It’s not just a good idea to test your ads. It is essential. 9 out of 10 ads fail, so you always have to try different things, learn what works, and iterate. The surest pathway to growth is creative testing: testing your ad creative quickly and in bulk.
But it is a big investment. You’ll need a lot of creative, a lot of bandwidth, and a lot of ad spend. Thankfully, the return on investment (ROI) is incredible. We’ve had partners save millions of dollars in months.
Keep reading to learn why testing your ads is worth it.
Rapid-Fire Creative Testing
Companies looking to grow fast need more than just slow A/B testing. In this world of new algorithms and zero-party data, how quickly you move makes all the difference.
But how do you know what to test? Or how often to do it? Or what’s worth scaling? Or when to pause a bad performer?
You know the struggle. So we made the perfect solution: the Outlier Method of testing. We use it for all of our partners to test their copy, images, gifs, videos, video hooks, thumbnails, landing pages, headlines, CTAs, and audience. You name it, you should test it. Here’s how it works:
For more on the Outlier Method, including recommended budget and timelines, download the cheat sheet here.
Your Investment
If you decide to follow the Outlier Method, your investment isn’t just the ad spend. It’s the money it takes to pay the designers creating the ads and the marketers managing the campaigns. It’s not just a monetary investment, either. It’s also the bandwidth to constantly come up with new ideas for tests, stay up to date on best practices, keep up with algorithms, etc.
How this is broken up will vary from company to company, but essentially, every company will invest these two things:
- The overhead, time, and bandwidth it takes to launch a given number of ad tests
- A certain budget for ad spend
In our ROI calculator, you can see exactly how many ad tests you should be running with your ad spend. You’ll also be able to see how many of those tests will fail (it’s probably more than you think) and how many will win.
Your Return
Here’s the good part: your return. Is all of that investment worth it? Spoiler: of course it is!
One way to calculate your ROI would be your percent increase in purchases as well as your savings, which both take into account the impact that rapid-fire testing has on your CPA. We’ll assume your CPA without testing would stay consistent, and that your monthly ad spend will not change.
Increase in Purchases
While actual numbers will vary, we identified an average trend in how CPAs decrease for our partners over time. You can see your projected CPAs for your first six months of rapid-fire testing in our ROI calculator.
You’ll also see that as your CPAs decrease, of course the number of purchases you can accommodate on your same monthly budget will increase. We’ll assume that without testing, your number of purchases would stay the same.
The percent increase in total purchases varies depending on your starting CPA and the number of ad tests you’re running, which depends on your monthly budget. Find out yours on the calculator.
For some (potentially mind-blowing) context, one of our partners increased purchases from ads by about 53% in just two months, and 89% in 6 months. Not too shabby!
Related: View our case studies
Total Savings
The way we calculate your savings is by first taking the total number of purchases we’d expect you to have after your first year of rapid-fire testing and multiplying it by your current CPA. This would show us how much the same number of purchases would cost you if you didn’t do rapid-fire testing.
We then take that number and subtract your annual ad spend to show how much money rapid-fire testing would save you.
One of our partners had savings of about $240K in the first 2 months, and $1.07 Million in 6 months, compared to if they kept the same CPA.
How Is This Possible?
While many companies hire growth marketing agencies, others are able to handle the investment with some internal changes. Others might do a combination of the two: keeping the ad management in-house but outsourcing the creative production.
We’re here to help! To get unlimited creative designed to convert, get started now with Primer On-Demand. To have it all done for you, click the button below to schedule a growth consultation today.
