Market, Scale, Grow: Facebook Ad Marketing Strategy for Teacherpreneurs

187 | A 3-Day Testing Protocol for Success

• Jenzaia • Episode 187

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Unlock the secrets to running successful ad campaigns with this three-day testing protocol that promises to save you time, energy, and money. In this episode, we'll chat about the steps to take in order to to optimize your ads within 72 hours!

Get started optimizing right away!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, inzea, and this is a Saturday Strategy Session. Welcome back to the podcast, and today we're going to be talking about testing Very hot topic right now. It came up in a group training that I just did. It came up in a video like a course that I'm taking in one of the Q&As. So very popular topic and I'm excited to dive in to the three-day testing protocol that I run with my clients and just give you a bit of an overview of it, the structure and some alternatives if you want to implement it in your business.

Speaker 1:

But the way that I do it doesn't really work for you. So the most important thing to know about the testing protocol is why we do it. By focusing our time, energy and money on testing assets right away, we save money, effort and energy down the road. So this is a three-day testing protocol On day one we test the ad copy, day two we test the images and the day three we test the headlines. Our goal is to have at least six different variations that we can run with and then long-term ongoing. We don't need to worry like, oh what if image one was the best one. We know for sure which images performed well in the test and which did not perform, and so there's no second guessing. It also saves us time and energy. If nothing does well, we can immediately go back to the drawing board or pull extra images, add copy out of the vault, test them and run with them. So I can't stress how important this is to take the time to test, especially if this is a shorter time frame, like three weeks for the registration before a live event. When it's an evergreen funnel, you have a bit more time to run the ads because they're going to be going on and on. But when it's leading up to a live event and you only have a very short window to get it right, it is really important. Now I still recommend that you run a testing phase for an evergreen funnel so you can get that hard work out of the way really quickly and you're not going to be spending weeks and weeks and weeks trying to tweak and perfect the funnel. You can get it done in 72 hours.

Speaker 1:

So as a big overview of the campaign, my testing protocol calls for one campaign. I do all of this inside of the same ad campaign, which I actually title product or resource or freebie name, month and year and then in capital letters, testing so I know what product it is, when it is and that it is testing phase. In that campaign level we set the objective. Your objective is going to be lead. If this is a lead campaign, 95% of the campaigns that I run are lead generation campaigns, so I'm going to be exclusively talking about them. If it isn't a lead generation campaign and it's a sales campaign, then you could be running traffic for the testing period. But I wouldn't recommend running it as a sales ad, because what you're looking for in the testing period is clicks. If it's a sales ad that you're testing for, then you're probably going to want to test it as traffic. If it's a lead campaign, test it as a lead objective campaign, test it as a lead objective.

Speaker 1:

Within that testing campaign you're going to have quite a few ad sets, because each ad set is going to be one variation. So if you have three different images that you're testing, you're going to have an ad set for image one, an ad set for image two and an ad set for image three. Only one thing changes in each of the ad sets. Now, the actual image itself is changed in the ad level, but just to keep the testing really seamless, really clear, we set the budget at the ad set level and then we know everything else is identical because I duplicate the ad set. I create the first ad Within the first ad set. I set up the audiences, I set up the time, like the timeline, I set up the budget and then, once everything is perfect, I duplicate and I just change the one variable asset. So at the ad set level we're picking the audience.

Speaker 1:

For my testing protocols I like to use lookalike audiences. I pool them all together, including the lookalike for Facebook engagement, the lookalike for Instagram engagement, the lookalike for website traffic and then the lookalike for email lists. If the client has a lot of videos that they produce, then I'll also create a video view lookalike audience and run that in the same container. Aside from that, we keep everything else pretty wide open. Increasing the age to a minimum of 21 or 22 and setting the location as either all of the USA or all of the English-speaking countries, like the big ones Canada, us, australia, united Kingdom and New Zealand, is typically what I go with. Other than that, I don't really put any constraints on the audience. Sometimes I do Advantage Plus, especially in some clients that I'm very familiar with and I often will test look like audiences versus look like audiences with Advantage Plus. If we've done that type of testing previously and I know that the look likes with Advantage Plus really, really surpass the look like audiences, I'll turn Advantage Plus on Totally at this point. That's personal preference.

Speaker 1:

The next thing we set at the ad set level is the budget. I like to look at what the campaign budget like for the entire campaign their budget is. So let's just say we had a $25 per day budget. I like to stay in that neighborhood. If we had three different versions of ad copy we were testing, I probably would test at $10 each a day. It's a little bit higher, but then I know that later on in the campaign I'll be able to balance it out. So at the end of the 30 days I will have spent the correct amount. If we only have $10 per day, then I'm probably going to go with a $5 per ad set budget and this is per ad set that we're setting this budget so that we know each of the ad sets spent $5 or $10 or $20 in the 24 hour period. The last thing that we set is that time frame. We want all of the ad sets to run for the same amount of time, spend the same amount of money, so that we can see how they differ in their performance, and we are going to talk about exactly which metrics I like to look at.

Speaker 1:

The last thing in the campaign setup is the ad level. This is where you put in the image, the ad copy and the ad itself is created. So here again, you're going to put everything the same. Pick one ad copy to start. I always do like in order whatever we have in the Google Doc ad copy one, ad copy two, ad copy three to put ad copy one. Whichever image is image one and headline one is what I put in and then I put the URL. Okay, I make sure everything looks good, that we are all set up, ready to go.

Speaker 1:

I click on the three dots beside the ad set level which I've named testing day one. I click on those three little dots and I duplicate the ad set level. I keep those ad set level names pretty simple Testing day one, testing day two. Testing day one, testing day two, testing day three, and then the ad level. I name add image v1, image v2, image v3. Copy v1, copy v2, copy v3. Sometimes I'll even put test copy one, test copy v2. I always have the v in there, so I keep those very obvious so that it has test in the name of it and then I know exactly which copy ad set or copy or image or headline we are looking at so that I can really quickly see which one performed the best. Make sure to duplicate the ad set level so that each variation has its own ad set. Then I go into the ad and on day one has its own ad set. Then I go into the ad and on day one V1 is version one. Copy V2 is the second version of copy and then copy V3 would be the third version of copy and everything else stays the same.

Speaker 1:

What we're looking for is the best performing ad copy, the one that causes the most people to click on the ad itself. The reason that I like to do ad copy before the image is so that when we're testing the image we already know that this hook is going to lead to the most clicks. The image stops the scroll, the ad copy leads to clicks. On day two we test the images After 24 hours. I go in and I look at the metrics. I duplicate the best one. Whichever one I deem as the absolute best one, I duplicate that one and I keep everything the same except the image. I pull out the original image and I put in image number two, image number three, image number four, if we have one, and I name them as such image two, image three, image four right, because image one was from day one. So I don't have a new image one because I already had an image one. And then at the end of that 24 hours I make sure that we run them for again 24 hours and then I do the exact same thing. Whichever image test did the best, I pull that, I duplicate that one and I keep everything the same and I just change out the headlines. So every day we're refining more and more till we get to the absolute best variations.

Speaker 1:

After the 72 hours is done, and if it's been a successful test, we have some images, some ad copy, at least one headline that did extremely well. Then I go in and I create the actual ad where I put all of these together and so let's just say we have two images. So image one and image two did really well and copy one and copy two did really well and headline one did well. So then I create the actual campaign that's going to run ongoing, and I create all the different variations. So I do image one with copy one, image one with copy two, image two with copy one, image two with copy two, so that we can see all the variations together and figure out which of those variations are going to do the best for the different audiences. I also do an audience test. I'm not going to get into that today because it's a little bit more complicated, it takes a little bit more time and it's more complicated and I feel like it would do much better with a video where you could actually see what I'm doing and what I'm talking about. At the end of those three days I have the best performing images, the best performing ad copy, the best headlines, and feel confident this campaign has the best performing assets that we could create for it To know which variation is performing the best.

Speaker 1:

The three metrics that I tend to look at and put the most emphasis on are CPM, so the cost per thousand impressions. That's what Facebook charges you. We obviously want to lower cost per thousand impressions. That's what Facebook charges you. We obviously want to lower cost per thousand impressions. It's not a be-all and end-all if it's more expensive, but I do like to see that metric. And then the two most important ones are the CTR link click-through and the CPC link click. So the link click-through rate is a percentage of people who clicked on the link to go to the landing page. I like to see that at at least 1%. If it isn't even 1%, then that puts my spidey sense tingles on. And then for the cost per click, specifically cost per link click, we're looking for it to be below 50 cents. This really depends on niche. A lot of my clients who are in the teaching space, education space, will see CPCs below 10 cents, below 20 cents. Some of my business clients are seeing them closer to like 60, 70 cents. So it super depends on the niche. But CPC closer to that 50 cents or below click through rate at least 1%. And if none of the images, none of the ad copy, none of the headlines, whatever we're testing, if none of them hit that, I keep that in my notes and I continue on with the testing. But then I add a fourth day. So if none of the images hit those benchmarks, then I go. Okay, I need to go back to the drawing board and figure out new images that we can use to apply, so that we can get those CPCs down in the CTR up Now.

Speaker 1:

Last thing that I want to talk about is some alternatives to this testing protocol. If it doesn't exactly work for you or just like to make it more yours, things you could tweak. So the first thing you could tweak is the order. You could test the images first and then the ad copy, and you might not even want to test the headlines. The course that I'm in right now they teach to test the images first, and testing the images first makes sense because that's what's going to stop the scroll, so you really want to make sure that they are the absolute best that you can. That course also teaches to test 10 or more different images. So you can absolutely increase the number of images or ad copy headlines that you're testing, as long as it's within your budget.

Speaker 1:

The second thing that you can test is the timing. I like to set the budget, the exact same for each ad set and run them for 24 hours, so that I spent the exact same amount of money and able to compare equally compare the number of impressions. There is a way for you to go in and create a rule so that the ad turns off at 500 or a thousand impressions. You can go in and set that rule, and then the ad set will automatically turn off when those impressions are hit. Each of the ad sets are only going to run to 500 impressions, which is great. Also, you're going to be spending a different amount of money. The timeline might not line up. Some of the ad sets might take a day to hit 500 impressions and some of them might take three days. Just all depends on budget allocation and the cost per thousand impressions for that specific campaign. I do like to give it a thousand impressions before I make any decisions about it. I feel like a thousand impressions is more than enough that I'm able to say, yes, like this is going well or no it's not. I don't like to make a decision, because it can take a couple hundred all the way to a thousand impressions for a campaign to start to stabilize and show you its quote-unquote true colors.

Speaker 1:

The last thing that you could do well, actually two more things, though is audiences. I like to add the lookalikes in there, because I feel like it gives a little bit more context to the algorithm of who you want to see your ads. But you could take that off and just do a location based, like all of the US or all those English speaking countries that I listed before, and not have the limit of literally anything except for location. I highly recommend that you keep that. On my first ad that I ever ran, I was getting leads quote unquote from men in their 50s in Kazakhstan, like that was. The 90% of the leads I got were from there, which is not my audience at all. It was a good learning lesson. So definitely recommend that you keep the location on and also that you set the minimum age to 21 or 22, depending on your audience, obviously, but just to keep that in mind. And then the last thing that you could change is running all of it in one day, and so I like to run the ad copy and then take the best one to run for the images, and then take the best one to run for the headlines, like the image and the headline and change the ad copy, and then also pick one of the ad copies and change the image and keep the headline the same, and then pick an image and change only the headlines, and so as long as in each ad set, the only thing that's changing between the ones that you're comparing to each other is that single variable. That would be fine and that would reduce the amount of time from 72 hours to 24. So that's something else you could potentially change. I hope that this was helpful. I hope you have a bit of an insight on how to test how I test and you could create a plan for testing in your own business going forward.

Speaker 1:

I'll be back next week with another strategy session coming your way, with another strategy session coming your way. Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. Every week on Saturdays, we release a new Saturday strategy session, sometimes with amazing guests, and I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends and then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back in your ears next week with another Saturday Strategy Session.