Ad Testing Strategy That Works Right Now

Happy Wednesday!

One of our clients shared some juicy details about how their first round of creatives is performing.

Let’s take a look at what’s working right now with our clients’ ads and what lessons you can take away and implement into your ads.

Reply to this email and let me know if you’d like me to share more about what’s working right now with our ads.

What you will learn today:

• How to turn high engagement into conversions by tweaking your ad strategy

• The power of Dynamic Creative Testing (DCT) and when to use it

• The crucial connection between your ad creative and landing pages

• Actionable steps to optimize your ad performance

And much more…

3 Creative Concepts For You

If you run an ecommerce brand, mobile app, or SaaS and spend at least $10,000 a month on ads:

We will write 3 creative concepts for your brand completely free.

We want to show you our creative process and why our clients love it.

Simply fill out this form and we will write 3 concepts tailored to your brand.

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• New brands fail because they don't understand how to create ads that perform and how to run them. Read this today.

• If I had to choose one concept for a benefit-driven brand. See what I would choose.

• Heated debate on the cost of creating ads and how to evaluate the performance of expensive ads. Worth reading here, including reposts.

The Initial Results

When we first launched the creatives, they were placed in a testing campaign on Meta with some tailored placements. And guess what?

They grabbed tons of attention—people were clicking, watching, and engaging with the ads.

But, and this is a big one, conversions were a bit of a letdown. This happens more often than you’d think.

You can have an ad that stops people mid-scroll, but if it doesn’t convince them to take that next step, you’re not getting the full value from your creative.

So, what did the client do next?

The Switch to DCT

They made a smart move and transitioned the ads into a Dynamic Creative Testing (DCT) campaign.

This meant pairing the three different versions of each concept with their top-performing copy and letting Meta’s algorithm do its optimization magic.

And then the magic really happened. Over the last week, the ads have started to deliver in a big way, especially over the weekend. Conversions are up, and ROAS is looking pretty sweet.

Breaking Down the Results

The [redacted] concept is leading the charge with the highest conversions and best ROAS. This is proof that when a creative hits the right emotional notes and offers a clear solution, it can really pay off.

The [redacted] concept, on the other hand, is struggling. Despite strong engagement, it’s lagging in ROAS.

This is a good example of how not all high-engagement creatives lead to sales. We’ll need to iterate this one, possibly tweaking the messaging or finding a better alignment with the audience’s needs.

A Limitation of DCT

Before you rush to implement DCT, there’s one crucial caveat to keep in mind:

When you use DCT, you lose the ability to properly analyze key retention metrics like Hook Rate, Hold Rate, and View-Through Rates (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%).

Even if you break down the results by creative, Meta’s reporting won’t give you the detailed retention insights you need to refine your ads.

This is something to consider if understanding and optimizing these metrics is a critical part of your ad strategy.

While DCT can be fantastic for overall performance, it limits your visibility into how well each part of your creative is holding the audience’s attention.

What’s Next?

The next step the client is taking is a crucial one: developing a new landing page that better connects with the messaging of the winning creatives.

This is an often overlooked but incredibly important part of the funnel.

Your ad creative might be doing its job by driving traffic, but if your landing page isn’t continuing that conversation in the right way, you’re going to see drop-offs.

Think of it like this: your ad grabs someone’s attention, but your landing page needs to keep that attention and guide them smoothly toward conversion.

That’s why it’s so important to ensure that your messaging is consistent across both platforms.

The right landing page can make all the difference between someone clicking away and someone making a purchase.

Lessons Learned

This whole process has been a reminder of how important it is to be flexible with your ad strategy.

What starts as a high-engagement, low-conversion campaign can be optimized into a winner with the right tweaks.

Some ways you can optimize your ad performance:

1. Switch up your campaign structure

2. Align your creative and copy

3. Make landing pages congruent with your creative

Winning Ad Creative Breakdown With 4.15 ROAS and 50% Hook Rate

We've created, tested, and optimized several ad concepts with multiple variations.

In the second half of the year, our winning ads brought in over $400,000 in revenue with 4.25 ROAS and $95,000 in ad spend.

We were able to reduce CPA by 42%, and increased the average ROAS from 2.24 to 4.25.

You can read my detailed breakdown here or watch my Loom video in the same link.

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How We Can Help You

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

1. If you’re looking for a creative partner who will handle your entire creative production, deliver winning ads every month, and help you scale, apply to work with us here. We have worked with brands like HexClad, BestSelf, Product Hunt, Morning Brew, and others.

2. Want us to train your internal team and implement all of our creative production systems and strategies in your business? Apply here and we will help you build an in-house team that can create hundreds of winning ads every month.

3. If you’re looking to take your ad performance to the next level and have a consistent stream of winning creative, but don’t want to hire anyone, we have created a program that teaches you our entire creative production process and everything we have learned over 3 years of creating tens of thousands of ads.