How your losing ads can help you design winners

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October 26, 2022
Written by Dan Pantelo
Average reading time: 5 minutes

Your low-performing ads contain clues that can help you level-up future ad creative. You just have to know where to look.

Unpopular opinion: your losing ad creative deserves a second look. They can help point you in the right direction if you know what to look for.

On the latest episode of Resting Ad Face, our VP of Performance Marketing, Susan Wenograd, and I share how to find actionable insights among your lowest-performing ads, and use them to create even more performant winners.

Here are some highlights:

Most of the ads you test will underperform. And that’s OK.

Creative testing is a numbers game. The more ads you test, the more likely you are to find a winner. But, you also end up with a ton of ads that don’t surpass your typical benchmarks.

That’s a-OK so long as you dive into what made them low-performers and use those learnings in future ad designs. Think of your testing budget as market research. You’re learning what works and what doesn’t, and making data-driven creative decisions to keep building winners.

Good engagement, high CTR, but low CVR? Set better expectations, then test again.

Certain ads are total duds and others deserve a second chance. How do you differentiate between the two?

First, take a look at the engagement and click-through rates. If your audience isn’t even stopping to engage with an ad, odds are they’re not going to buy either. Time to move on from this creative.

If engagement and click-through are good, but conversion is low, you might want to take a look at your landing page experience. Does it match up with the ad experience? Is there something there (an unexpectedly high price, for example) that might cause someone to bounce instantly? Adding that information to the ad creative and testing them again will help you qualify your buyers and increase CVR.

For more, subscribe to Resting Ad Face on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.

Transcript

Jess: Hey everybody. Welcome to the 10th episode of Resting Ad Face. I am Jess Cook, I'm VP of Brand and Content at Marpipe.

Susan: And I am Susan Wenograd. I am VP of Performance Marketing at Marpipe, so I am, Jess and I are are one. We work together every single day.

Jess: That's right. And we always kind of rant and rave about like, you know, ad creative what's, what's in, what's out. And today we're gonna talk about losers. Losers.

Susan: Loser.

Jess: And specifically losing ads and what you can learn from your losing ads to create winning ads.

Susan: So, yeah, so the, I mean, I think the, the interesting thing to note too is like everyone talks about winning creative, but like, most of what you run winds up being losing creative to be, I mean, which like, that's not the sexy thing to say, but it's like the fact is you churn through a lot of versions before you find ones that actually win.

Susan: So I love this topic because it's like a lot of times I've told clients in the past, you need to treat your media money as also market research to figure out and learn what works and what doesn't. Yes, this like, you need to get sales, of course. That's a given. But, just because it, it's a loser, doesn't mean that you didn't learn anything from it.

Susan: Loser.

Jess: And specifically losing ads and what you can learn from your losing ads to create winning ads.

Susan: So there's a few, there's a few things that you can look at. So I'm going to hand it off to you, Susan. What is like the top thing that you look at?

It's so critical to identify common elements in low performers to guide future success. These insights can substantially refine your strategy and approach.