It can be challenging to stand out and reach your target audience effectively. With ever-increasing competition, marketers are facing the task of using their limited budgets in a strategic manner to yield the best results. As we enter 2023, it’s crucial for marketers to ensure that their digital ad spend is optimized to drive strong campaigns and deliver maximum impact. One way to do this is with social ad A/B testing.
How to Benchmark your Campaign Success
Maximizing your return on ad spend (ROAS) is a top priority for any marketer, and understanding how to accurately calculate the metric is crucial. Before diving into how to improve your ROAS, let’s first review how to measure ROAS and how it will be referenced throughout our discussion.
To calculate ROAS, take the total campaign revenue and divide it by the total campaign cost.
For example, if you ran a digital ad campaign that you spent $5,000 on and you generated $15,000 in revenue into your conversion funnel, you would end up having a ROAS of 3 to 1.
As a note, in today’s blog post, you will see several B2C references and examples. But, everything we’re talking about today is relevant to B2B campaigns as well!
Optimizing your Ad-to-Page Journey
Increasing your return on ad spend involves creating messaging that resonates with your target audience, so they engage with it and eventually convert. To ensure your messaging is relevant to your audience it’s important that the elements of your marketing funnel are optimized for each audience segment and that you perform A/B testing across the funnel.
Before we dive into optimization practices, let’s first understand the basic ad-to-page journey your potential customers will take.
Featured below is an oversimplified, birds-eye-view of what the ad-to-customer journey looks like.
The conversion process begins when your audience first sees your ad. The exposure of your target audience to an ad, followed by a landing page. For a landing page to be high-converting all the elements need to highlight the offer–keeping in mind the audience’s needs.
There should also be a perfect message match between your ad and your landing page and whatever else comes after it (welcome email sequence, nurture sequence, etc).
Optimizing your ad-to-page experiences also involves A/B testing—including social ad tests and page tests to ensure you’re not paying high CPC (cost per click) on leads that aren’t converting on your page.
Let’s analyze an ad-to-page example for message matching and see if there’s room for improvement.
The Sasquatch Boots Social Ad A/B Testing
This Sasquatch Boots ad offers 10% off hiking boots. The ad copy includes social proof from world-class hiker Anish Anderson, and the creative features an image of the boots.
The landing page features the full quote from the hiker, ensuring the headline and sub-headline highlight the features of the boots from the point of view of the customer.
However, if you isolate the copy, it doesn’t really explain much about the product except for highlighting the comfort angle. There’s no mention of durability, how it performs against other natural elements, etc.
This page also doesn’t feature the 10% off offer that brought prospects from the ad to the page. The missing discount offer also takes away any sense of urgency from the page.
Let’s see what happens when you add “sale” messaging on the page. The page now also includes a sense of urgency with the addition of the CTA “Shop Sale Now.”
However, we can still tweak this landing page by showing prospects exactly how much they will save. It’s always better to save your potential customers the hassle of doing the math themselves.
Here’s what the landing page would look like if you incorporate the 10% discount copy, while also highlighting the dollar value of the discount.
As the real cherry on top, it also brings in the exact hiking boots from the ad. As a bonus: the landing page includes additional optimizations such as showing you the product’s star rating and adding in a more relevant CTA, “find my size.”
Tips on how to optimize your ad-to-page journey for your next campaign
Now, let’s dig into the tactics you can (and should) adopt to maximize your ad spend investment. Applying these five tips to your next digital campaign could help you improve your ROAS through social ad A/B testing.
Be consistent with your messaging
Running A/B tests on Facebook Ads, for example, helps you analyze what creatives and copy are most relevant for the audience, making your messaging more impactful.
Diagnose the right opportunity
In order to run a successful campaign, you as a marketer need to diagnose the right opportunity. How can you do that?
Just as cost per click or CPC is an input metric into return on ad spend, meaning that any changes to CPC will directly impact ROAS – CPC also has its own input metrics – clickthrough rate and conversion rate.
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions resulting in a click. If CTR is lower than expected, there are usually two things that could be improved:
- Quality of your ad creative. Does it capture someone’s attention enough to warrant a click?
- Accuracy of your audience targeting. Are you targeting the right people who find the messaging relevant enough to click through? If not, rethink your audience. If you’re targeting groups based on interest or demographic categories, consider contextual targeting or retargeting groups who have interacted with your site as well.
Secondly, Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who took a desired action (e.g., purchased a product, signed up for a newsletter, etc.) out of the total number of people who came to your website. Weakness in conversion rate diagnoses problems with
- Does the layout and quality of your landing page match what the visitor was expecting from the ad that they clicked? Here is where consistency of messaging is very important
- And again, the accuracy of audience targeting. Especially for B2B companies, this can mean that you’re targeting the right types of companies but perhaps not the right decision-makers.
Make adjustments to your audience targeting, ad creative design, messaging, and your landing page, and see how your cost per click, and by association your ROAS changes as a result.
Provide a personalized ad-to-page journey
As we shared above, showing the same product in an ad as on the corresponding landing page is best practice. Dynamic ad and landing page templates can be further personalized to show the products that a particular visitor was looking at from a prior visit, as well as products that are related to the ones that your visitor was looking at.
When you personalize the user experience to individual preferences through social ad A/B testing, you can create a more engaging and relevant journey that is more likely to result in conversions.
By demonstrating that you understand and value your customers’ needs and preferences, you can foster a stronger connection and increase brand loyalty. And by offering a personalized ad-to-page journey, you can differentiate your brand from competitors and stand out in a crowded market.
Increase your speed to conversion with social ad A/B testing
It’s all about increasing your speed to lead here. And making the most of the limited attention you will get from your page visitors. So employ tactics like:
- Testing on-page promotions
- Heat map data
- A/B Testing
- Focus on scarcity (ticking clock, deal end dates)
- Offering upsells or cross-sells
- Highlight social proof
Optimizing your ad-to-page journey is critical to maximizing your return on ad spend. By focusing on the key components of an effective ad campaign, you can create an engaging experience for your audience and drive stronger results for your business. Remember, every touchpoint in the ad-to-page journey has the potential to impact your bottom line, so take the time to make sure each element is working together to deliver the best possible experience for your audience.
Now that you know what you need to optimize your digital campaigns, Instapage makes it easy to create personalized, relevant landing pages for every ad group and audience with hundreds of templates and easy in-app testing. Sign up for a 14-day trial and start improving your ROAS with social ad A/B testing today!