Automate Your Ad Concepts Testing

The concept phase is an ideal time for ad testing. But this is not a secret — brands and agencies have been doing it for decades.

The thing is, the traditional methods are outdated. Focus groups don’t offer a realistic environment or user experience and rarely do they actually include ideal target audience members. And A/B testing, while automated and in-market, delivers the shallowest level of data available, telling you only which ad was the higher performer, but never why.

In our new video series, Resting Ad Face, our VP of Performance Marketing, Susan Wenograd, and I share our opinions (we have many) on all things performance creative. And our first episode was dedicated to this very topic — automating creative concept testing the right way.

Here are some highlights:

Automated ad concept testing validates creative before spending a dime on production

A creative direction chosen and executed without proper concept testing is the costliest of all. If it doesn’t land with your audience, the time and money spent on concepting, production, and media is wasted.

It’s much smarter to test even some approximation of the idea before shelling out thousands upon thousands of dollars to bring it to life.

The best way to do this is to find a small-scale version of the idea — perhaps a static image ad with the right image and messaging — to prove the concept will drive ad performance.

• Test a few different headlines that essentially say the same thing.
• Test a handful of images that evoke the right feeling.
• See which colors from the concept’s color palette drive engagement or conversion.

Having data to back up an ad concept — something that definitively proves your target market will respond because they already have — will send you into production mode with much more confidence.

Automated ad concept testing lets you flip traditional pitches on their heads

Imagine this scenario: a new ad campaign is needed for a product launch.

The creative team is given a brief and gets to work on three possible concepts. They come up with a possible ad layout along with a handful of headlines and images that bring each concept to life.

The team brings all three concepts to the client (if this is an agency we’re talking about) or to the leadership team (if this is an in-house team) and pitches the merits of each.

Up until now, this concept presentation has been nothing out of the norm for a brand or creative team.

But what if, at this point, you stated that the objective was not to choose an ad concept — but to approve all three for automated, in-market testing?

This flips the script on the typical pitch process. Suddenly, you’re allowing potential buyers to influence the direction of your ad creative with their clicks and purchases — and not the person in the room with the highest rank.

This is how we move away from making opinion-based creative decisions and toward data-based creative decisions.

Automated ad concept testing helps inform the entire user journey, fast

Many times, ad concepts are coming to life in parallel to the rest of a campaign — the landing page, the video ads, the social media creative, etc.

Applying learnings from creative concept testing across all of these touchpoints is crucial to creating an impactful user experience and increasing the odds of driving conversion rates. Using the winning headline, images, colors, and more can help create a more cohesive, performant campaign.

Conceptual testing can be used as a new form of real-time market research, feeding creative teams and marketers with data that can be used to elevate the brand as a whole. You don’t have to wait to see how the ads perform to optimize the rest of the campaign. You know upfront which creative elements will drive performance and you can use them wherever your audience will encounter your brand.

Check out the full, 20-minute chat from episode 1 of Resting Ad Face above. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest episode drop every other Wednesday.