Your landing page is the first intentional point of contact for your customers. Your ad templates led them to your landing page, and now it’s time to generate conversions and make a sale.
Is your landing page effective and provides your target audience with the best possible experience? The only way to know is to test it, but you can be more confident and avoid wasting time by ensuring you have the necessary elements of a winning landing page.
Elements of High-Conversion Landing Pages
The best landing pages focus on the customer’s journey and guide them toward conversion. In other words, consider what your audience needs, from scannable copy to custom-made visuals emphasizing your brand’s product or service, and make sure they can access it on whatever device they’re using.
Landing Page Templates
Keep your landing page template in mind. These variations address different things in their headers, and the remaining structure depends on the goal. For example:
- BDQs (Buyer Decision Questions) – Address the key questions your customer needs answered before they are confident buying. Include concise answers, stats and proof, and include unique selling points mixed in with your answers. I.e if you were buying a car, you would need to know the MPG, the # of doors and the paint color.
- Listicle – In a sequence, specify why your product will solve problems or what makes it unique. Using the listed examples as proof, promise to satisfy your future customers.
- Vs. Alternative – Position your product as the best possible solution to a customer’s problem, comparing directly to traditional solutions, your direct competitors, or doing nothing. You should provide meaningful comparisons vs alternatives, trustworthy testimonials, and a breakdown of why your product is the best solution.
- Sales Questions – Rather than you reminding them their problem or goal, ask a question that causes your target customer to recall their problem on their own. Continue asking Qs so that they remember how urgently they want to solve it, and how they’ll feel when they solve it. Once they’ve reminded themselves of what they want, they will be excited to follow through with your call to action (CTA) right away.
- Personalized – Simply state what makes your product different. Get the press talking about how great your product is, demonstrate how easy it is to get the product, share customer testimonials, add before and after pictures, and show what makes the product special.
- Press/Testimonial – Start with a quote validating your product’s selling points and show quotes from press outlets, customers, and UGC examples. Tell customers how easy it is to reach similar results and guarantee the product fits their needs.
Download Primer’s favorite landing page templates here!
Landing Page Key Elements
Run through this at-a-glance checklist to make sure your landing page has all of the essential elements that set it up for success.
- Most Crucial: Information that addresses your audience’s core Buyer Decisions Questions (BDQs)
- Differentiation from potential alternatives and competitors (position directly vs the alternatives)
- A focused and direct headline addressing your target audience according to your landing page template
- Clear calls to action (CTAs) both above the fold and in each section
- Easily scannable copy with no more than 3 lines per paragraph
- Responsive design — optimized for mobile and desktop use
- Uncluttered, consistent design elements throughout
Browse our landing page gallery to glimpse this checklist in action.
Strategizing Variety
Variations
Landing page wins fatigue much more slowly, so you get more bang for your investment in landing page creation. Once you find a win, you can easily scale that win by swapping the hero section headlines, body copy, images and videos (as well as within other sections) to improve results. This will give you a way to test a specific message or feature within the page without creating an entirely new page.
Test With Primer
Whether you’re looking for someone to deliver ready-to-launch landing pages designed to convert or you need a partner to develop and manage your landing page testing strategy, Primer can help.
You can access high-converting landing pages, images and videos with Primer On-Demand, Primer’s trusted online platform.
Interested in learning more about how Primer can help you create video ads and landing pages that convert? Schedule a free consultation today.
At Primer, we have a playbook of several themes we know drive strong performance. One of those proven themes is what we call “how it works”. The magic in this theme is that it explains the individual steps a prospective customer would go through to get from their problem to a solution. The ad makes it feel quick and easy! Just like these ads, we will break down how you can turn this ad creative template into an ad that converts for your brand.
Whether you’re using this theme to produce video ads, image ads, or a landing page, this concept is clear and concise. It breaks down the product or service into short, actionable steps that feel easy and relatable.
Try This Ad Creative Template for Image Ads
When you’re working with static image ads, the goal is to convey as much information as possible, while still keeping the image clear and attention-grabbing. Here are a few ways we achieve this:
Simple Steps
Break your image up into four sections and walk the user through each step to go from problem to desired solution.
How I_____
In this image, we break down a product by showing how it helped solve the problem. If possible, it’s great to share specific information here (e.g. ingredients) to provide proof of the solution.
Checklist
This simple image format breaks down the steps from problem to solution in a checklist format.
Improve Your Video Ads with This Ad Creative Template
When creating a video ad using the How It Works theme, the goal is to quickly and succinctly walk users through the steps from problem to solution. To make that easier, we created a winning script that does just that.
Here it is in action:
And here we break down how we used the template to produce this video. (Pro tip: if your product involves an online purchase, show video footage of the user going through that process. Even better if it’s on a mobile device so it feels familiar when users are scrolling through their phones!)
To make creating video ads even easier, we put together a downloadable How It Works video ad creative brief.
Convert Users With This How It Works Landing Page Creative Template
When How It Works ads are combined with a How It Works landing page, you can be sure that your potential customers have the information they need to fully understand how your product or service can help them.
Similar to images and videos, the How It Works landing page breaks down the steps it takes for a prospective customer to go from problem to solution with your product.
View the page here.
In this example, we combine the step-by-step process with customer testimonials and press logos to provide proof of its effectiveness. When you’re creating your landing page, follow this same structure to balance explanation with proof.
Here are more tips on how to create landing pages that convert.
Start Testing Now
As we wind down 2022 and look ahead to the New Year, many marketers scale back ad spend and slowly transition into January. At Primer, we recommend the exact opposite. Instead, we suggest you start prepping your next video ad creative brief and go big into Q5. We’ll help you get a jumpstart with this high-converting How It Works video ad creative template.
Get Ready to Scale Up During the Cheapest CPMs of the Year
Q5 is the “hidden quarter”. It’s the period between December 26 and mid January, when CPMs go down and engagement is high.
During the 2021-2022 Q5 period, TikTok reported a 22% decrease in CPMs and a 24% increase in video views. At Primer, we have seen similar decreases in CPMs across all channels, including TikTok, Facebook/Instagram and Google. CPAs have also dropped as much as 32% during the same period.
So why don’t more brands take advantage? Many marketers still think that January is quiet outside of health and wellness. While health and wellness brands do very well, Q5 can benefit any brand poised for the drop in costs.
Skip the “New Year, New You” Messaging
As you’re gearing up for Q5, you can skip the New Year, New You messaging. That overplayed tactic elicits instant eye rolls from most consumers. Instead, focus on your brand’s unique value proposition and mix 2023 into the messaging to ensure relevancy.
Now that you have the framework in place, we recommend you start testing right away. The sooner you can get your ads live, the longer you have to find wins that you can scale when CPMs drop around Christmas Day.
At Primer, we developed an ad testing method that enables you to make fast strategic decisions and optimize your budget toward proven top performers. We call it the Outlier Method.
In this post, you’ll learn what the Outlier Method is and how to use it to 3.2x your growth on paid social. We’ll discuss:
- what to test
- when to test
- testing timeline
- big ideas vs. iterations
- how many ads to test
- budget
- what an outlier is
Let’s get started! (More of a visual learner? Click here to download our Outlier Method PDF!)
The Outlier Method
The Outlier Method is an ad testing methodology for paid social media. The full method lasts 2 weeks and should be repeated twice a month, if budget allows.
The goal is to optimize your ads as much as possible by testing every element: copy, creative, landing pages, and audiences. Create different versions of each to test against each other. Once you find the winners, you scale and iterate on them to help them reach their maximum potential.
This method requires a high-volume of creative testing. A/B testing is not enough to work with the Outlier Method.
Before we go into the steps of the Outlier Method, here’s an overview on how to test.
How do you test different elements on ads?
When testing an element (copy, creative, landing page, audience), keep all other elements the same for control. For example, when you test 5 new image variations, use your proven best-performing copy, landing page, and audience on all variations to see which image works best. That’s 5 tests.
You can do the same with new copy, different audiences, new landing pages, etc..
What’s the best way to test ads?
The best way to test your ads for maximum growth is by following the Outlier Method. Here are the steps:
- Launch – Launch a new big idea ad set
- Pause – Pause ads that are underperforming
- Scale – Scale Outliers by adding budget and making iterations
- Iterate – Iterate on your winning iterations
These four ad testing steps are completed in 2 weeks and repeated twice a month. Let’s dig deeper into each step.
Step 1: Launch
Decide on a brand new idea to test. We call these “big idea tests” to differentiate from “iterative tests.”
For every big idea, you should create 3-10 visuals. Then, combine that with copy, headline, and LP combinations for a total of about 50 tests for every $25,000 in ad spend.
Day 1: Launch a new big idea ad set
Launch your tests into a separate ad set or campaign from your top-performing ads. Why? Facebook records a history on ad performance, so when you run a brand new ad against a top performer with a history of winning, Facebook will favor the top performer and your new ad test will not get a fair shot.
On Facebook, we recommend launching ad sets with 10-25 ads in them, though you can go up to 50. On TikTok, we recommend keeping tests to between 4-6 ads per ad set.
For a partner, Farmstead, one big idea we tested was messaging around buying fresh or local in a slightly more native-style format than previous creative (at the time, native-style text was just emerging). Using Farmstead, here’s a visual example of what the creative for a big idea ad test might look like:
What about budget?
For ad set budget optimization (ABO – recommended for Meta ads): set a daily budget that will yield a minimum of 3x conversions a day with your average CPA.
For campaign budget optimization (CBO – recommended for TikTok ads if monthly budget is <$100,000): pick a daily budget that ensures you can hit at least 50 conversions per week in the campaign.
For more on this, read How Many Ads You Should Be Testing Every Month to Hit Your Goals (it’s more than you think).
STEP 2. PAUSE
Day 2-4: Pause ads that are underperforming
The Outlier Method moves very fast (we don’t have time to wait for statistical significance – there’s money at stake!). Start to pause your bottom-performing ad tests immediately.
For the first three days, watch the tests closely and quickly pause ads with higher CPAs than average. As a rule of thumb, aim to have 50% paused within 48 hours and 75% within 72 hours.
This way, you’re not wasting budget on underperformers. You’re only directing budget toward potential Outliers.
What is an Outlier?
Outliers are generally ads that perform 2-3x better than the rest in their campaign. They should have better performance than your account average by at least 10%.
STEP 3. SCALE
Day 4: Scale Outliers by adding budget and making iterations
Scale
Move those 25% that you did not pause into a campaign filled only with proven best performers. Add budget and watch them win!
Once you have 1-4 ads that either beat the previous period’s average CPA or beat your goal CPA, those are your Outliers. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to pause everything else.
Here was the best Outlier from our ad test with Farmstead:
Iterate
To get the most out of your Outliers and scale them even more, make and test at least 3 ad creative iterations for each Outlier. For example, keep the main image the same but change the copy on the image, like we did for Farmstead, below:
What is an iteration?
An “iteration” is a variation of your previous top-performing ads in which you change one or two elements, such as changing the image copy, the color scheme, or a video’s hook. By creating multiple iterations and testing those, you can thoughtfully scale your account’s Outliers.
STEP 4. ITERATE
Week 2: Iterate on your winning iterations
Keep this process going. In the second week, you’re essentially following the same process as the first week, but with iterations of Week 1’s Outliers. Yes, this means you’ll even iterate on winning iterations.
The Outlier Method should be completed within 1-2 weeks for each new big idea (including iterations). Then, depending on your budget, you should also launch new big ideas 1 – 2 times per month.
For Farmstead, the iterations mentioning “$0” and “No Fees” performed best. So, we tested these iterations next to find the highest performer of this big idea test:
That’s the Outlier Method!
Now you have all the information you need to start using the Outlier Method. Congrats! Download our Outlier Method PDF to keep this info on hand.
It’s a lot of ad testing and requires a very high-volume of creative. But since most ads fail, and because older top performers fatigue out, this high volume of ad testing is the best way to ensure long-term success and fast growth for your brand.
You’ll need a lot of management and creative – that’s where we can help!
Your Growth Partner
If you’re looking for help scaling and testing your ads, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll handle it all for you – the creative strategy, design, production, reporting, and media buying. You just enjoy the wins.
Creative On-Demand
Need a lot of high-quality ad creative fast? Primer On-Demand is an online platform to get videos, images, and landing pages produced by top marketing designers who know what converts.
With a looming recession making headlines, many companies are hyper-concerned about their growth coming to a halt and revenue flatlining. If that’s the case for you, you might be faced with two conflicting tasks:
- Reduce spend 💲
- Increase revenue💰
You’re trying to save money and make money, and that’s exactly why you need to run more ads. Thankfully, launching many controlled ad tests will help you to reduce your CPA and increase revenue exponentially in a short amount of time.
Reduce CPA by 1.6x in just 2 months
Here’s a real CPA trajectory of one of our partners that increased the amount of ads they were running:
Monthly ad spend: Approximately $200k
The result?
👉 Savings of about $240K in the first 2 months, and $1.07 Million in 6 months, compared to if they kept the same CPA.
👉 Increased purchases from ads by about 53% in just two months, and 89% in 6 months.
Related: View our case studies
Here’s how we did it (and how you can, too)
We call it the Outlier Method:
- Launch a new big idea ad set.
- Pause ads that are underperforming.
- Increase budget to your wins (A.K.A. “outliers”) and pause everything else.
- Scale wins by creating at least 3 iterations each.
- Iterate on your winning iterations.
Finally, repeat the whole cycle with a brand new big idea ad set. But you have to move quickly.
The key to saving money: act quickly
When it comes to pausing and scaling, don’t wait for statistical significance. By that point, you’re wasting money on underperforming ads and the opportunity cost of scaling your wins. Here’s what your timeline should look like:
- Start pausing underperforming ads within 24 hours
- Find and move budget to the outliers by day 3
- Start making creative iterations of your outliers to launch ASAP
- The Outlier Method should be completed within 1-2 weeks for each big idea
- At least 2 big ideas launched each month
The key to ad performance: great creative, and lots of it
Ready to launch more ads to reduce your CPA? You’ll need a lot of great creative. For each big idea, you’ll need about 20 creative assets. When scaling the wins, you’ll need about 20 more. If done twice a month, you’ll need about 80 creative assets per month. If this seems out of reach for you, we can help, just like we helped our partner above.
Your Growth Partner
Need high-quality ad creative fast? Use Primer’s on-demand online platform to get videos, images and landing pages produced by top marketing designers.
If you’re looking for help scaling and testing your ads, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll handle it all for you – the creative strategy, design, production, reporting, and media buying. You just enjoy the wins.
You’re probably not launching enough new ads to hit your goals. With changing algorithms and creative styles, it’s more important than ever to refresh your ad creative and unlock new audiences. Here at Primer, we determine how many ads we should test based on the ad spend. We aim for 50 new ads for every $25,000 in ad spend.
Why do we recommend launching 50+ new ads per month?
Testing a high volume of ad creative in paid social helps in four key ways:
- Improves critical metrics like CPA and ROAS
- Keeps ad creative from growing stale (this is increasingly important as converting creative styles change)
- Unlocks new audiences (this is particularly helpful for content-marketing-focused brands
- Leads to a more sustainable growth strategy (Bonus: Consistent testing means you can find wins even as algorithms change)
Won’t testing that much hurt CPA?
Short answer: no.
Using a regular, high-volume testing cadence, we scaled purchase volume by 60% and increasing conversion rate by 65% over a 3-month period for one of our partners.
You can expect a new ad set to increase CPA during its learning phase (right after launching); however, if you structure your test correctly, you can minimize the impact.
Here’s how: create your test in a separate ad set and make sure this testing ad set budget should be less than half of your overall monthly ad spend. This means any spikes in CPA should be both temporary and minor.
In the long run, you’re much more likely to hit your goals with regular testing than by leaving the same two to three ads active for months at a time. This is because of “creative fatigue.” Over time, an ad that was once a strong performer loses its efficiency, and CPAs start to increase. By consistently finding new wins, you can defend your account against this phenomenon and unlock new strategic learnings to use in your future tests, content marketing, email campaigns, and more.
This is particularly true on TikTok, where creative fatigue happens much faster than on Meta.
Here’s what to test in new ads
Launching dozens of ads per month means you should be able to run multiple split tests.
For our purposes, a paid media “split test” means trying out multiple new variations of one element of an ad while keeping everything else the same. And then seeing how those new ads or audiences perform against the old “winner” (i.e. your control ad).
Here are some elements of ads you should test regularly:
- Copy
- Images
- Image Headlines
- Videos
- Calls to action (CTAs)
- Headline
- Audiences
- Video thumbnails
- Landing pages
Try testing out new colors, layouts, phrases, and more. Maybe your audience likes emojis, or maybe they’re more into facts and stats. You won’t know until you try those elements.
How to launch a lot of ad tests fast
(This works for TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram)
Step 1: Set up a new test ad set in your the campaign with your current goal (e.g. Website Purchases)
- For audience tests, use your past top-performing ads with a new ad set audience
- For all other types of tests, use your top-performing audience with new ads within the ad set
- Tip: Make sure you name your ad set so that you can easily tell what it’s testing at a glance. (example: 2022_Purchase_ImageTest_THEME)
Step 2: Launch Ads in Bulk
- Batch together ads in a new test, changing one element (e.g. the copy) and keeping all other elements the same, as a control
- For example, when you test 15 new copy variations, use your top-performing image and audience
- On Facebook, we recommend launching ad sets with 10 – 25 ads in them, though you can go up to 50
- On TikTok, we recommend keeping tests to between 4-6 ads per ad set
Step 3: Set Your Budget
- You want to make sure your budget is high enough that your test can exit the learning phase within 1 – 1.5 weeks. Since the learning phase is generally more expensive, this will help minimize the impact of new launches on your overall CPA.
- For most Facebook campaigns, we recommend using ad set budget optimization (ABO) to have increased control in your test spend. For TikTok, if your budget is under $100k per month, the best option is usually CBO because of the increased creative turnover rates. [Here’s more about setting up TikTok ad campaigns.]
- For Facebook, Instagram and TikTok here’s how much you should spend:
- For ad set budget optimization (ABO): set a daily budget that will yield a minimum of 3x conversions a day with your average CPA
- For campaign budget optimization (CBO): pick a daily budget that ensures you can hit at least 50 conversions per week in the campaign
Step 4: Pause Bottom Performers
- After 48 – 72 hours, you can begin pausing bottom-performing ads (Note: Changes in iOS App Tracking Transparency mean there can be up a 72-hour delay in conversion reporting)
- Pause ads with a higher-than-average CPA
- Continue this process for 1-2 weeks (depending on your budget)
- Once you have 1-4 ads left that either beat the previous period’s average CPA or beat your goal CPA, those are your WINS
Step 5: Scale Wins and Repeat
- First, scale the budget to the wins in the test ad set (for ABO) or campaign (for CBO)
- Then, iterate off of those wins for your next test
- Make sure to keep all elements except what you’re testing the same so you can compare performance between the new ads and the control (i.e., the previous wins)
___
Routinely testing on paid media is the best way to ensure long-term success and growth for your brand. And determining how many ads you should test should be simply based on ad spend.
If the above process feels familiar, it should. At its core, split testing on paid media is grounded in the scientific method.
As you get more information about what performs for your buyer personas (and, perhaps, why), your ads should lead to more conversions from your key audiences and unlock new audiences to expand into.
Still curious about how our methodology works in practice?
See how we launched over 2,200 ads in six weeks for Madison Reed to get them 41% more customers.
Or, book a consultation to get a free growth plan below.
So you’ve created ads with killer click-through rates. But your conversions just aren’t there.
This likely indicates that your landing pages aren’t working for your audience.
The landing page has one job: SELL fast.
Within SECONDS, the user will determine if this product is:
- A fit for them
- Will solve their urgent need
Tip: Some users will leave the page before they even see your content. This is generally because of slow loading speeds. Make sure your page is optimized for both speed and multi-platform use (mobile, various browsers, different screen sizes, etc.) so that they actually get to read your great content distraction-free. Check your page load speed for free on Uptrends.
According to Wordstream, the average landing page CVR is around 2.35%, with the top 25% of pages converting at 5.31% or higher.
Here’s how to create landing pages that will convert customers and improve ad performance.
5 Essential Elements for a High-Converting Landing Page:
1. Speak directly to your customer persona
- Write in a conversational style
- Talk TO them by using the word “you” or “your” (or “my” in a CTA)
- Address major questions and objections about signing up to, paying for, or using your product/service (e.g. to emphasize how easy your site is to use, you could say: “Sign up in 30 seconds!”)
- Tailor the language to feel relevant to the person you are speaking to
2. Address Their Urgent Need
- Why is the consumer looking for your product right now?
- Address their urgent need above the folder in the header (so they don’t have to scroll to discover something that interests them)
- Refer to their customer persona to ensure you’re answering the questions they will need to ask before making a purchase
3. Give Them Specifics
- Add numbers, data, quantities to create specifics around the benefits
- We’ve found that data acts as a more compelling hook than more generic headlines. If your company doesn’t have any studies that reference your product specifically, try pulling data from industry-wide research (e.g. 23% of adult women experience acne). Then, posit your brand as a solution to that problem.
Discover more ways to draw readers in with copy hooks
4. Make the CTA Actionable
- The CTA should reflect the next actionable step in the purchase
- The consumer should know exactly what comes next
- It should be specific to them and the action they take on the page
- Ensure there is a CTA button above the fold on both desktop and mobile
- The shorter the better: we want the CTA to be clear and quickly read
5. Make Headlines Scannable
- Users don’t read, they scan: Studies showed that only 16% of users read word-by-word and realistically only read 20% on the page
- Limit your copy to no more than 3 lines of copy per section, which should be scannable within 2-3 seconds
- Use short, to-the-point headlines
- Communicate your key points in the headlines
7 Creative Ways to Share a Lot of Info
In order to perform, landing pages should be easily scannable and clear, but sometimes your copy has to do a lot of work to address a customer’s key buyer decision questions.
That’s where creative layouts come in. You can use design elements to make a lot of content feel less overwhelming.
1. Buttons that Reveal Content
Great for: Multiple products, many features
2. Press Testimonials in Logo Bar
Great for: Very short quotes that add credibility and/or support your theme
3. Scannable Comparison Table
Great for: Products or services with many features; Brands in a competitive space; Subscriptions
4. 50/50 Visual Comparison
Good for: When you want to showcase the key product benefits and contrast them to an alternative option (works great when it’s against a concept instead of a direct competitor).
5. Testimonial Slider
Good for: Brands with many customer testimonials.
Only show one testimonial at a time and either have them auto-play cycling through or have manual buttons/arrows for users to select to see the next.
6. Use an Educational Video
Good for: Medical brands or brands with many “fine print” details or a steep learning curve on their product use
Instead of adding in-depth instructions on your landing page, consider creating an instructional video, which you can either embed on your landing page or make available for anyone who wants the in-depth information.
7. Ingredients Slider
Good for: Medical, beauty, and food products
If you need to showcase detailed information about ingredients or elements of a product, consider hiding details until a user clicks on a certain element.
* * *
At Primer, we know how important landing pages are to overall ROI. That’s why we include landing page design and development in all our creative testing.
See more examples of top-converting landing pages on our landing page gallery.
TikTok is no longer a newcomer in the digital advertising space. It’s a global platform with global brands spending billions on TikTok ads. Its ads management platform is sophisticated and the reps are top-notch. If you’re not already advertising on TikTok, we have many reasons why you should start, and this guide will give everything you need to know to get your TikTok ads live and winning. Here, you’ll find ad ops best practices for TikTok ads, including how to set up your campaigns, the top TikTok ad audience strategies, and what to avoid.
How do we know what works?
We’re a top TikTok advertiser and a proud partner in the TikTok Creative Exchange. In fact, the majority of the advertisers that have partnered with us to create ads for TikTok have been featured in the TikTok Top Ads Library,, meaning they have high-quality creative, resonate well with audiences, and are high converters.
When it comes to creating winning video ads, did you know that 70% of campaign performance is rooted in creative? Ad creative fuels brand success.
By designing content specifically for the platform, the ads feel more organic and engaging, giving brands the chance to stop the scroll and increase results, lower CPAs, and scale their business.
At Primer, we’ve helped our partners develop engaging, organic-feeling creative that grows their brands and gains a whole new audience on TikTok. In fact, every single partner we’ve worked with on TikTok has been featured in TikTok Top Ads.
Here are 7 ways we are producing some of the top TikTok Ads (and how you can too):
Have you ever heard that your ads are only as strong as your buyer persona? …You mean, that’s not something commonly discussed at dinner tables? Never fear! This is the article for you. We’ll break down what buyer personae are, why they’re useful, and why they’re crucial for creating ads that attract customers and help your business hit its goals.
Yesterday’s “hacks” to account performance are long gone. The days of narrowly targeting interest-based audiences or fine tuning your ad budgets have been replaced by the digital ad platform’s algorithms. In Facebook’s and TikTok’s attempts to level the playing field for advertisers, they have essentially removed the ability to fine-tune your ad account to optimal performance. Today, the greatest lever that is available to growth marketers is ad creative. With high-volume creative testing, you are able to find new levels of efficiency and growth.
At Primer, we use a creative testing process called The Outlier Method. Our goal is to find the ads, audiences, and landing pages that rise to the top above all the others and focus on scaling those wins to create a healthier, stronger account. In this method, great ad ops can only take accounts so far. To get ads over the finish line and into the “win” zone, high-volume creative testing is key.
The Magic of High-Volume Creative Testing
There is only so much account management and restructuring you can do to optimize an account—especially as Meta, TikTok, and Google take more control out of the hands of the marketer and deliver it unto the almighty algorithm. Gone are the days of being able to slap together a few rushed ideas, make a couple of tweaks in platform, et voila… your campaigns are humming along with a positive ROI.
If only it were still so simple.
The digital landscape is now more crowded than ever, and costs are constantly rising. In order to be successful, you’ll have to stand out from the crowd—and to do that, you need creative that connects with your audience and gets potential customers to convert.
This is why high-volume creative testing (i.e., launching many ads with new creative against your go-to top performers) is such a crucial part of a successful paid media strategy.
The Case of 2 Accounts
Below we’re going to lay out two types of accounts. One doesn’t test new creative regularly and the other does. Can you guess which one is healthy and hitting goals? Let’s find out.
Account #1:
Prioritizes “Scrambling” and “Account Optimizations”
- Priorities always given to daily and deep-dive account management
- Creative briefs are always rushed. Copy no one would ever say out loud BDQs aren’t answered in videos or LPs. Turned in late or over the weekend.
- Constantly wasting time on extra meetings and comms with the partner b/c the account hasn’t improved in since the start
- Just treading water 🦆
Account #2:
- Prioritizes the creative brief and creative reviews
- Learns from each creative test
- Invests now for a payoff in 2-3 weeks.
As we can see from above, the account that is regularly testing new creative, learning from those tests, and then continually building on the learnings will eventually reach its aggressive CPA goals. Whereas the account that relies purely on ad optimization is “treading water” and will have a hard time unlocking new wins to hit its goals.
At the end of the day, garbage in equals garbage out.
How it Works: Otter.ai Case Study
Let’s take a look at how this works—with a real example from one of our successful partners.
Otter.ai is an automated note-taking app that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help users boost productivity in meetings, lectures, dictation, and more.
Otter.ai came to Primer with the goal of growing their customer base and scaling ad spend while improving their cost per acquisition. By implementing an aggressive creative testing strategy, we were able to scale purchase volume by 60% while decreasing CPA by 13% over a 3 month period.
Otter.ai’s previous creative strategy used language and visuals common in the tech world. They were blending in where they needed to stand out. By testing large amounts of copy, visuals, and landing pages, we pushed creative boundaries to the edges of their brand guides to find new scroll-stopping ways of appealing to the customer.
We aggressively tested creative at high volumes and found outliers that resonated with the audience, including retro imaging, videos showcasing the software, and testimonial copy. After finding these outliers, we quickly scaled various combinations of winners to build a large stable of ads that could maintain a strong CAC while actively scaling spend.
The Thought Process
Like most data-driven ventures, we began with the tenets of the scientific method: We started with an educated hypothesis, then took what we learned from that test and built upon it — then repeated A LOT ‘til the cows came home.
Here are some of the insights we discovered in our tests and how we scaled them to hit Otter’s goals:
Pop-Art Images
Since we believed the isometric images so similar to other tech companies that were previously used in the account were blending into viewers’ feeds, we tried a new pop-art/retro style paired with copy we had previously seen perform well. This resulted in 3 quick wins. Based on these wins, we tried a similar art style with animals in an office environment and got even more wins. After that, we routinely included pop-art-style graphics into every creative brief and new test, looking to keep up performance momentum, even as we tried out new copy concepts.
Blue Backgrounds
In our pop-art image test, we noticed that of the 10 images in the creative sprint, the 3 winners all had a blue background. This led us to keep increasing the amount of images that had blue backgrounds every sprint. After doing so for a while, we deduced that blue outperformed all other colors and used it for the majority of ads.
Copy
Copy focused on “manual notes” and associated pain points had always worked well in the account, so we tested copy that was the inverse—what did Otter offer in relation to manual notes? Tapping into BDQs led us to unlock new key phrases like “boosting productivity” and “time-saving automated notes,” which consistently performed well—both in headlines and various body copy.
Quiz Landing Page
We communicated to the partner that we had seen a lot of success with quiz-style landing pages in other accounts. We built a new quiz page around the new imagery and messaging we had seen working in the ads. This landing page led to a 65% increase in conversion rate. (You can find more examples of Primer’s top performing landing pages here.)
Retargeting
Using all our learnings from top of funnel (TOF) prospecting advertising, we rebuilt Otter’s retargeting campaign with the addition of middle of funnel (MOF) messaging. This unlocked massive gains, reducing retargeting CPA by 43%.
Better Creative Testing for ANY Vertical
If you’re looking to make great improvements to your marketing campaigns, aggressive creative testing is one of the best ways to do that. Taking the time to optimize which imagery and messaging attracts your target customer will help drive purchase volume, lower acquisition costs, and scale your paid media in ways that would be nearly impossible to achieve otherwise.
If you’re looking for a guide on your paid media journey, consider our full-service marketing strategy, creative development, and account management solutions.
Find out how you can start hitting goals with our high-volume strategy in a growth consultation.