Looking to boost your results with paid media or hit your ROI targets while increasing your budget? You’ve got a few options.

At Tuff, we believe the four biggest levers to pull are:

1. Optimizing Paid Media Campaigns
2. Testing and Refining Audience Targeting
3. Experimenting with Different Creative Assets and Messaging Strategies
4. Designing Intentional User Flows and Testing Landing Pages

In this article, I’ll zoom in on experimenting with different creative assets and strategic messaging strategies and our approach to measuring their impact.

But here’s the thing—what’s the point of testing creative assets and messages if you aren’t measuring their impact? And how do you do that effectively?

For many brands, regardless of size, measuring the impact of great ad creative can be elusive and inconsistent.

I’ll dive into the ways you can measure the impact of performance creative, how we do it at Tuff, and why your brand should be doing it too. Plus, I’ll touch on who should be accountable for justifying the investment—the creative team producing it or the media team implementing it across different paid channels.

Let’s get into it! 

Established Ad Creative Testing Methodology

At Tuff, we don’t believe there’s one “right” approach to testing. Instead, we believe the approach should be dependent upon the specific question you’re trying to answer, what goals you’re working towards, and the platforms you’re using. Even small improvements in CPC  and CVR can add up to drastic business growth. 

At a high level, when we set up an A/B or multivariate test, we start with this approach: 

To put this into perspective, if we were aiming to set up a performance creative test on Meta (Facebook, Instagram), we would focus on minimizing variables to produce accurate and replicable results. 

This methodology aims to create an environment poised for constant testing, iterating, and scaling – If you’re not building on your findings, you’re losing learnings.

Begin by Assessing Potential Performance with Tuff’s Creative ROI Calculator

Here’s an example of how we measure those results with our Tuff: Performance Creative ROI Calculator Template. 

This template is a real-life calculator that you can use to plug in your monthly budget, average cost per acquisition, and lifetime value per conversion to forecast how you can maximize your media spend with performance creative. 

While performance creative may not solve all your revenue challenges, we are confident that with the right testing methodology and measurement tools in place, you will see results after a few weeks of testing. 

Tuff’s Approach to Ad Creative Testing and Measurement

Measurement is undeniably crucial for effective and replicable tests, but let’s talk about ownership, shall we?

Who should be responsible for measurement? Should it fall on the ad creative team to track measurement, or should the media team bear the accountability for justifying the investment?

In our experience, tight integration between media and creative teams is essential. They need to collaborate closely to plan, measure, and enhance results. This integration is something that sets Tuff apart from many other agencies. From day one, our in-house performance creative team has been trained to understand media intricacies, including platform allocation, top-performing ad creative, and client-specific KPIs. This advantage, having a creative team that works hand in hand with our media team, is pivotal in creating winning ad assets and campaigns that deliver results.

While we rely on the performance creative team for insights, hypotheses, and recommendations for creative asset and message testing, we count on the paid media team to establish structured testing environments across various ad platforms to effectively manage and scale creative performance.

This is a quick snapshot of how Tuff collaborates across teams:

• Paid Media Team: Start with data and get specific with audiences & campaign setup so we understand the focus of our message testing.
• Performance Creative Team: Develop high-impact channel-specific creative with an intentional messaging variety.
• Paid Media Team: Launch ads!
• Paid Media Team + Performance Creative Team: Measure, analyze, learn!
• Performance Creative Team: Develop a new round of creative fueled by data-driven insights

Real-Life Examples

We’ve done a lot of testing at Tuff – It’s kind of our thing. We’ve worked with a variety of brands at different stages of growth from early-stage to established – We’ve done it all. 

So before we part ways, let’s dive into a specific case study for a brand we worked with, soona.

• Case Study: Here!
• Background: soona, the home of the ‘virtual photoshoot’. soona is a self-serve content creation platform that helps brands create professional, high-quality photo and video content for e-commerce and digital marketing. They aim to satisfy the growing demand for digital content by providing a fast, affordable solution to traditional content creation methods.
• Strategy: Build a repeatable formula for winning ad creative.
• Results: Large scale, quick-turn gains! We achieved an average increase of 60% in total conversions MoM with a CPA below target by $200+.

A key takeaway that is transferable for almost any brand at any stage of growth – Big budgets don’t always equal big results. While having a larger budget can certainly help achieve more significant results, it’s not the only factor determining success. A well-crafted campaign with laser-focused messaging and targeting yields high-impact learnings, no matter the budget.

Interested in learning more about Tuff’s approach to testing and measuring the impact of performance creative? Reach out to us directly here!

Kate Theobald

Hey there! I’m Kate, the Head of Social at Tuff. I specialize in crafting paid social campaigns and testing performance creative to drive business results. Outside of Tuff, I enjoy tackling home renovation projects, skiing, and nerding out over the Enneagram (personality test)!

The post Ad Testing Methodology: Our Approach to Creative Testing and Measuring Results appeared first on Tuff.

Gone are the days when generic, one-size-fits-all advertising and ad creative works for businesses. Today’s consumers demand personalization and relevant messaging that resonates with them. As the amount of data and ad clutter grows, it can be difficult to break through the noise. You have to resonate with your target consumer in a way that makes them feel less like a consumer and more like a…person.

But deploying personalized marketing strategies at scale can seem daunting, if not impossible. Especially when you’re spending thousands of dollars across multiple channels where user behaviors differ drastically.

This is where performance creative comes in. Brands can and should build interconnected creative strategies across multiple paid media channels. The ultimate goal is to prioritize creative resources on the ad archetypes you know work. In this post, we’ll explore what performance creative is, how it works, and why it’s essential for modern marketing.

Know your ad creative audience

Effective performance creative starts with a deep understanding of your target audience. Collecting demographic data on your audience is table stakes–for performance creative to be effective, you have to understand the psychographics that drive purchase decisions.

What are your audience’s pain points? How does your product or service solve them? What motivates your audience to take the action you desire? Why might your audience choose you over a competitor? 

Audience research that’s actionable, not fluffy

Audience research can take many shapes and forms. At Tuff, we thrive with partners who have already validated product-market fit and are looking to scale. This normally means that our partners have already done the work to build out specific audience personas. We bolt on to really understand where those audiences live online, and which messages are most likely to drive the target audience to take action at different points throughout the funnel. Once we have thoroughly understood our partner’s audience and verified the existing data, the next step is to go deeper into their online presence and customer interactions. We believe in gathering insights from multiple sources to build a comprehensive understanding of the target audience.

Here’s how to further refine your audience research process:

• Verify website, social following, and ad channel demographic data. Sometimes, a brand’s target audience as outlined in an audience persona doc isn’t actually who’s visiting their site. Gut-check the data to see if there’s a discrepancy, and if there is, identify why.
• Speak with sales and customer success. To really know your audience, you have to build relationships with the folks on your team who interact with them the most. They have a constant feedback loop, with boots-on-the-ground access to discuss pain points, common challenges, and macro factors that impact purchase decisions.
• Research voice of the customer data. There are several social listening tools you can lean on for this kind of research. Most often, we tackle this at Tuff with scrappy, but effective Google Sheet templates. When we onboard a new partner, we conduct a VoC exercise, where we compile all of the online reviews about a product or service into one spreadsheet. Then, we identify common themes in those reviews and map that back to a larger messaging strategy.

By leveraging data and insights from deep audience research, you can create personalized ads that speak directly to your consumers’ needs and interests. Achieving this high level of personalization requires various strategies, like customized messaging, tailored imagery, and dynamic video content that adapts to user behavior across certain channels.

But the value prop you lean into for each audience persona might look different. How do you identify which messages drive the best results from upper to bottom-funnel campaign types? That’s when a strategic approach to creative testing comes into play. Let’s dive in.

Ad creative testing and optimization 

Personalization is just the beginning. Effective performance creative also involves testing and optimization. By measuring the performance of your ads and adjusting your strategy as needed, you can ensure that your creative resonates with your audience and drives results. 

This level of agility and responsiveness is essential in a rapidly changing advertising landscape, where even small tweaks to creative can have a significant impact on performance.

Take, for example, some of the work the Tuff team has done for Sabio, an online coding bootcamp based in LA. Our acquisition costs on Meta started to increase after making as many in-platform campaign optimizations as we could: testing new campaign events, rotating in fresh audiences, and testing bid cap strategies, just to name a few. 

Our Strategy

We pulled in our performance creative team to analyze historically top-performing ads and generate insights to inform a new round of ad creative for our campaigns, knowing that this was one of the last levers we could pull to improve performance on Meta. 

Note: This data has been altered for the purposes of this blog, but you get this gist.

The catch here? Sabio’s legal team had given feedback that our top-performing creative message for the past 15 months – “$100k Career” – was no longer compliant and we had to move away from that specific marketing claim.

Our team immediately dove into discovery and research to find new value props and ad archetypes that were just as likely to drive student applications. We did this by leaning into real student testimonials and in-platform creative trends.  

Results

By leaning into student testimonials, we were able to still use the top-performing salary value prop within legal requirements. Staying nimble with our creative strategy and capitalizing on trending TikTok sounds led to stronger results, even when the creative was also used on Meta.

Below you’ll see the results from Meta campaigns after we rotated in new creative at the beginning of May—Cost Per Application decreased by 66% and CPC decreased by 56%. That’s huge!

Cross-channel creative strategy

Performance creative offers a significant advantage: creating a cohesive brand experience across multiple channels. This approach capitalizes on variations in user behavior unique to each channel. We’ve found that similar messages drive the most efficient conversions across almost all channels. The design itself, on the other hand, should lean into differences in user behavior by channel. Touchpoints across display, LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and potentially even connected TV, come together to build a holistic marketing strategy that resonates with your target audience wherever they are.

Cross-channel performance creative for soona

Take soona for example. We deployed performance creative to support campaigns across several channels–LinkedIn, display, Pinterest, and Meta. We tested messages that accounted for differences in user preferences and behavior across channels. 

That’s why our team built a testing strategy that took one ad archetype and created variable versions that all spoke to the same value prop: the virtual photoshoot company that’s gone viral.

Performance creative is a powerful tool for optimizing ad spend. Use data to focus your advertising efforts on the channels and tactics that are most effective. Maximize ROI and drive higher performance. This level of precision is essential in a world where ad spend is more competitive and more expensive every year.

Interested in learning more about how Tuff can help build creative testing strategies for your business? Hit us up! 

Kristin Dick

Kristin is a senior growth marketer and COO at Tuff. After working in a variety of agency landscapes, Kristin found her way to Tuff to work with teams who make make marketing decisions rooted in data and tied to revenue growth. When she’s not building growth strategies or working with the Tuff team to improve our processes, you’ll find her chasing her two kiddos around the house or playing fetch with her dogs.

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When analyzing ad creative, it can be hard to tell which element really makes a piece resonate with the viewer. Is it the bold color? The little bit of sass? The scroll stopping typography? Or is it how you articulate the value you’re offering? The audience you’re addressing? 

There are so many variables that it can feel overwhelming. That’s when it’s time to start A/B testing!

At Tuff, methodical A/B testing has allowed us to both make small yet powerful tweaks to well-performing ads and also generate powerful business-level insights. Most importantly, it helps us drive up click-through rate, and drive down costs. This article will take you through our process from the initial creative development all the way to the implementation and analysis of A/B tests so you can supercharge your ad creative too.

A/B Testing 101

An A/B test is when you run 2 versions of the same ad, but with one variable that’s different. You can then look at the ad performance to see which version more effectively resonated with your audience in order to gain insights that will help your overall campaign.

Below is an example where we were A/B testing different hero images to see if people would be more likely to engage with language about “virtual photoshoots” or language that targets a more sophisticated creative demographic that might be looking for “photo assets.”

Here are the results: 

• A Variant (photoshoot company)
  • CTR = 0.36%
  • Purchases = 20 
• B Variant (photo assets) 
  • CTR = 0.24%
  • Purchases = 1 

Notice that every variable is the same from the logo color and placement to the lay-down imagery to the highlight color. While it would have been possible to truly isolate one variable here in this ad (like JUST changing one word) there’s strategic decision making that went into our approach so, before you put pen to paper, it’s important to ask yourself…

Where to Start?

A/B testing for A/B testing’s sake is just about as useless as hanging your clothes out to dry in a rainstorm. Without some forethought and a strategic outline, you’ll be left with results and also a resounding, “so what?”

So, at the outset of creative production, we’ll get our full team together. This usually consists of a growth marketer, or big-picture strategist, a campaign manager, or the person deep in the day-to-day on-platform optimizations, and the creative strategist, or the person on the hook for developing creative that’s on-trend, on-brand, and platform-specific. We’ll ask ourselves three major questions:

1. Why do we want to run this test?

An A/B test that originates in an actual impactful question makes a significant difference in its effectiveness. This can be as simple as: “is our creative more compelling when it features people or just products?” It can be as complex as: “should we position ourselves as a disruptor in the market or a powerful alternative to other stale options?”

2. How do we measure success?

It’s important to outline your KPIs for an A/B test before you develop your ad creative. 

If click-through rate (CTR) is your primary metric that determines success, then you’ll want to seriously consider your hook, the headline, and potentially the CTA as elements that move the needle. 

If you’re more focused on a metric like cost per action (CPA), then you’ll want to consider your holistic message and how well the information, look, and feel of the ad matches the landing page experience in order to determine success. 

Finally, if you’re considering a metric that tells you more about general awareness like cost per 1,000 views (CPM) or watch rate, then you’ll need to talk about what elements of creative will be responsible for driving those metrics and honing in there. 

3. What do we expect to learn from it?

Remember 8th grade science class? Then you’ll remember how important a hypothesis is. It’s critical to have a clear understanding of what you hope to learn, or what you expect to discover by running your A/B test so that when it concludes, you’re one step closer to driving optimal performance with your ad creative. This is closely related to point #1 above, but takes it one step further. Here’s what that looks like using the two examples.

“is our creative more compelling when it features people or just products?”

• Hypothesis: the presence of people demonstrating our product in use is a crucial part of generating interest and sales of it. So, we expect to learn that more education about HOW our product works is an important step in the user journey.

“should we position ourselves as a disruptor in the market or a powerful alternative to other stale options?”

• Hypothesis: people are curious about us as disruptors, but are more efficiently compelled to sign up/request a demo when they understand how to compare us to one of our competitors or a “poor alternative.”

4. How are we going to go about it?

This is where the real cross-team fun begins! Before you begin your brief and define how to build your creative to get the findings you’re after, it’s critical to collaborate with your campaign managers to understand their approach to creating an appropriate environment within the right channel. Is this a test for Meta, LinkedIn, or YouTube? What’s the right audience? How about budget and duration? Aligning on these points will set you up for success. 

Developing Creative for Your A/B Test

One of the most popular elements to start A/B testing is the hook of a video.  A hook refers to the first 2 seconds of a social video ad because this is the time it takes most viewers to either get engaged or keep scrolling. It’s basically the 2022 equivalent of the age-old newspaper term “above the fold.” 

A/B testing can be done on a fresh ad idea (like the still images example in the previous section), but we’ve also found success through using A/B testing to revamp a struggling ad that we believe still has potential. This is useful when we know a video ad has elements and messaging that has worked in other iterations, but for some reason, it is failing to draw an audience. This is a great opportunity for developing an A/B Test around a new hook. If we can get a successful hook, viewers will stick around for the valuable meat of the message. 

An example of this was for our product photography partner, soona. On our first round of creative, we were optimistic about a testimonial concept that ended up underperforming. The ad had a lot going for it, the testimonial was sincere, the edit was fun and the messaging was similar to ads we’ve seen succeed in the past. So instead of scrapping the idea, we created an A/B test where we produced a B variant with a new hook. 

We hypothesized that the ad struggled because the viewer didn’t know what soona was quickly enough, so for the B variant, we added a 2 second frame with copy explaining it (a virtual product photography company) with photo examples before jumping into the testimonial. 

Then, we isolated these two videos in a fresh campaign with a modest defined test budget to ensure that the performance of the original wasn’t impacted by an audience that had already seen it.

Here’s our original (on the right) and our B variant (on the left). The two videos were exactly the same except for the fresh 2 second hook in variant B. Headline and text copy remained exactly the same between the two:

Ultimately, the results were surprising:

• The original video (with Rob’s face as the hook) showed a significantly stronger click-through rate:
  • CTR = 0.25%
• The B variant:
  • CTR = 0.11%

So, we proved our hypothesis wrong! And in the spirit of science, we didn’t ball our test up and throw it out, we dug in deeper to try to uncover what it is about this asset that lagged behind. Ultimately, we ran several more additional tests and discovered that short, quippy, brightly-colored stills tend to generate our strongest click-through rates, reaching upwards of 0.8%. 

Top Tips for Structuring Your Test Campaign

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of how to set up your campaign structure in order to walk away with definitive findings like the ones we generated above.  

The first thing you’ll want to do when planning how to execute your A/B test is put together a strategic plan that outlines the following:

1. How you’ll test the two variables against each other 
2. Where the test will take place
3. How long you’ll be running the test
4. KPIs for success

There are two ways to implement a A/B test on paid social –– using Facebook’s A/B tool or isolating the variables and measuring the data manually. 

To use the A/B testing tool on Facebook, you’ll want to create two new ad sets using the same audience (one ad set with variable A and one ad set with variable B). From there, you’ll click the A/B test button in the main navigation which will take you to a page that looks like this to set up your test. 

For the A/B test above with the two different text graphics, we wanted to make sure that we were isolating the two different assets and testing them in the same audience on Facebook so that way we could have concrete data on which graphic performed better. Since we know that the KPIs vary for different audiences based on where they fall in the user funnel, we typically like to execute the A/B test in one prospecting audience and one retargeting audience. 

From there, we decided that we’d run the test for 10 days or until each audience reached $500, which would give us enough significant data to analyze and determine which variable was the winner. 

Our main KPI for this A/B test was CTR. We also layered on number of purchases and cost per purchase as secondary KPIs. 

Think Like a (Creative) Scientist

Ultimately, to get REAL results from your A/B test you’ve gotta keep an open and unbiased mind and lean in with curiosity. If your test doesn’t generate the results you were hoping for, change up the creative and test again! When you’re after insights greater than “which color button performs better,” you’re reckoning with a number of different variables. So, creating a new hypothesis, and diving back into another test is the best way to keep you inching closer to creative assets that unlock amazing performance. 

Ready to dive into an impactful A/B test with us? Let’s talk. 

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