Without destroying your eCommerce ROAS

In Facebook, both your audiences and your creatives will become exhausted over time. One of the best ways to combat this unfortunate reality of Facebook advertising is to always have fresh, high-performing creative on the stand by to revive your dying audiences.

Why do audiences become exhausted? Within every audience, there’s sub audiences. Say you have an audience size of 10,000,000 people. Within that audience you have a variety of sub audiences of, let’s say 10,000 people, who Facebook is quite confident, based on billions of dollars of data, that they will convert. Let’s say you have 15 of those sub audiences within that 10,000,000.

That’s 150,000 people that Facebook is confident will convert.

How much money will it take to reach all 150,000? At $10 per 1000 people reached (a $10 CPM), that’s only $150. That means your high-performing audiences can become exhausted rather quickly.

Once those 150,000 people are exhausted, Facebook will start going to other sub groups, ones which its algorithm isn’t quite as sure will buy, which will drop your ROAS, because these people convert less often.

That’s why you always want a variety of fresh creative, so that your main sub group of 150,000—or whatever the number is per audience—doesn’t get tired of seeing your ads. Plus, improving your creative over time will also help convert those secondary sub groups.

As a side note, and as the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Until the performance starts to drop off and your frequency goes up (meaning Facebook starts to repeat who it shows the ad to), you shouldn’t be updating your audiences with new creative. There’s thousands of horror stories out there of successful ad accounts being ruined by people updating successful audiences and kicking them back into learning limited, resetting the algorithm.

But inevitably this audience will exhaust at some point—and if it isn’t but you’re seeing a great return, why aren’t you spending more money to exhaust it quicker? If every dollar you put in is generating revenue, keep putting more money in!

That being said, what’s the best way to test new creative?

3 Different Methods To Test New Creative

There’s three ways to test new creative that I’ve found effective: best audience duplications, dynamic ad testing and my personal favourite, the 30D approach.

Static Ad Testing

This is probably the most basic method. You simply take your best performing audience, duplicate it, and use it as a control group to test your new creative. Let the creative run for ~7 days with either an add to cart or purchase objective, and if it performs up to your standards, introduce it to your dying (and only your dying) audiences.

Dynamic Ad Testing

This is one I’ve been experimenting a lot with lately, probably because it gives you a lot of information on what part of your ad is most effective, which can help you with future ad tests and teaches you how to best talk to your audience.

You again take your best performing audience, duplicate it, and run 3 pieces of creative in a dynamic ad.

But in order to do that, you’ll need to have this switched on:

You test the 3 (or a number of your choosing) pieces of creative with the same copy and headline. Let it run for 7 days and choose the winner.

After that test you take the winning creative and test it again, but with 3 different types of copy and headlines combinations.

This way you’ll have narrowed in on exactly the best performing creative / copy combinations while saving a lot of money.

What you don’t want to do, however, is test too many variables at once. I’ve seen students of mine run 5 different videos with 5 different copy. That’s 25 combinations. If you’re testing 25 combinations on $10/day. That’s 40c a variation, which will mean your results will be statistically meaningless.

My favourite—the 30D method

Plainly stated, 30D is a testing method where you create a campaign, create an audience in that campaign with no interests—it’s completely open, then you create your ad. You then duplicate it at the ad set level 30 times at $7.50 / day each, set it to purchase objective, leave it open with no interests, age ranges or audiences, and let it run for 48 hours.

Here’s what your campaign will look like at the ad set level:

And here’s the audience. Make sure you don’t have detailed targeting expansion on or you may find that Facebook decides to send your ads to strange countries who have no chance of buying.

Then I go through two rounds of optimization. With each round, you’ll turn off about half of your ads.

After 24 hours:Turn off any ads that have a less than 2% CTR (unless there’s an add to cart or purchase). There’s a caveat here, though, because different accounts have different CPMs (Cost Per 1000 Impressions), so sometimes a 1% CTR is fine, because the cost of the ad is so low.

So I generally consider 2% as the primary metric, but as a secondary metric, if the ad is below $1 CPC (Cost Per Click), I’ll keep it on until the next round of optimization.

After 48 hours: Turn off any ads without a purchase.

That’s it.

From there, you’ll see if your ads were successful or not. How I judge success is if the total ROAS of the 30 tested ads is within 20–30% of your targeted cost per acquisition or ROAS.

If it is, once you put them into a better targeted audience, you should hit your targeted cost per acquisition or ROAS.

Unlike the other two, what you’ll generally find is this is a method of testing your ads that will give you more confidence in your ads that are successful andyou’ll be making money on your testing phase, which is a huge bonus to any company.