I came across a very well done Lead Generation Case Study on Facebook Advertising and thought I’d share some thoughts on the company’s testing savvy:
As brief background, the case study involved generating leads for an online Jiu Jitsu Course, and theys started out target a very broad demographic of US males under the age of 50.
So what did they do right?
- They understood that they’d have to do some testing to get the “Ad-Demographic-Landing Page” combo correct, and they understood the intrinsic interconnection of these elements when it comes to producing bottom-line results. I’m not going to go into that here, but encourage you to read more about this within the case study itself.
- They tested broadly at first and then narrowed down to optimize on their initial findings. This goes both for ad targeting AND ad messaging.
- Initial testing was for 7 distinctly different ads, featuring images, headlines and body copy, targeted at a wide swath of their potential market: US males under the age of 50.
- They took the winning ad and then tried to both learn from the results of their tests and move forward by optimizing their winning ad.
- They optimized both the landing page and the ad, and when optimizing the ad, they looked at both the image and the body copy.
Here are the ads they initially tested, with the winning ad circled:
And these are the take-aways you should really key in on:
- Testing multiple styles of ads up front is essential
- The winning ad had TWICE the CTR as the losing Ad (.045% vs. .022%)
- The more specifically targeted the message, the better the response
And I think that last bullet deserves a bit more explanation. See, the ad that spoke most directly and specifically to the felt needs of its audience got the best CTR.
The other ads are much more general in their approach to referencing “protect yourself” and “Getting pushed around.” By contrast, the winning ad was very specific about what it feels like to get pushed around “Afraid to Go to School?” and spoke very specifically to a much more narrow audience — school age boys!
So once they had that ad, how did they optimize it?
1) First they made the image more visually prominent.
2) Then they tested 8 alternate headlines, all specifically targeted towards school-age boys
Here’s what the final, winning ad looked like:
Notice how the green shirt really spikes the visual prominence of the ad. And who would have guessed that that headline would be better than the initial one?
So what was the bottom line result? By testing for both ads, demographics, and landing page, Purpose Inc. was able to acquired leads for HALF of their goal: only $1.43 per lead!
Sort of blows the old “Facebook Ads Don’t Work” opinion out of the water, doesn’t it?
And the bottom line for YOU ought to be this:
Testing Rules. Test Your Ads, Your Demographics, and Your Landing Pages. Then Optimize Your Winners.
Because testing rules and opinion drools.
P.S. There’s more to learn from that case study, so why not go read the whole thing?
