Is it better to add new ads to existing campaigns? But then the campaign goes back to the learning phase.
Is it better to create a new campaign for testing creatives? But then the best performing audiences can overlap and it will be difficult to scale.
I think all of you have these questions and answers in mind when thinking about introducing new ads to a stable campaign structure.
I recently had a very interesting discussion with a Facebook representative on this matter and would like to share my findings with you.
Of course I won’t give you a strict guideline of testing new creatives because every account differs but I will share with you the information I got from Facebook which helps me understand the algorithm a bit better.
There will also be a very interesting tip on how to restart a learning for a specific video – so stay tuned!
How to Add a New Creative Into An Existing Campaign
Let’s say we have 1 top performing prospecting campaign with 5 different ads inside. Each ad has the same video and 5 different copies.
But at some point we see that the CTR starts to die and we want to refresh the ads with new videos. We don’t want to turn all of the old ads off since we don’t know the results of the new videos.
But if we just create new ads in the same campaign there’s a big chance that the new ads won’t start spending since the old ads have more engagement and the algorithm already learnt a lot about the ad.
So why does this happen?
Whenever you add a new video, Facebook identifies it is a specific creative. So, for example, if you’re using this video in different ads and even different campaigns, the algorithm consolidates all the learning around this video together.
And when you add an absolutely new video, Facebook doesn’t know anything about it so it prefers to spend the budget on the familiar video already.
So the first tip I got from the Facebook representative was to create a small testing campaign with the new video. This way the algorithm will start the learning process and gather more information about this specific new video.
After several days you will be able to introduce this new video to the existing campaign. And since Facebook will already be familiar with this video, it will start separating the traffic between the videos.
Read More: 5 Best Practices for Ecommerce Facebook Ad Creatives
How to Split Test an Old Creative Vs. New Creative
Let’s imagine another situation. You’ve been running the same campaign for weeks but now you would like to create a new campaign with different targeting (let’s say targeting another GEO) and you would like to introduce the old video together with the new video in the campaign.
Whenever you upload both of them, though they are new ads, still the algorithm starts sending much more traffic to the old video.
How can we avoid this? This tip really helped me a lot.
You need to change the thumbnail of the old video!
Whenever you change the thumbnail, Facebook starts looking at this video as an absolutely new video.
Read More: What Creative Works Best In In-stream Video Ad Placement?
So if you want to create an A/B test with an old and a new video from scratch, just change the thumbnail of the old video and both of them will have the same chances to compete.
I found this information really interesting and helpful.
To sum up when you’re planning a creative testing, think carefully whether in this specific test you want the Facebook algorithm to work based on the previous knowledge or not. Now you also know how to trick it and start the learning from scratch.
If you want to know about other strategies we’re using while testing
Book a call below: https://dimniko.com/msp-apply
Thanks!
Maryana from DimNiko
