account (meaning you tested quite a few creatives), you can follow these steps:

  1. Optimize ad formats with Creative Insights - view your ad creative’s performance at a glance and spot missing formats, like short, medium, and long video length, and ad types like carousels, videos, and images.
  2. Leverage the Smart Filter in Creative Insights - to optimize audience targeting and tweak your creative strategy.

Ad copy testing

It’s best to approach your ad copy in the same way and use Ad Copy Insights to determine your best wording. Using copy that your audience responds well to gives you a better chance of a conversion. Some of the ad copy components you can analyze are:

  • Varying copy lengths

In the example below, it’s clear that the short ad copy outperforms both the medium-length and long copy because the ROAS is more than double the others. Furthermore, you can see that the revenue is much higher than the ad spend. This ad account should use short ad copy in their next ads to improve performance and increase revenue.

Performance of different copy lengths in Ad Copy Insights.
  • With vs. without emojis

Using emojis helps this ad account below perform better. It’s clear that when not using emojis, the spend is higher than the revenue. In addition, Madgicx gives you a list of the top emojis for your ad account 🤩 Use this insight to inform how you write your next ads.

Emoji performance and Top Emojis in Ad Copy Insights.
  • With vs. without links

You can see whether including links in your ad copy is worth it by checking your link performance. You will also see a list of your best-performing links based on your ad account history.

Link performance and top links on Ad Copy Insights
  • Your top phrases

Ad Copy Insights will even give you a list of the top phrases you’ve used that bring in revenue. Using this information when creating your next ad can help to improve your ad performance, thereby increasing profitability.

Top Phrases in Ad Copy Insights.

Scale winning creatives and test audiences

After testing your creatives, you can take the winners and test audiences to understand if specific audience segments work better than broad for you - that's horizontal scaling - winning creatives across multiple audiences.

Which audiences should you test and how?

  1. Use the Audience Launcher to test lookalikes. You can also test different lookalike percentages to see which brings in the highest return. You can duplicate audiences for testing in the last step of the creation process in the Audience Launcher.
Launch lookalike audiences from the Audience Launcher.
  1. AI Marketer suggests good interests to test, and you can also discover more in the Audience Studio. In the AI Marketer, you can easily duplicate the interest-targeting ad sets and test multiple variations to find a winning combination.
The audience mixer in Audience Studio.

Use Targeting Insights with Audience Studio to analyze performance and pick your winning audiences. You can find Targeting Insights in the 360° Meta Audit menu.

Targeting Insights in  Madgicx's 360 Meta Audit

What you can test with Madgicx’s 360° Audit Tool

All of Madgicx’s analytics products are accessible from one place - the 360° Meta Audit tool. Here is a rundown of the insights you can compare when conducting an A/B test in Madgicx.

Auction Analytics

  • Placement and device

As the name suggests, this tells you how the different ad placements perform across Meta’s products. In addition, you can see which devices were used to view your ads, whether on desktop or mobile and if on iOS or Android. 

Placement and device performance across your ad account.

Based on the insights, you can learn what works for your ad account and plan for the future accordingly.

  • CBO vs. ABO

See the performance of how you choose to control how your ad budget is distributed between ads, whether campaign budget optimization (Advantage campaign budget) or ad set budget optimization. 

Test performance across campaign and ad set budget optimization.
  • Campaign objective

This widget shows what percentage of your ad spend has been spent across the different campaign objectives according to ROAS by default. You can change it to the metric of your choice.

Test performance of different campaign objectives.
  • Ad delivery optimization

Similarly, in this graph, you can see how much money has been spent on each type of campaign optimization to see where you’re focusing the bulk of your ad spend.

  • Bidding methods

Whether you set your bids manually or use automatic bids, you can see here whether it’s working for you or not, and specifically which bid types yield the best ROAS.

Test different bidding methods.
  • Days and hours

Here you can see when your ads get the most responses so that you can see when to launch campaigns. You can test scheduling your ads to only run during profitable times to ensure you don’t waste any budget.

See how different days and hours perform.

Geo & Demo Insights

Understanding which location and demographics matter for your campaigns is important to better localize your ad creatives and speak to your target audience. You can test how your ad is received in different countries.

  • Countries
Test how different countries you advertise to perform.
  • Age groups

You can split-test your creative across different age ranges to see which creatives work better for each one.

View how different age groups perform across your ad account in Geo & Demo Insights.
  • Genders

As with ages, different genders can yield different results for the same ad. When you’re selling a product that isn’t gender-specific, testing different copy or creative can help improve your creative production.

Gender performance in Geo & Demo Insights.

It’s super helpful to combine age and gender to refine your data, so it’s broken down into age ranges for each gender. 

See age group performance by gender.
  • Languages

You can also test which languages work best for your business by country or region.

Language performance in Geo & Demo Insights.

Targeting Insights

  • Landing pages

By testing different landing pages, you can determine which ones are most successful at sealing the deal for your audience. 

See the performance of your landing pages in Targeting Insights.
  • Audience size

Testing your ads on different audience sizes can tell you which ones outperform others.

See the performance of different audience sizes in Targeting Insights.
  • Lookalike percentage

By testing your lookalike percentage, you can tell how closely your lookalike audiences should match the one you’re copying. 

Lookalike percentage performance on Targeting Insights.

In conclusion, all these ‘small’ insights paint a bigger picture for your business and are like answers to questions you didn’t know you had before. So, now you can create ads aligned to the most important insights you’ve gathered to improve your overall ad account performance.

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