August 20, 2016
As a marketer, you probably A/B test most things. The color of your buttons, call to actions, Facebook ads, your socks, your cereal… you get it. One of the golden rules of marketers today is to A/B test everything.
You wouldn’t run a multi-thousand dollar online campaign without at least A/B testing a couple of designs, text or CTAs, right?
But there’s one medium that often gets overlooked when it comes to A/B testing. Video. Honestly, a lot of us haven’t figured out how to incorporate video in our marketing mix, and that’s okay.
Getting started with video marketing can be intimidating and seem difficult. And let’s not even talk about A/B testing video.
Okay let’s talk about A/B testing video. It’s an aspect of your marketing that can bring you great ROI, and it doesn’t have to be that difficult to get right.
Why video A/B testing is so rare
So why aren’t more people A/B testing their videos in their online campaigns? Well, for starters, it has traditionally been difficult for SMB marketers to make enough high quality content to be worth A/B testing. In fact, it’s often been difficult for them to make ONE good video.
It’s easy to A/B test the color of a button, a CTA here, a header there, an image ad on Facebook, a headline in Google AdWords, etc etc.
For text, well your keyboard is right in front of you. For images, you have Photoshop or Canva. Change up the visuals, ad another ad in your Facebook campaign, bam, done.
For video? “Ugh, I have to make another video? That’ll take ages”, you think for yourself. Making one is difficult enough, right?
How A/B testing video can be easy
What if I told you that making effective video ads for your business doesn’t have to be either expensive, morale-bustingly difficult, or soul-crushingly time consuming?
Take this startup as an example. Snappy is a fast growing mobile app for cross-border shopping that helps people focus on what to buy, rather than how to buy.
As an e-commerce platform focused on mobile, their main KPIs when running Facebook campaigns is their CPI, Cost Per Install.
They tried a lot of different image ad campaigns, and was getting decent performance, but they knew they could do better.
They also knew that they wanted to use video somehow. Showing their app with images and text is one thing, but they knew that video could give them an extra dimension and possibly help optimize their ROI.
How Snappy A/B tested their way to 450% lower CPI
So the Snappy guys decided to make a video ad. Before using Shakr, the guys at Snappy didn’t have much experience creating promotional videos.
In fact, they didn’t have much original footage to use, and they definitely didn’t want to hire expensive videographers to come to their place to shoot the footage.
They had an idea though. Snappy is a mobile app platform where people can buy products from thousands of brands from all over the world, and those brands have a ton of content promoting their products.
So the Snappy guys used a mix of different content sourced from their associated brands, and used that to make a video with Shakr. They also added a couple of screen recordings of their app in action. No expensive videographers, no long days of shooting, no actors, no nothing.
Check out the result:
This is the first video they made with Shakr for their Korean market:
This video resulted in a 1% decrease in CPI. Not very encouraging. But Snappy decided to keep iterating and experimenting with more videos.
This is the second video they made:
Here’s what they ended up with after A/B testing 4 more videos:
The video might seems like it’s similar, in fact, it’s using the same template as the second video Snappy made.
But the performance? 4,5 times better! That’s right, by the 5th video they used, they had managed to decreased their CPI with a whopping 450%.
And the Click-Through-Rate? A huge 718% improvement compared to their image ads.
And all it took was $ 99 to make 5 videos with Shakr, some time to produce the videos in the Shakr video editor and a data-centered marketing approach.
Here’s how you can do the same
If you’re running Facebook campaigns to sell a product, increase your brand awareness, get sign ups for a webinar or an online course, or just want to get traffic to your blog post, you can do exactly what Snappy did.
Making effective video ads that drive real, tangible business results isn’t magic. It’s math. Just like setting up an ROI positive image ad campaign isn’t magic, neither is making an ROI positive video ad campaign.
It takes testing, testing, testing. What is doesn’t take is hours or days to produce a single video and then hope that that video performs.
So here’s how you do:
- Take one of your current or upcoming campaigns.
- Identify your business goal and benchmark how your ads are currently performing.
- Make a couple of videos using Shakr and start experimenting.
- Remember to track your performances using either the Facebook pixel, or your own website analytics software like Google Analytics or something similar.
Conclusion
If you’re serious about improving your Facebook marketing, video A/B testing have the potential to turn an average or underperforming campaign into a money making machine.
It doesn’t have to take days of work or thousands of dollars to make an effective video. Being able to quickly produce several videos to see what sticks is a super powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.
Have questions about how to A/B test video ad performance? Let me know if the comment section!
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