The NEW WAY To Test Facebook Ads (Post Andromeda) transcript

Facebook advertisers are losing their minds when it comes to testing ad creative now that the Andromeda update has been rolled out. I'm seeing so many mistakes being made around this and in this video I'm going to show you how we're still able to test ad creative post Andromeda and we're spending more than 15 million dollars a month across hundreds of ad accounts. We do a lot of testing. >> Oh my god, okay, it's happening.

Everybody stay calm. >> What's the procedure, everyone? What's the procedure? >> Okay, so let's quickly make sure that we all understand the problem that I'm talking about here. Now that the Andromeda update has been rolled out, one of the big impacts from that is that we now know we need more ad creative diversity. We need more ad creative and we need it to be different each individual piece to be different from the other pieces of ad creative that we're running within within a campaign within an ad set.

If you create ads that are just variations of other ones, let's say there's five different ads that are all very similar, you're testing different elements, Meta will just pick one of those, put that into the auction, the others won't get a fair crack at it. And if you create other ads that are very different visually, could be a different ad format, image versus video, could be uh something that looks very different, then fine.

Meta will treat that as a separate ad and and put that into the auction and and give that a go and see how it it can perform. Now, Meta's doing that because they're recognizing that different people respond to different ad creative. They're also trying to overcome ad fatigue, so they're thinking creative diversity, excellent, that's going to help advertisers get better results. But it does create a real problem when it comes to testing and that's that if you find a winning ad format, let's let's take an image for example.

You want to make as much of that as you possibly can and you also want to get more detailed and test the various elements to see if you can improve performance. So for example, you might have a winning image and think, right, I want to test different text overlay on the image. I want to test different background color. I want to test it in in that color versus black and white. I want to test including a price banner or not.

Well, because those are all relatively minor tweaks of the one image ad, Meta could easily look at those and go, "Nah, they're all the same thing. We're only going to choose one, and that's the only one that actually gets any any budget and any chance to to perform and generate the leads, sales, whatever it is you're optimizing for." But, we know as advertisers that changing the text overlay, for example, on an image ad can have a massive impact on performance because that might be the thing that either gets people to pay attention to the ad or not.

It might be the thing that convinces them to take action or not. It could have a really big impact. So, whilst the system might not recognize them as different ads, we know that that can have a bigger impact on performance, and we want to be able to test this. What that has led a lot of Meta advertisers to do is just guess. So, they're thinking, "Well, each ad creative needs to be really different. So, for my image ad that includes the founder holding the product, for example, um I'm just going to have to guess that this is the right text overlay to put with it." That's not a great place for advertisers.

That's not how we want to do things properly. That's not how professionals operate when it comes to to performance marketing and when it comes to advertising. So, you can test this properly, and you absolutely should. The way you do it is with the creative testing tool that I'm going to to demonstrate in a minute. So, let me show you how this creative testing tool works. It's very simple. It's included within within Ads Manager, and it's actually the ad level.

So, I've just created a quick example leads campaign. You can obviously do this with other campaign types as well. But, if you come to the ad level and you scroll down beneath I haven't set up anything else about this ad um yet. I just want to to focus in on this. Beneath where you set up your ad creative, you've got this creative testing. Now, you can see it here it says here it here it says, "Compare up to five different versions of your creative in a test that helps ensure delivery to new test ads." That's the really important part.

This is why this tool is the perfect solution to the problem created by the job of the update when it comes to ad creative testing. So, if we click in here, we can better understand it, right? So, we can test between two and five different ads. We don't have to just do what, you know, ad A versus ad B. We can test a whole bunch. I'm going to do two for demonstration purposes now, but absolutely fine to to do more at once.

You then say how much of your budget should go to test ads. This is just a quick example campaign. Um this is only got a £25 daily budget, so I can say, "Look, use all the budget within this campaign ad set or ad set um for the test, or just use a proportion of it." Totally up to you. Um how long should we run the test for? The default is 7 days, but you can increase this time frame you wish to. This will depend what you want to do here will depend on the conversion volume you're likely to generate.

So, we want to see, for example, which ad generates a better cost per lead. So, we need to make sure that we run the test long enough so that we generate enough leads to have data that we can actually use and and rely on. Now, this part is really, really important down here. The default for me within this example is cost per post engagement. So, how do you want to compare performance? Cost per post engagement? Absolutely not.

That is not what I want to measure. I want to measure how well this does on a cost per lead basis, on a cost per sale basis, whatever it is the most important metric, not engagement. So, I want to come in here and change this in this instance to cost per lead, but there are obviously lots of other options as well. Now, when I've done this, this is also another important part. It says, "Since your duration or budget changed, the recommended key metric was updated in the drop-down." Basically, that's why they put it at cost per um >> [clears throat] >> engagement.

Using this metric can help you get more information results with high confidence. So, what they're basically saying here, without actually saying it, but I can translate for you to some extent, is that, "Look, only spending 25 pounds per day over a 7- day period and optimizing cost per lead, that might not be either enough spent or long enough to be able to know which ads within this test produce a better cost per lead." So, in this instance, what we would likely need to do is increase the budget.

We'd have to increase the ad set or campaign budget, right? Cuz that's we can't go beyond the total, or increase the time frame, or both, right? To the point where we now have enough data to be able to run this test and know. I'm just going to leave that as is for now, but just wanted to quickly highlight that this is how you go ahead and set that up. So, then I go ahead and click confirm, and what you'll see happens, very simply, is that within this sort of ad here, we've got these two test ads.

And then we can go ahead and you can see these ads are same setup as a regular ad, but we could go ahead and add in different uh creative in this instance, but you can also test other things, by the way. But, we could add in different creative into this ad and then come up to this ad and add in other creative. In fact, I did a little run-through uh a second ago, so let me show you what that looks like. So, this is an example test that we might want to run um for our ad creative.

So, this is an image that has worked well for us in the past. We've run this um in ad campaigns for a little while now, and it's an ad for my mentorship program. By the way, if you're interested in mentorship program, link in the video description, you can find out more. We have unlimited one-to-one support, um daily live calls Q&As with me, and expert team members, like, tons of support, really good program. If you're interested, go ahead and check that out.

But, anyway, this is a image that we've run for mentorship program. So, very simple format, picture of me, um some results that people have achieved within my mentorship program, a fairly standard image ad, right? Want me to mentor you. We know this works, so we might go, "Right, I want to test this against very similar versions of this, but tweak some stuff." So, here we've got a black and white version of me. We might want to test this against, if I just scroll down and it loads up, a color version, right?

With a little bit of a different background, instead of just the solid blue background, we've got sort of uh a desk in um our office behind with some people sat there, and and that be the the look of the ad. Meta could easily look at those two ads and go, "These are the same thing. We're only going to put one into the auction." if we weren't using the creative testing tool, but because we are, Meta will now give these ads a proper go.

And what they would do as part of creative testing, it's not just about giving it budget, it's also they're going to keep the delivery of those ads separate, so that you could do a proper test. So, that you go, "Okay, group A within our audience is going to see this ad, group B within our audience is going to see this ad, and then we can compare performance based on the metric that we selected. In this case, was cost per result, but could be something else.

Once this test has completed, once that time frame has run out, Meta will then usually go ahead You You do want to double-check cuz it doesn't always happen, but usually then spend more money on the winning version. And you can always turn off the the other version, and delivery will return to normal, and you can go about your ads will be put in front of people as would happen anyway. But this can be a great way to narrow in on the finer detail and actually work out, "Okay, this element does improve performance versus this element." We could see, for example, a 10% 15% difference between the black and white version and the color version.

That would absolutely be worth finding out, and we don't want Andromeda to prevent that. And this is how you get around it. Hyros is the best tracking and attribution software for Meta ads. It's the software all the big players in this industry use, including myself. I use it to track results for my own ads, as well as all my organic results as well. So, if someone books a call for our done-for-you services, for example, I can see exactly where that person came from with a lot of accuracy.

That allows me to make better decisions for my marketing and my business. Hyros has been able to track that from our ad spend in this campaign, we've generated 96,000 pounds. But 58,000 pounds of that was not reported by Meta. So, if I was just looking at my data within my Meta ad account, I might come to the conclusion that this campaign is doing okay, but in reality, this campaign is doing a lot lot better. Now, this is a relatively extreme example because of the nature of our business.

So, most of our product services have a recurring billing elements. Meta might be able to see what we make initially from our ad spend on that initial transaction, but not those subsequent payments. That's why it it shows the importance here of being able to accurately see what did we actually get from our ad spend in order to be able to make better decisions and optimize correctly. So, if you want to improve the performance of your ad campaigns without having to touch your ads, go ahead and sign up to Hyros.

There is a link in the video description. Now, there are a couple of other things I need to mention around this creative testing tool. Firstly, it's not as important if you are testing very different ads anyway. So, if for example, you're testing an image ad versus a video ad, Meta's going to treat those different ads. The Andromeda update's not going to get in the way. You'll be able to test. Now, the delivery's probably going to overlap.

You might want that. Might be better performance. But, if you are looking to do a strict test to find out does A perform better than B, even if they're very different, you can still use the creative testing tool. But, the Andromeda update is not going to affect that. It's not going to get in the way of that process if the ad's very different. Either different formats or very different visuals. So, what we'd often find is that the initial round of testing, we're less likely to use the creative testing tool because we're finding out the big stuff.

What performs better? Image? Video? What performs better? UGC style video versus, you know, really professionally produced versus founder led? Those sorts of things. But, then when we want to get into the more detail, and often the winning happens in working out the detail, then we're going to use the the creative testing tool a lot. Another instance where I really like using it is to test video hooks. So, if you've seen my content before about video ads or hooks, you'll know that hooks are incredibly important to Meta ads.

The hook, by the way, is the opening scene, the opening line, usually about the first 3 seconds. And you can take a video ad that's performed really well, change the hook, and it'll perform really poorly. Even though you're only changing the first couple of seconds. Likewise, you can do the opposite and massively improve an ad. Because the hook is what convinces people either to pay attention to it or not. Um and if they don't pay attention to it, they don't find out about your product service, they don't take the action that you want to take.

So, when we create video ads, often what we'll do is we'll we'll create just a handful, maybe a couple of full ads, but then we will create lots of different hooks with different visual locations, maybe change the opening line, so that we can create, say, 20 different ads even if we've only produced two full bodies because we've got 10 different hook variations for each. and then we will test those and you'll often see massively varying differences in results between the different hook options.

Now, with Andromeda, this doesn't seem to happen all the time, by the way, cuz I have a lot of people say this, and yes, we've seen it in some instances, but not all. What Andromeda, post-Andromeda, what Meta will now do is they might look at two ads that, let's say, are 40 seconds long, and they're identical other than those first few seconds, and and make the same calculations we talked about previously. Aha, these are basically the same ad, we're just going to put one into the auction, the other one's not going to get a look-in.

That is absolutely not what you want to do, cuz just like I discussed previously, how changing the text overlay on an image is massively important, changing the hook on a video ad is incredibly important. You absolutely want to be able to test between different um video ad hooks. So, the creative testing tool, exactly what I just showed you, is is absolutely the right way to do that. And you can test the different hooks, and then you can introduce And then, what you can do, basically, let's say you test five different hooks, same main body of the ad, but different hooks, find out which is the winner, and then put that into your ad set without the creative testing, alongside other very different ads.

That's when you then test, okay, this is a UGC-style ad versus founder-led versus product demonstration video ad um type setup, right? That's how you go about doing it. So, please do not throw out the hook method, the changing of hooks, which is what a lot of advertisers are doing. If you've got a video ad that's performed really well, and you want to get more out of it, it's a really time-efficient and effective way of doing so is to go and record a bunch of new hooks, edit them onto the front, and then test.

You can do that through the creative testing tool. I really I've seen a lot of advertisers say you can't do that anymore. You can, you've just got to use the creative testing tool. Um I know I'm probably uh hammering home the point here, but I think this is this is really key to a lot of how we test going forward. And I think in general, I want to help Meta advertisers relax post-Andromeda, because the standard recommendation now is that you produce 20-plus ad creatives and every single ad creative needs to be completely different from the others.

That's an enormous amount of work. It's difficult to produce 20 ad creatives even if you are using say the hook method and five of the ads are exactly the same but just with different hooks or you're creating variations of an image that still work but to produce 20 pieces of ad creative that are totally different from one another and run all those in an ad set together, I think is unrealistic for a ton of businesses and actually I'm starting to see this put people off and get in the way of the making progress cuz it just it it feels like too large a burden.

The juice isn't worth the squeeze. It's like if I have to make 20, I'm not going to bother making one. When actually if you just tested a couple of new ads every now and then, compounded over time that can make a massive difference to your ad campaign performance and is well worth doing. So don't let this massive creative requirement put you off. The way I would look at meta ad creative production and testing would be similar to a diet, right?

Better to go with a creative production schedule that you can stick to as opposed to the one that's perfect. Just like with diet, we all know what a perfect diet looks like. Can anyone realistically stick to a perfect diet all the time? No. So we need to go with the option that is realistic that we can actually stick with and that might mean that you launch a campaign with four very different creatives and perhaps a few different variations.

That's absolutely fine. And if you want more info on meta ad creative, check out this video here. In that video, I react to a number of different meta ads found by my team in the meta ads library. I hadn't seen them before I watched this video. Some are great, some are terrible, well worth a watch. Check it out.