Social Media Advertising Agency A/B Testing - Bright Age Digital Creative Agency

No matter what type of brand you are, your audience should always be at the top of your list, revolving around everything. If something isn’t resonating with a large portion of your audience, you may not be going in the right direction. A/B testing is essentially the process of evaluating the cost per result of each social media advertisement, so you can make the decision on which ads to keep. This is a great way to make sure your content is resonating with your target audience. The ability to take logical test results and apply them to marketing strategies is the key to projecting content for a specific target audience. As a social media marketing agency, this is what Bright Age does. This article highlights reasoning behind the importance of A/B testing a social media campaign.

Transparency

Being transparent within marketing and creative teams is essential for maintaining a strong brand. Increasing awareness, which is measured by likes, impressions, link clicks, engagement, and content views is considered organic. Anything that zeros in on acquisition through direct response is considered paid. As a social media marketing agency, which is a B2B company, we primarily focus on our clients’ goals relating to their social media channels. Being transparent allows all aspects of their goals to been seen from different aspects, and through the eyes of each of our marketing specialist. A/B testing requires transparency between all parts of our creative team.

Start with one main goal

The first thing you should do when A/B testing is gather information to form a hypothesis, which acts as the starting point for your test. This hypothesis should be clear, being able to show proof, and back up detailed assumptions. The key is to start broad and then focus more on specifics. For example, if you are testing a social media campaign, a social media marketing agency would first get a cost goal for an advertisement, and then zero in and see the more expensive ones. Then you can develop a plan on which campaign to present, based on the cost per result for each ad image. Once you focus in on specific metrics that identify what is successful and what is not, you can get more specific on what it is you’re testing.

A/B testing is an opportunity for relationship building

At Bright Age, our analytics team gets together often to discuss testing results. This helps us determine new goals, while simultaneously creating an environment in which all of our thoughts and ideas come together in one creative space. Collaboration lets everyone share their opinions about social media campaigns we can test in the future.

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Testing on a tight budget

Whether you are running a paid, or an organic, free of charge ad, if you do not have much of a budget for testing, there is no need to worry, just run a test for the organic ad first. If those organic ads are working, you can either put that toward paid, or create a case for using paid ads in the future, with results from the success of your organic ad. If you have a small budget and want to get started in paid ads, boosting is a great way to do so. For example, if one of your organic ads is doing well, you do not necessarily need to create a new ad. You can just put a small amount of money behind it and see it reach a larger audience.

Determine what works best for you and your team

A/B testing is a versatile way to run things, so what works for one idea, may not work for the others. At Bright Age, we run A/B tests for social ads. Regardless of what you choose to use testing on, reaching statistical significance is a key factor because it quantifies whether a result is random, or if it is due to a factor of interest. For example, if your goal is to get 20,000 link clicks, you will determine the outcome once the post reaches your 20,000 link click goal, or once it reaches statistical significance. With this said, goals vary immensely due to factors of interest, your budget, and the individuals you are working with.

The bottom line

As with everything in life, A/B testing is a learning experience. It does not have to be complex, however it does take time to set goals into place. Being flexible and having patience are crucial because you may need to run tests multiple times for a social media campaign before meeting your targeted goal. Also, if you are to set a lower cost per acquisition and you changed the content type, you may need to figure out a new test. There is no “one size fits all” when dealing with A/B testing, especially in a creative atmosphere. If you don’t reach your intended goal, keep trying. At Bright Age, our creative specialists take testing very seriously to achieve ultimate optimization, while taking each challenge as a learning experience.