A Guide To Creative Testing For Facebook, Tiktok & LinkedIn Ads (Free Framework Download)

LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram (Meta) & Tiktok are ad creative-focused advertising platforms. 

This means the image or video you use within your ad is a vital part of the success of the campaign and how many conversions or leads you will get. 

Why?

This is because the user isn’t actively searching for your product/ service. Their intent to purchase a product or service isn’t their priority like it would be if they were searching on Google. They are scrolling in their newsfeed with the aim of their attention being filled with relevant content from people they follow and also the content picked by the platform’s algorithm. 

Therefore, the ad creative needs to be relevant and compelling enough to catch their attention and get them to stop scrolling (a scroll stopper). 

This is giving the right message to the right user at the right time. – Marketing 101.

Why Is Creative Testing Important?

Metrics incoming…

A good ad creative will have a better click-through rate (CTR) because it captures attention and creates enough intrigue for the user to click through. If it then goes to a landing page or lead form that is also relevant and what the user is after then it results in a higher conversion rate (CVR) and ultimately reduces your cost per acquisition (CPA) and increases the return on investment (ROI).

Good ROI = happy bosses.

Long story, short – your ad creative matters….

Therefore, it is important to continually test your creatives in order to find your ‘winners’ and then scale these winners in order to maximise your ROI.

However, if you are to test your creatives, it is beneficial to do so in a structured format that is documented so you understand the progress of a specific ad creative. 

Fundamentally, find out what isn’t working, what is working, and how to further improve what is working.

The Creative Testing Framework Breakdown

Finally, what you’ve been waiting for… This tutorial will go over the exact method we use to test our creatives and scale winning ad creatives.

I recommend you have this blog open on one tab/ screen and the framework on another so you follow as we go. Screenshots are never as good as the real thing. 

Download the framework here

The framework is organised into 5 sections:

1. Filing
2. Experiment Details
3. Hypothesis
4. Results
5. Next Steps. 

Filing

Good organisation is always important in marketing.

The campaign and ad name will be written here, along with the test round number and who is doing the test (initials are fine).

Experiment Details

This identifies the Testing Angle, which is the specific part of the ad being a/b tested. This could be categorised to:

• The ad image/ video 
• Headline
• Intro text 
• Call to action (CTA)

Along with a description of the experiment, the current status, the resources needed to conduct the experiment and also for the good organisation we like, the time the experiment is expected to take. 

Hypothesis

As with all experiments you did in school, they started with a hypothesis.

As marketers, we typically have a hunch about the outcome of a change we want to make. The hypothesis is used to compare to the results.

Prediction – Summarise your predictions for the experiment. 

Metrics – these are the key metric we will use to assess the effectiveness of an experiment. 

Results

It’s been 2 weeks (for example). The experiment has concluded. How do the results compare to your hypothesis? 

You’ll be inclined to change your hypothesis here as the results most likely won’t be what you expected. However, this is fine! This is exactly the reason you should be testing your creatives.

You’ve only just started your experiment and are getting to know your ad creative. As experiments go on you’ll see you hypothesised and results become more inline, I promise.

Metric results – What were the quantitative results of the experiment? Here the metrics recorded from the experiment are noted. 

Summary – Write down the key findings from the experiment. 

Next Steps

Now the experiment is done, what happens next? Typically one experiment leads to another so make sure to include what would be tested next.

Conclusion

There it is, the creative testing framework. Was it more simple than you imagined?

Now, I only have average skills on Excel/ Google sheets. Therefore, I am sure this could be made pretty and conditionally formatted to the moon until a finance bro is nervous you have the skills to take his job. Be my guest, the fundamentals are there for you to do as you wish.

In this blog we have gone through the following:

1. Why having quality ad creatives on social media advertising platforms is vital (it is competing for the user’s attention)
2. Why you should be testing your winning creatives (in order to maximise their ROI by scaling)
3. Finally, we went through the exact creative testing strategy we use to scale our winning creative and maximise ROI for our clients. (including free template download)

Creative testing will paint a picture of what to do and especially what not to do for your ad creatives. Ultimately, its purpose is all about making incremental improvements that add up to make a big change in the end. Feel free to reach out to our team for a free proposal!