Facebook Creative Testing for Brand-Driven Organizations

Facebook Creative Testing Best Practices

Creative Elements to Prepare

Most large companies have developed a strong brand image accompanied by strict brand guidelines used to represent companies in a consistent manner. While brand-driven organizations take into consideration elements such as color palette, font treatment, logo placements, voice and tone to be used in the copy. And more to develop brand-compliant creatives.

Brand Assets: Brand guidelines with dos & don’ts, logos, fonts, colors, styling & layout, sounds, etc.
Who You Are: Brand guidelines with dos & don’ts, logos, fonts, colors, styling & layout, sounds, etc.
Likes and Dislikes: Preferred color pallets, simple vs stylized, subtle, elegant vs dramatic.
Brand Mode: Elements to recreate your look (backgrounds, textures, icons, graphics…).
Inspiration: Share videos that worked well—ones you love, and some that bombed.
Campaign References: Examples of successful assets and their results, and why they worked.

But, when dealing with direct response advertising, what happens if brand-driven creative does not perform? Should advertisers drop their brand rules and test different creative that will drive performance? Our team at Consumer Acquisition has developed creative testing guidelines to help a brand-driven organization succeed with a mobile app and user acquisition campaigns on Facebook.

Direct Response vs. Branding

It’s important to note that there are brand marketers and then there are data-driven marketers—they think about social strategy from different viewpoints. Brand marketers consider reputation and visibility, and data-driven marketers think about measurable results. Finding a middle ground between these two mindsets is required for optimal performance:

Tips for Making Data-Driven Decisions in a Brand-Driven Company

Move quickly from testing to scaling.
Most ads get less than 10,000 impressions.
75% of brand compliance is okay for testing.
Find winners before ads fatigue.
Limit non-converting spend.
When you find winners, clean up brand compliance, and re-test!

The Creative Testing Process

Creative testing is imperative to find a winning creative, Thus, a high-performing video or image that would allow your organization to scale and reach your financial objectives. However, creative testing can also produce financial waste, because about 95% of creatives will fail at outperforming your current winner or at becoming a winner. As a result. our team at Consumer Acquisition has developed guidelines to help advertisers test creatives efficiently.

Before Testing

Test 1 variable
Know your KPIs
Avoid data contamination & reduce overlap
Ensure test geo is representative

During Testing

Test 1 variable
Know your KPIs
Avoid data contamination & reduce overlap
Ensure test geo is representative

Post Testing

Test 1 variable
Know your KPIs
Avoid data contamination & reduce overlap
Ensure test geo is representative

Creative should be born from something. Before you start testing, you should brainstorm what you think would resonate with your audience and start forming a hypothesis around different variables. Forming hypotheses will later help you understand more about what works and what doesn’t within your Facebook campaigns.