Testing Ideas for Paid Search and Social Media Ads


April 11, 2013

search and social media testing

With traditional advertising media such as TV spots and magazine ads, many companies invest heavily before they can predict how ads will perform. Not only do they pay the TV channel or magazine publication, they invest in the creative talent, equipment, materials, and production of the ad campaign. They commit to all these costs before they can even tell if it will work. 

A Digital Advantage: Paid Search and Social Media Testing

With paid search and social media ads, you have the power to maximize your investment and control your costs in real time. Many platforms provide comprehensive metrics that help you evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns. Thus, not only can you control your costs, you can spend more on effective campaigns and not waste money on ads that don’t work. Here are some tips to help you succeed with paid search and social advertising.

Set Measurable Goals

paid search and social media testingBefore you start writing ad text and creating graphics, consider your goals. What are you looking to accomplish? Do you want to increase customer awareness or engagement with your brand? Do you want to generate leads or communicate a promotion? Or perhaps you want to increase traffic to your website.

Different search or social platforms are better suited to achieving different goals and reaching different audiences, so choose platforms with your goals and audience in mind. For example, Google AdWords is a good platform to drive traffic, communicate promotions, or generate leads to your website.

It’s important to set goals that you can measure. Most search and social platforms provide the capability to track metrics. In general, key metrics are impressions (or views), clicks, click-through-rate (CTR), and cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand-views (CPM).

Imagine you have a website called “Cupcakes for Cats” that averages 50 page-views a day. You want to use Google AdWords to double that to 100 page-views per day. Your goal for your AdWords campaign is to generate 50 clicks per day. It’s ok to estimate when setting your goal, you just want to set a goal that will help you objectively evaluate the campaign performance and strategically plan future ad campaigns.

Test a Variety of Ads

paid search and social media testingNow that you’ve set your goal, it’s time to create your ads. Write a few basic ads, and then tweak them, using different combinations of wording, punctuation, and graphics. The greater variety of ads you start with, the more information you’ll have to evaluate which ads are effective and which are not. Even if some of your ads don’t drive traffic, those ads won’t cost you a dime since your cost is based on the number of clicks or impressions your ads generate.

Reach your target audience by targeting specific locations, age groups, or other criteria. Tweak your ads to be more relevant to your different target audiences. For example, if “Cupcakes for Cats” has locations in New York City and one in Chicago, create a set of ads specific to New Yorkers and a separate set of ads geared towards Chicagoans.

Depending on your time frame, run all of the ads you’ve created for a few days, or a few weeks. Keep an eye on your bidding, and those key metrics I mentioned above. Then, gauge the effectiveness of your ads. Which ones performed the best? The worst? Were some ads more effective with certain targeting criteria? Continually refine your ad campaign and bidding strategy to focus on the most effective combinations of ads and target audiences.

Evaluate Performance of Key Metrics

paid search and social media testingOnce you’ve established your ad campaign and are getting some consistent traffic, check to see how actual performance measures up against your goals. After running your “Cupcakes for Cats” ad campaign for a couple of weeks, you see that, on average, your ads generated 20 clicks per day. In the past week, they generated 30 clicks per day.

Although you haven’t yet achieved your goal of 50 clicks per day, you’ve increased your web traffic by 40% these past two weeks. Maybe your goal of a 100% increase was too lofty, or maybe you just need to give your ads more time. After all, it looks like traffic is picking up.

If you don’t reach your goal, don’t be disappointed. Every market has a different competitive landscape on each of the platforms. The more familiar you become with the different search and social platforms, the better you’ll be at setting ambitious, yet achievable, goals.

Are you testing your paid search and social media ads?

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is a strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World and Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. He is the Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital, an educator at the University of Iowa, and host of the On Brand podcast. More about Nick.