Should You Start New Campaigns with Creative Testing?
Today's question is whether to launch a brand new campaign with creative testing or start testing later with new creatives. There's no absolute right answer, but Jon has a preferred approach with clear reasoning behind it. He explains why starting new ads with a test answers questions you'll have later, avoids the messy workaround of duplicating existing ads, and ensures you get meaningful data from the start.
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Question
Hi Jon, this is Amanda with a Pubcast question regarding creative testing. I had recently taken a pause from doing campaigns for my business and so now I'm ready to launch our very first campaign and we have new creatives and wondering. Should I be launching this brand new campaign setting it up as creative testing or should that come afterwards as I receive new creative?
Answer
Hey, Amanda, great question!
Creative testing is a major focus of mine right now, and I love talking about it. There isn’t a true right or wrong here, but I certainly have a preferred approach, and there’s a reason behind it.
Whenever I am ready to publish new ads, I start them with a test using the creative testing tool. That doesn’t mean a separate campaign or ad set for testing either. I create the test in the active ad set where these ads will live and run when the test is over.
Your question is about starting a new campaign and ad set, and there’s a slight caveat here. Normally, when you initiate a test using the creative testing tool, a percentage of your campaign or ad set budget will be set aside for the test. Meta typically recommends around 20 percent for testing.
But if it’s a new campaign, you’d obviously want to use 100 percent. In theory, Meta should use more than 20 percent if the only ads in the campaign are those in your test, but I’d just go ahead and manually choose the full budget when setting up the test.
There are two reasons why I do this at the beginning when starting new ads.
The first is that it helps answer questions I might have later. I get to see how individual ads perform when Meta gives them equal budget. I won’t have to wonder weeks down the road what would happen if an ad that’s not getting any impressions received some budget. I’d have that data from the initial test.
The second reason I start new ads this way is due to an annoying quirk with creative testing. You cannot test existing ads with the creative testing tool. And because of that, you’re stuck with a very annoying scenario if you want to test an active ad weeks after it started running.
You’d need to duplicate those existing ads and recreate them to run in the test. And those test ads would run while their duplicates also run. It’s just super messy, and you can avoid all of that by starting new ads with a test.
As a side note, consider the number of ads, length of the test, and budget assigned to the test as well. You want to get meaningful data from that test.
If you’re optimizing for a purchase and running a creative test of five ads that split up $50 per day for a week, you’re not going to get meaningful data. You’re spending $10 per day for each ad.
That’s where you might want to test two ads at a time or extend the test to two weeks.
Hope this helps, and thanks for the question, Amanda!