It’s that time of year again to do your holiday shopping. More and more people are relying on their mobile devices to do all their shopping ? As a business owner, you want to be sure your holiday campaigns are connecting with all those shoppers.
If you’re investing tons of money ?into your campaigns, you may want to use some testing strategies before the holidays. Any testing you do always pays off. They can improve your holiday campaigns this year and give you valuable insights for next year’s.
Check out these measurement strategies and learn the insights you need to know to help you make better decisions for next year and to understand where your holiday ad spend drives your business outcomes.
Figure Out What Type Of Campaign Performs The Best
Spit-testing your holiday campaigns allows you to compare how your ad performs. It’s also good to test ?each element in your ad — like images and video lengths.
Facebook did some research and found that if you test your creative and the elements in it, there was an average of 71.9% improvement in CPAs! ?
Testing your creative concepts is a great way to get new insights for next year’s campaigns. Also, as you test them, you’ll discover ways to optimize your creative and improve performance this year! ?
Here are some elements you could split-test:
- Video vs. static imagery
- Video length or types of images
- Length of copy/copy strategy (like using a customer quote vs. descriptive text)
- Different audience demographics
Run a Conversion Lift Test
Even though you’re still comparing data, a lift test is not the same as a split test, as it’s run a bit differently.
A conversion lift test is done where a certain group of people ? are withheld from seeing your campaign and are compared to those who did see your ad campaign. These groups of people are called test and control groups and are randomly chosen.
The test group will see your ads, while the control group is withheld from seeing your ads ? Then, you measure the actions of each group, like whether they made a purchase or what pathway they went down.
This type of lift testing is a powerful tool ? for helping you make good business decisions because you get to see conversions from people who actually saw your ads. Using it to test your holiday campaigns can give you valuable data that you can use to plan your holiday strategy ?
Facebook’s Conversion Lift tests are free to run but may have certain budget requirements.
How Does Lift Testing Work?
If you want accurate data on how your ads impact your business, conversion lift testing is how to do it. Here’s how it all flows:
- Create your Facebook ad campaign.
- Two random groups are then established — the test group (people who see your ads) and the control group (people that don’t).
- Data from this test is then shared with Facebook from sources like the Facebook Custom Audiences pixel, conversion pixel, or secure point-of-sale (POS) data.
- Facebook determines additional lift generated from the campaign by comparing conversions in the test and control groups.
- The results of the study are made available in the Ads Manager.
Figure Out Where You Should Place Your Ads
This season your holiday campaigns will be seen on multiple devices and browsers ? That can make it tricky to understand the true value and performance of your ads.
You need to focus on the right channels for the right audience. Like I talked about in my post on holiday shopping behaviour, many shoppers use Google to research gifts before purchasing.
During the holiday season, shoppers may start out in one place, but not take action until later. They may see an ad on Facebook, research on Google, go to Amazon to read reviews, etc.
Shopping behaviour can be hard to predict during this time of year because customers go back and forth between multiple channels.
Because of this, Google Ads is particularly relevant for retailers this season.
Paid social is important, too, but if you’re only using Facebook to market and sell your products, without considering Google Ads, you are missing a major opportunity.
Focus on Your Attribution Models
Some of your analytic tools may not report all the data you need to figure out whether there was an increase in return on ad spend.
A Conversion Lift study can also help detect the exact data you need. Once your test has run, choose the attribution model that corresponds closest to the results.
During the holiday season ? brands become more competitive when it comes to getting the attention they want from their audiences. They do whatever it takes to connect with customers.
To help with your holiday campaigns, you need to test and measure every ad. These insights will help you keep up with the competition and create high performing campaigns ?