Create A/B testing

What Is A/B Testing?

A/B testing, also called split testing, is a tactic by which you find out which ad headlines, body copy, images, call-to-actions, or a combination of the above work best for your target audience. Moreover, you can experiment with several Facebook audiences and ad placements to know who’s your perfect audience and which placements they can be reached with.

Usually, the A/B tests are published for a couple of weeks, while the advertisers wait for new results to come in. After the experiment is completed, a conclusion will be made whether one option outperformed the other(s). You can ensure that your results are statistically significant by using a statistical significance calculator.

The most common variables to split test on Facebook:

• Creative
• Ad copy
• Audiences
• Placements
• Call to action buttons
• Landing pages

While this isn’t a comprehensive list of the variables available to A/B test, keep in mind that what you DO test should be relevant to your overall business goals.

How to Create Facebook A/B Test Ads

There are several ways to set up a split test on Facebook.

Step 1: Navigate to “Experiments” under “Analyze and report” in Facebook Ads Manager.

Step 2a: Either duplicate an existing Facebook campaign, ad set (shown here), or ad

Step 2b: Or Create a New Campaign

In Ads Manager: create “Campaign”, select “Objective”, scroll down from the campaign level and toggle on “Create A/B Test.”

Step 3: Get Started

After clicking “New A/B Test” or “A/B Test” (depending on where you start from), click “Get Started” in the lower right corner.

Step 4: Follow Facebook Prompts for Set Up

Follow the prompts based on the variable you want to test, and which campaign, ad set, or ad level you’re interested in testing that variable in.

Step 5: Rename the Ad Sets and/or Ads

Once you’ve selected your chosen variable and followed the steps to setting up your split test, we recommend changing the names of the ad sets and/or ads so that each version is immediately recognizable and distinguishable from the other.

In this example, we’re running a split test at the ad set level, as we were testing a saved audience against a lookalike audience to determine which would result in the lowest cost per click.

What to Keep in Mind When A/B Testing

1. Remember to only test one variable at a time!

2. Facebook recommends running tests with at least 80% estimated power.

How Long Should You Test Facebook Ads?

Split tests on Facebook can be run for 1-30 days, but tests that run for less than 7 days may not yield conclusive results.

A/B Testing for your retargeting strategy

You can also use a split test to determine your ideal campaign set up for dynamic product ad retargeting.

Here’s an example: A retailer that works with StitcherAds previously only showed sweaters to people who viewed this product category on its site. The retailer decided to run a test to determine if they’d have more success showing different categories of products rather than just retargeting these consumers with sweaters. They used the findings to reconfigure their retargeting campaigns moving forward.