In advertising originality and spontaneity are crucial to great ad campaigns, but too often ad concepts are developed without sufficient testing. When campaigns are finally launched, the marketing team is often left wondering whether or not their hard work will pay off and lead to a successful campaign.
On the other hand, software developers very rarely develop product features without first being certain that they’re time is well invested. The value of quick ideation, development and testing cycles are proven in software development, but also add incredible value to advertising and marketing.
From our point of view, developing new ad campaigns is as complex as developing product features. Implementing agile ad testing processes within your team will have an incredible impact. In the following article, we’ll introduce the concept of agile ad testing and help your team implement agile in your day-to-day workflows.
The Benefits of Agile in Advertising
Before getting into the content of the article, here’s a snapshot of key differences between traditional marketers and those that adopt agile thinking in the way they do advertising.
| Traditional Marketing | Agile Marketing |
|---|---|
|
Focused on the 4Ps |
Focused on the customer and their needs |
|
Creative decisions made before campaign start |
Creative decisions made on an ongoing basis |
|
Creatives delivered in their totality before campaign start |
Continuous delivery of creatives throughout campaign |
|
Feedback analyzed at the end of the campaign |
Continuous feedback analyzed using learning cycles |
|
Feedback from top-management plays an important role |
Feedback from online advertising testing plays an important role |
|
Fixed start and end date of marketing campaign |
Campaign goes through incremental development without specified end date |
In a previous article we wrote about how A/B testing works, but today we’ll discuss agile principles in advertising. A/B testing and agile frameworks go hand-in-hand, but while A/B-testing is a tool, agile is an overarching approach to advertising.
In short, agile ad testing is an approach to creating new ads that is based on user behavior rather than on assumptions.
Agile is often compared to an opposite methodology called waterfall development. The main feature of the waterfall approach sequential steps, meaning one step is fully completed, before we move forward with the next. In the context of advertising a waterfall approach might look like this:
- A full set of ads are developed by the creative teams
- The ads are reviewed and adjusted until sufficient ad concepts are approved
- The ads are tested on campaigns
- A report on the performance of the ads with hypotheses explaining them created and distributed to management
As I’m sure you’re aware, these are the steps most teams go through when running new ads, usually with many more brainstorm, review and approval steps in than that! While there are advantages, such a seqencial approach is also slow. In a competitive digital advertising landscape, slow is also costly.
Unlike waterfall testing approaches, in agile ad testing a small number of ad concepts are quickly tested and improved upon over time. Data from those test campaigns drive conversations within teams to ensure that decision-making is based on results and not opinions.
Introducing Agile in Your Ad Development Process
How can you introduce agile methodology to your ad department? In the next few paragraphs we’ll outline what an agile team’s work looks like and help you develop a new approach to testing advertising.
Note that agile ad testing is not just about creating higher performing copy. It’s also about understanding why your ads are performing. Being able to explain the results and being able to use those learnings in your next tests is just as important a part in minimizing wasted resources spent on ineffective concepts.
That means that an agile team must also develop strong knowledge management capabilities to make sure all of the data campaign their way is utilized. After this article you should be able to:
- Iterate on ads faster
- Collect audience feedback quicker
- Report on ad concept and learnings faster
- Actively manage new learnings about ad creatives, audiences and channels
Let’s help you create an agile team within your advertising department!
1. Optimize the Ad Testing Process with Agile Research
The first step to optimizing the ad testing process is to conduct ad research. We define agile research as a method to continuously gain learnings from your ad campaigns instead of only doing so at the start or end. So how can you make your research process continuous without investing too much time on it?
- Make use of your current reporting tools to automate reports on the progress of new ad tests
- Make use of a competitor research tool to track industry and competitor ads
- For every weekly report take note of significant learnings in an internal spreadsheet or knowledge management platform
- Any time new creatives are being developed go back to the significant learnings page to utilize these insights
Can you and your team confidently answer questions about how your audiences are responding differently this year than they did last year? Or how your competitors have adjusted their messaging strategy over the last few months? Through a simple agile research process your marketing department will have a better understanding of your campaign results.
With an agile research process in-hand, a marketing has a strong foundation to test increasing the pace at which new ad concepts are developed. With learnings tracked and saved, a wealth of ideas and hypotheses become available for the next step: Ad Concept Development.
Quick Tip: Tools like SEM rush offer a great solution to get you started on competitor and industry research.
2. Increase the Pace of Your Ad Concept Development
Thinking of new ideas to test is usually time consuming, not only for designers, but also for the rest of the team given the discussions and approval steps required. While these approvals ensure consistent messaging and branding, in order to avoid some of these obstacles and increase your ad concept development speed we recommend working in small batches of ads.
How many ads can your team create on a weekly basis? Start small and aim to increase the output over time. If a design team is encouraged to begin using more advanced creation tools the the teams output can also increase. For instance, Creative Automatic automates many design steps by generating multiple formats from a single ad and helps in testing the ads as well.
Throughout a campaign underperforming ads should be removed and new ad concepts continually developed and tested. On a weekly basis, your ad team can capture learnings from campaigns and based on those learnings develop new ideas.
3. Reporting A/B Test Performance
Agile testing methods are different in advertising than in software development. While in the former we focus on scripts and test users, in the case of ads we can us the testing tools provided by ad networks. The reporting of test can be performed through spreadsheets or 3rd party tools like Flowin, which facilitates the analysis of results.
Ad Network A/B Testing Tools
The ad testing tools provided by the networks are basis of any A/B test. They allow you to compare several versions of your ads and to see which one performs better. They require little effort from campaign managers to setup and provide great data for analysis.
Now what’s the most efficient method to analyze all that data? An issue with these tools is that while they can tell you which ad performed best, they do little to help understand why.
Which tone and emotions do the audience respond to most? What happens when you mention price and should your ad copy be longer or shorter? These questions are more easily answered through Flowin’s learnings dashboard and help your marketing team and capturing learnings for your own learnings database.
The focus on continuous testing and learnings helps share a new vision of results with brand managers and business analysts within your teams. With this clearer understanding, your team will be able to see great improvements in your execution speed and campaign ROI.
Agile Terminology and 5 Final Tips
Concept Testing Vs Validation
The first step in any marketing campaign is understanding who your audience is. Once you know this information, you can start creating content that resonates with them. While testing is a global term used in many ways, ad concept validation usually refers to the practice of testing a concept for the very first term and hence validating it with your audience.
Exploratory Testing
While some resources should be invested in iterating existing ads, some of it must be invested in exploring new ideas. This is where exploratory testing comes in. Exploratory testing is an approach often to testing, which emphasizes freedom in the testing process instead strict rules.
In software development, it is sometimes called session-based testing or continuous testing because the testing is created in real-time. Hence, a brainstorming session could lead to new ideas, which could then be rapidly developed and tested. Whether this could lead to new high-performing concepts is not clear, it will without a doubt lead to new insights.
What About Customer Feedback
Customer surveys are certainly an important tool in the traditional marketer’s toolbox. It plays a role in gathering knowledge for large brands who’s ad spend is focused in channels where tracking isn’t possible. For most teams focus on digital channels like Google Ads or social media, customer feedback is often too slow for the agile advertising team.
Active Vs Passive Advertising Testing Methods
The key difference between active and passive testing methods is that passive testing requires users to visit websites where they are exposed to your messaging. In contrast, active testing involves finding customers through digital ad inventory and testing your messaging then and there.
This article strictly focused on active testing methods since running these tests is usually the task of the advertising team. Passive testing methods are employed by the product team or a marketing team in charge of the website.
Creating User Stories for Ad Tests
User stories in testing is similar to the concept of personas in marketing. While personas are focused on creating an identity for the customer, the user story is focused on explaining the need and desired outcome. You can think of a user story as a specific moment in a customer persona’s life.
To create your first customer story reflect on what might be going through their mind at the moment they’re seeing your ads. What’s their need and what are they looking to achieve? Does the ad concept help address these questions for the customer?
Build Your Agile Team Today
Welcome to the agile approach! Adopting agile ad testing is a great way for any marketing team to quickly test ads and to ensure new learnings are achieved. Are you confident that you’ll be able to implement your own agile testing methodology?
As a campaign manager we encourage you to start thinking about your work as an ad testing specialist. Use exploratory ad testing to develop new ad ideas and report those learnings for the rest of your team to use.
As a strategist or marketing manager, discuss the topic of the agile team with your colleagues and set goals to slowly begin implementing these practices.
If you have any questions about how to implement these creative ab tests do not hesitate to reach out!
