1,000 tests and what did you learn?
Whether you are a marketing director or a media buyer, you have probably heard something like this:
“You should dedicate 20% of your budget to tests, and you should run new tests every week.”
The problem:
You can get lost in the data.
You can’t spend money to run tests isolating every variable. The cost would be exorbitant! Not to mention the time.
Solution:
Isolate your variables using naming conventions and Pivot Tables.
What are naming conventions?
We create a standard way of naming our ads that tags them with essential elements. This will allow us to search for them later.
The format I recommend is:
Media type - Copy - Media name - Headline
A specific example:
Video-Scarcitycopy-Testimonialvideo-Getyours
What are Pivot Tables? Let’s ask Bill:
-A Pivot Table is a powerful tool to calculate, summarize, and analyze data that lets you see comparisons, patterns, and trends in your data.
In other words, if we wanted to find our how our scarcity copy is working we could try this:
But our heads would explode.
Whereas with this beautiful Pivot Table…
I can clearly see how the scarcity copy performed. Not just in one or a few campaigns, but across all. Why? Simple. With naming conventions, I was able to filter for any ad names that contain, “scarcity.”
You can see the aggregate numbers in green.
Pivot table filter
Once I export my data with naming conventions, creating this Pivot Table is as simple applying this filter in just a few clicks.
Not an Excel geek? Naming conventions are still useful. You could get these same results by using the search feature in the FB Ads Manager (if you used naming conventions).
Ending note: In this example, I showed you how to use ad naming conventions to track the performance of ad copy. You can and should use naming conventions for your ad sets and campaigns to isolate variables such as targeting, placements and optimizations.
With naming conventions and Pivot Tables, you can isolate any variable you want and learn from the ads you are already running.
