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If Facebook were a country, it would be the biggest one... which is why it's so important for marketers to understand how to advertise effectively on Facebook.

A successful Facebook ad can make a huge impact on a potentially huge audience.

Part of the Plan

I can't overemphasize how important testing is to creating successful ad campaigns.

When you start to brainstorm your ad, look for ways to bake-in testing: From the start, come up with multiple headlines; get a few different images to try; plan different versions of the ad, each testing one distinct variable.


An example of testing one variable at a time: same headline, different image. And wouldn't you know it, the one with the hiker performed almost twice as well as the others.

Have Your Goals in Mind

What are you trying to do, and how will you measure success? There are a lot of ways you can evaluate the effectiveness of your ads, but the metric we rely on most at Edgar is cost per action. Simply put, this is how much, on average, you have to spend to get the action you're looking for.

For example, if you're advertising on Facebook to get more likes for your page, how much are you spending for each like?

  • Amount spent: $45
  • Number of likes gained: 90
  • Cost per like: $0.50 (Amount/Likes)

Breaking down the numbers so you can compare the cost of each individual result helps make it easier to judge the effectiveness of your ads. The lower your cost per action, the more effective your ad.

Get Scientific

In science, one of the rules of a good experiment is that you test only one variable at a time. The same rules apply with advertising on Facebook (or anywhere else online). If you change only one thing at a time, you'll have a better chance of finding the things that really make an impact.

Say you have an ad with one headline, one image, and one call to action. You could test changes to any one of those elements (try three different headlines, for example, but keep everything else the same) or you could run a more complex test, trying different versions of each variable:

  • Control: default version of the ad
  • Test A: same as Control, but with a different headline
  • Test B: same as Control, but with a different image
  • Test C: same as Control, but with a different call to action

With some (admittedly terrible) copy in place, that might look like this:

Creating a such a rubric will let you study exactly what works, and what doesn't, which is how you'll be able to create better and more effective ads.

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The Secret to More Effective Ads on Facebook: The Science of Testing

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Matt Thomas

Matt Thomas is a content writer for Edgar and has over 10 years of experience in digital copywriting, online marketing, and content/social strategy. To escape technology, sometimes he plays in a bluegrass band.

LinkedIn: Matt Thomas