How to do creative testing

Overview

Think about creative testing as trying to find those amazing ingredients that make your recipe work every single time. The recipe is the ad creative and the ingredients are the key elements that make it so successful (e.g. the angles, the transitions, the hook, etc.).

Obviously, we want to know why certain things work and others don’t. That’s how we scale success and avoid repeating underperforming ads, in order to optimize ROAS.

In this article, we’re going to show you:

  1. How to properly test UGC ad creatives

  2. How to identify a winning ad formula

  3. How to scale winning ads

  4. How to turn underperforming ads into winners

Go get some ad creatives: First, before you do any sort of creative testing, you will need ad creatives.

So to continue with our recipe analogy, this is the moment where we get the stuff we want to work with.

Next, you want to get your ads out into the ecosystem and begin gathering data on their performance. Note what is working and what isn’t via top-of-the-funnel metrics like CTR.

After you’ve tried different recipes and found the winning one, it is time to do some digging and find out what was so special about it.

Identify the key ingredients: Now it’s time to determine what made the winning videos so successful.

By dissecting the footage and asking the right questions, you can identify the video’s core elements. You know like in storytelling you might have a hero, an emotional problem, a transformational journey, a battle and an outcome. Ads are very similar. They also have these elements that connect with your target audience. Like a funny scene, a strong CTA, or a problem that you’re solving.

Now that you know why the winning ad creative worked so well, you just have to figure out why the others didn’t perform by repeating the process with the losing videos.

Basically, the whole idea is to understand how to reproduce a winning ad with the same elements and test if it works as well as the original one.


Related Articles

Ideas for CTAs

UGC ad types: current top performers

How to come up with a creative concept

How to do creative research

Brief for UGC vs Brief for Organic Posting

How to come up with great hooks


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