Everyone is doing social media ads in 2019 – unsurprisingly, since there are 3.2 bn social media users around the world, or 42% of the Earth’s population. With so many people spending time on social media platforms, there are more and more marketers trying to get noticed, competing for the precious attention of consumers. The space and time in the news feed are limited – and the early bird (or in this case, the behavioral-testing bird) gets the worm.

Impactful social media advertising is not easy, so we compiled a guide for making sure your ads are worth the investment by using behavioral research. Here are three tips and tricks from our Insights director:

1. Digital campaigns need to have different key performance indicators

Why is testing and optimizing social media ads so important?

In the digital world, visibility-catching attention, breaking through the vast media clutter, and stopping the scrolling is much more important than in traditional media. Due to the changing environment in which ads are encountered nowadays, attention and emotion are becoming even more important than before. If we think of the relevance of those KPIs in for marketers in the golden age of TV, they would have taken up spots of mid to low-relevance in the KPI ranking. Nowadays, they have indeed climbed into the top 3.

Moreover, people are scrolling at a speed of 1-3 seconds per post while on the TV channel you can ‘force’ people to watch them till the end. Because of this fact, making an emotional connection is even more critical for social media than TV, as ingesting a significant amount of rational messages at the same time is not feasible.

You cannot apply the same principles (e.g., showing the ad to the respondents in full screen and till the end), thinking (e.g., building up a story) and methods (e.g., using only survey) to a very new and particular type of media contexts as you did to traditional media.

For example, some companies reuse their TVCs as social media ads without adjusting them and think they are employing an integrated approach to advertising. If your TVCs show the brand and critical messages onscreen only after 20 seconds, and an average social media ad is watched for 3 seconds, it is not surprising that such ads don’t have an ROI on ad spend in a different environment. The same is true for emotions – if you need 20 seconds to build up your story for the climax, the watchers won’t get to the desired feeling in time if they scroll right past.

2. Craft the right testing environment

Given the different dynamics of the environment, we cannot show the full-length ad in full screen – we need to test it incorporated within the environment.
• The position of the tested post matters: Our studies have shown that ads positioned near the top of the feed have significantly higher visibility – 94% vs. 75% for posts and ads appearing later on in the feed. This is important for us to keep in mind and vary in our environment design to ensure the highest standards and accuracy of our methodology.
• Further, the content before the ad impacts its performance; therefore, it is essential to have more neutral and comparable posts to decrease the impact of the content around the tested ad, especially if we want to compare it to our benchmark database.
The creative direction of the feed is also vital, and another thing to keep in check is whether the context is natural enough for the respondents (e.g., free scroll, interaction…).

3. Choose wisely: testing on multiple platforms and devices

There are some differences between testing your social media ads on mobile, desktop, or both, as well as between social media platforms. In general, it is recommended to test the medium with the highest traffic. Nevertheless, some types of media might be able to obtain more data than others (e.g., webcam eye tracking on desktop). In this case, what are the differences between the ads? Will the suboptimal medium favor one of the creatives more than the other? Will the additional testing environments and methods be more likely to select the correct ads?

The performance of an advertisement can vary significantly between platforms because social networks and their users differ greatly as well. Some platforms are scrolled through faster, and the ads are more visible, and other platforms inspire shopping for products more. For some industries, it is more efficient to advertise on specific social networks because of the nature of the product or service. Testing your ad across multiple platforms enables an optimization of media spending and targeting the right audience profile. Still, most campaigns do not have the budget to test on all platforms, so it is recommended to select the one with the most relevant traffic for the campaign and to keep in mind the differences in platforms.

Conclusion

By using a combination of behavioral and traditional methods, you can get a comprehensive picture of how your ad will perform in a social media feed. Since there are so many different things to have in mind when starting to test your social media ads, we have compiled a suggested list of priorities: what are the most impactful things you should focus on from the start, and which ones you can include if your budget allows it.

• Priority 1 – Modify your KPIs, testing environment, and methods to adapt to the social media environment: don’t use your TVC testing output/protocol to evaluate social ads. Instead, test in a natural context with eye-tracking and facial coding
• Priority 2 – Then, if you still have the budget for it, you might want to test on your ad on three different audience segments
• Priority 3 – If you need to get further insights, you can test the TV ad first, pinpoint the key scenes and the seconds that make (or break) the ad, and then create your social media ads based on the best scenes
• Priority 4 – if you still have the budget, you might want to consider testing the ad in multiple environments – on different platforms and devices to get the most comprehensive picture and prediction of your ad’s performance.

Interested in becoming an ad testing hero and making the most out of your advertising budget? Request more details on EyeSee’s cutting-edge adverting testing solutions here.