Launching new products is an equally exciting and stressful opportunity for a lot of Australian businesses.
The problem is that you’re never really sure if it’s going to work, and if the market will end up loving your new product as much as you want them to. And in some cases, it might not be the product itself that’s the issue – but the way you present it.
Facebook campaigns provide an exciting opportunity to test out your new product and see if the intended audience loves it, what kind of offer they prefer to attach to it, and the overall presentation that would work best for this new product.
If you have a new product that you want to test through Facebook ads, Australian Internet Advertising has this great article prepared by our Facebook Advertising Specialist just for you:
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How to Test New Products using Facebook Ads
1. Find the Perfect Audience
First, it’s important to figure out your audience size, their likes, preferences, devices they use, and any other kind of information you can get.
Facebook advertising allows you to tap into all user data to deliver your ads strategically to the people most likely to be interested in what you have to offer, but to benefit from this you do need to know who these people are.
The easiest way to get started is by creating a Custom Audience and a Lookalike audience. First, you can run your ads to consumers who already shop from you and present your new product. These users are already familiar with your brand, so they are more likely to act when they see an ad from you.
Then, lookalike audiences will tap into audience members who share the characteristics of your Custom Audience but have not interacted with your brand. This will allow you to get your new product to a similar, potentially interested set of users.
2. Establish Your Budget
Before you go on to test your Facebook ads, it’s worth figuring out how much money you can comfortably invest in your testing.
You will need to run an entire ad set that promotes the same new product (more on this later). Facebook allows you to establish a total budget as well as a daily budget, so think about how much your business could afford for this testing.
While you won’t have to establish budgets the size of, say, ads you run for promotions or products you know are high-converting if you want to get as much information as you can out of this process, you will need a bit of money dedicated to this effort.
3. Get Familiar with the Concept of Split Testing
Split testing involves creating two or more versions of the Facebook ad, and running them at the same time to see which performs better.
Two things will remain the same:
- The product is the same new product you are trying to promote
- The audience is the same audience across all the ad set
What’s different is everything else around the Facebook campaign.
Split testing basically offers you the unique chance of understanding what kind of offer or promo your target audience responds better to, and what they need for this new product to reach the number of sales you want. With split testing, you start with a smaller portion of your audience size, then take the winning ads and run them across the bigger target audience.
To create a split testing campaign, you need to consider a few key things:
- Ad copy – the words in your ads should invite users to take a specific action, so the ad copy must be clear, easy to read, and reflect your intended goal. Ad copy is not the easiest thing in the world to write because you usually have a handful of words that need to do all of this work, so it’s a good idea to have different ad copy across all your ads;
- Ad visuals – photos, gifs, or videos? What kind of content does your audience prefer when it comes to ads they consume? People usually consider video to be the best format for any sort of ad, but don’t assume that about your audience. They might just need a photo to spark their interest. In any case, you can also test the ad visuals to see what your audience likes more;
- Landing page – don’t just focus on the elements that appear in the Facebook ad. People click on your link and visit your landing page to view more information about your product, so it’s a good idea to make sure this landing page works in your favour. But like with the ads, it can take a while to get to the winning formula, so consider having different versions of a landing page and test that with your ads as well;
Note that you should test all these variants all at once. Split testing can offer you loads of insights into your audience, but you need to be able to tell what’s different across your ad set to see what worked better.
Here’s an example:
Say you have 2 ads for split testing. Same audience, same ad budget. Think about what you want to test first.
- If you test ad copy, go for identical ad visual and landing page
- If you test landing page, ad copy and visuals are the same across the ads
By the end of the campaign, you can look at these two ads, and see which version of the ad copy, for instance, drove better results.
4. Optimise Your Ads
Facebook presents loads of features for advertisers, but the ball is in your court to make sure you’re setting up the campaign for success.
Even during the split testing stage, you need to optimise your ads to ensure the results are relevant – meaning one ad did not have great results because of ad copy, not because you chose the wrong format.
Some things to consider:
- Choosing the appropriate calls to action – if you want purchases, opt for ‘Buy now’ and not ‘Learn more’;
- The right ad spend – split testing works best in the long-term, to allow your ads to gather relevant data, so while you don’t need to invest huge amounts of money, you will need to spend a few dollars to turn a profit later on;
- Choosing the right objective – Facebook campaign goals tell the ads service you want to take your ads to users most likely to perform the action you need, such as purchases. In this case, you will need the ‘Conversions’ goal, as the ‘Consideration’ goal is for users likely to click the ‘learn more’ CTA.
AIAD Is Here to Help You Test
The secret to launching new products with Facebook ads is that you do need to continually test the little things in the campaigns until you reach the winning formula.
Australian Internet Advertising is happy to help in this department. Reach out online or call us at 1300 304 640.
