Digital marketers are always looking for tools to optimize their efforts. If you haven’t heard of Facebook Split Testing, don’t worry, but it might be the answer to some of your marketing optimization challenges.

Split Testing is a tool designed by Facebook that allows advertisers to run two different ads concurrently - essentially, this is Facebook’s own version of the A/B Test built into the platform. The tool allows you to test different aspects of your ad from audience to appearance.

It’s Basically Free

If you're advertising on Facebook, running a split test costs no more than what you're already spending, as Facebook ads are priced as cost per result.

The Split Test option will divide your audience by ad sets and test one variable, like different ad copy, in order to work out which ad performs better. The winning version will be determined based on which ad had the lowest cost per result.

How are you spending your money on Facebook advertising now? When you set up your ad on Facebook, you're already establishing a budget. With a Split Test, you’ll be using the same budget and splitting it amongst the variations of ads you decide to run.

But while increasing your budget means each ad will be shown more to provide a larger test, it’s not necessary to increase your budget at all.

Optimize Your Audience

Facebook Split Tests can help you determine your best audience. While you can test the effectivity of the ads themselves, Facebook also allows you to target your ad to separate audiences - this enables advertisers to find the audiences where their ads are the most successful, helping companies stretch each ad dollar for maximum results.

After analyzing millions of dollars of ad spending, Adespresso found that Ad Targeting by audience - specifically dividing ads by country, gender, interests, age, custom audiences, relationship status, purchase behaviors, and education levels - resulted in the biggest gains for advertisers.

Even if you have a graphically pleasing advertisement with witty copy and a compelling call-to-action, targeting the wrong audience means your advertisement won’t see success. This aspect of Split Testing is going to help advertisers generate better results.

Knowledge is Power

Split testing won’t always improve your Facebook as results, but it'll still help to validate your decisions.

Sometimes, you're already doing a good job reaching your audience with effective advertising, and you don’t need to change your strategy, but without testing, you can't know this is the case. 

To fully understand if your ads are working, then you do need to test, and if the new ad you’re putting outperforms worse, then you know that your initial research was right, and you can move forward and start testing a different aspect.

Facebook split testing offers companies the ability to create the best advertising strategy, and supplement each factor with tests. If you start with audience tailoring, you can implement a test for graphics. Once you’ve determined a type of image that performs best, test different copy.

After that, take an ad that's been proven to work and keep testing. Add a different call-to-action or measurement strategy, so that instead of clicking the link, the objective is to increase Page likes. Continue building your strategy piece-by-piece to create an optimized ad strategy that will make your future campaigns easier, and more successful.

Conclusion

Facebook Split Testing is a powerful tool for digital marketers who want to take the power of A/B testing to their social media marketing efforts. With tools for testing both advertising creative and audiences, it gives marketers the flexibility and insights they need to continually improve their efforts.