We all make excuses for not testing our online advertising… especially, if the results are not what we hoped for. But the truth is: there’s no good excuse for not testing since it’s the only way to discover which ad will get the best results… before you’ve committed your marketing budget!

Here are 7 things to keep in mind to make testing your ads easy and effective:

1. Decide in advance what you’re trying to achieve. How will you judge the success of your ad campaign? Click-through rate? Conversions? And what results are you looking for? Decide before you start testing.

2. Be clear about what you’re testing. Is it the offer, the copy, or the graphics? Remember, ambiguity is the enemy of testing! Keep it simple by testing one “element” at a time, and make sure the only difference between the test ads is that one element.

3. Get the biggest bang for your buck. Unless you’ve done lots of testing with a particular ad, don’t just look for incremental improvement… focus on getting big results! For example, why test the impact of tweaking a word when a different offer could double your results?  

4. Make sure you’re testing “apples to apples”. Test different versions of your online ad against the same audience over the same time periods. For example, test ads against the same search engine or ad network so that everything is “apples to apples”.

5. Let your ads run long enough to get meaningful results. A month is a good place to start… anything less and you may have a hard time figuring out whether the results were “significant”. Or worse, you could jump to the wrong conclusion! And when in doubt, run the test longer.

6. Review the test results with your goals in mind. See if the results show a meaningful difference between the ads you’re testing. But remember… the “winning” ad still needs to meet your goals; otherwise, you should consider testing another idea.

7. Make testing a way of (marketing) life. Even when your test is done and your best performing ad is running… keep coming up with new ideas to test against so that you’re always improving your results!

Testing is an easy and objective way to determine what ad campaigns will work best with your audience. So no more excuses… :<)