Creating Product/Market Fit
What products to do adverting and content about? First get an idea of what of your content/products has the biggest potential. The easiest way to do this is to look in google analytics and see what of your pages and products are most visited. This will give you an indication of what is most popular and thus advertisement potential.
What demographic attributes to test on? When you have selected the content/products forget about previous segmentation studies and other given facts - have a fresh start and take nothing for granted. Some of the more normal attributes where you are likely to find performance uplifts are by testing on age, geo, gender and language. It is not unlikely that each of these represent a CTR/VTR uptake that in combination is high.
What ad formats to use? Many advertising platforms offers insights on the differences in ad-performance. The easy thing is to simply turn off what has the lowest performance. Not only will this reduce your advertising spend it will also decrease the overhead that is often hidden in producing multiple creatives for multiple formats. If you are primarily running social campaigns in facebook it can be more difficult to get a download of what ad-formats are really performing. I would encourage you to do manual tests where you turn off the different placements one by one in order to find out where the value lies – because the difference in Facebook performance is huge.
What creatives to use? When you have selected what product and ad-formats to use. Next step Is to decide on pictures. Most of today media is very picture driven and strong performance relies on your creative. Here you are likely to find that rather than a few well produced somewhat generic pictures shot in environment and made by a marketing department is very likely to be outcompeted when it comes to performance from long-tail and honest product pictures. So hold your production budget tight until you are sure on what you need.
What about call to action? That call to action has almost become a science in itself and many companies will offer you extensive analysis on where to place the button, what color it should have and what it should say. Some of these advice holds true value but there is also a lot of hearsay. Personally I prefer to begin testing company USP’s to see what resonate better with your audience. Buttons, colors and placements are all generic values that can easily be copied. Whereas a real point of difference will give you the long term competitive advantage you are looking for.
When you have been through the test phase you should be ready to start executing your learnings. I would expect you to get double digit improvements from the very beginning. The really important learning is that the optimization never stops. When you have finished the first set of testing and implemented the learnings then begin a new test – because there is always something new to learn – and why should it not be you who is having CTR rates on 70%.