By Michelle Moscone, Head of Creative Operations at WITHIN
Everyone wants to run optimal advertising campaigns but when it comes to honing performance, marketers can often question if they are using their content appropriately and efficiently.
If you feel stuck in a rut when it comes to optimizing your ad campaigns, comprehensive testing is your best bet; iterative learning is the key to unlocking your campaigns’ potential. Here are some tips and tricks to keep in mind.
The More Creative, the Better
We’ll assume you already have killer creative in hand. You made videos that are unskippable, with vibrant color schemes, great product shots — and every element is modular, so you have the flexibility to determine the best combinations to personalize and appeal to your audiences.
The more content you create, the more data you can gather. The more lessons you learn from the data, the more ways you can map your creative’s maximum potential.
Gather Data Points and Put Them to Use
Once your ads are running, continuously monitor campaign cycles to inform and make real-time creative changes. Every change you make should be informed by data and rigorous testing to ensure optimal performance.
For example, if your target demographic is women under 40, split your audience into control and variable groups. Show your creative to the control group, which should be a general audience that includes all ages and gauge its success. Then, show the variable creative to a second group, which only includes women under 40, to note any changes in engagement. Adjust your ads accordingly. Every opportunity to segment audiences will help to more accurately tailor the message to appeal to the user.
Here are Five Key Principles When it Comes to Creative Testing in the Platform:
- You Can Almost Never Have too Much Creative.
Lots of creative gives you modules to deploy and more choices for optimization. And with more creative, you can run more trials in order to scale faster.
- Use “Testing” Ad Sets to Prune Creative Before Rolling Out if Needed.
Test multiple ads at once and test ad sets with equal budgets. Include your top-performing ads in tests. Optimize ads to higher in the funnel to gather data quickly. You can use “testing” ad sets to prune creative. - Roll Out the Winners.
Pause the testing process once you’ve gathered sufficient data indicating you have found the go-to units. Roll out the ads that outperformed your “old winners.” - Test Unique Creative for Specific Audiences.
After the broader audience wins, run your audience-specific ads. Run your customized creative to both specific and broader audiences, where it’s logical. Then add your top “general” ads to your unique group ad sets to see which holds the edge with your custom audience. - Iterate Based on Your Top Performer.
Get the most out of your winning units by making stills of your video content and making videos based on your top-performing stills.
Make Testing Integral and Constant
The testing discipline will ultimately change how you approach advertising and how you execute campaigns. It may take some time to adjust to the shift but the good news is that advertising is by nature an iterative process that always includes testing. So if you are strategic about testing operations and use real, accurate data to inform decision-making, your campaigns will thrive with your optimized creativity as the star of the show.
Michelle Moscone is Head of Creative Operations at WITHIN. Her 14-year Creative Advertising history has varied across large advertising agencies, in-house at Clients, to boutique branding shops.
She is charged with scaling out and up the Creative Department against people, process, tools and expertise, achieving rapid growth in department size and revenue since starting at WITHIN 11 months ago. Her passion for Creative is only superseded by her passion for people and cultivating career opportunities for the development of talent.
