Testing Your Ads

It doesn’t matter if you are selling cars, software, or custom apparel on Viralstyle – the methodology to testing ads is essentially the same. There are many facets to testing; identifying the targeting criteria, deciding how much to spend, or knowing when to scale or kill ads, it can be hard to make a decision with so many moving parts. It requires a lot of experience and gained intuition for you to make confident decisions early in the marketing process.

Why is Testing So Difficult?

Nobody said digital advertising was easy. It requires analytical abilities and a strong understanding of the data and individual characteristics of your niche. If you are unfamiliar with the behavior of the users you are targeting, you may not even know where to begin.

Not to mention, ads during the testing phase probably aren’t generating positive ROI yet. This can toy with your emotions as a marketer or entrepreneur so it’s important to stay patient and be objective with your data.

Making early budget decisions is one of the biggest challenges for online marketers at any level of experience. The next part of developing a winning advertising campaign is making early budgeting choices in your first three days.

Kill, Chill, Scale Method

To decide how to move forward with your campaign there’s a lot of information you can interpret to decide if the ad sets you tested are worth pursuing further. The decisions you make when scaling ads during the first few days can make an impact on how effectively the delivery will optimize so it’s important to be patient. At the same time, the amount you spend on ad sets that aren’t making positive returns can mean the difference of your campaign becoming profitable so you need to be careful to not overspend.

Refer to our recent article on testing ads for in-depth strategy. Depending on your goals, the product you are advertising, available funds, audience characteristics, and experience with the niche, your starting budget can range anywhere between $5-20/day. We suggest trying a minimum of 3 ad sets with unique targeting, you may want to test as many as 10 depending on your cash flow and expectations.

For the purposes of this example, we’re using a budget of $10/day. We chose this as an optimal ad spend for custom apparel campaigns on Viralstyle where the average seller profit per item overall on a campaign can range from $13-18 depending on the volume sold, products offered, print colors and retail price.

As a disclaimer, none of the suggestions in this article are intended to be followed verbatim and every seller should strive to develop their own unique strategy. Budgeting decisions greatly depend on your financial resources and overall profit goals for your business. You may also want to supplement your conversion ads with Engagement or Clicks to Website ads – the kill, chill, scale insights in this blog are specific to conversion ads.

Just as the name of the method says, we’re going to Kill, Chill, or Scale an ad based on a few factors.

• Clicks – Number of people clicking on your ad.
• Buying Intent Events – Events that are recorded by your pixel show people taking buying intent actions like adding to cart, initiating checkout, or purchasing.
• Purchases – The number of sales.

These rules apply to each of the ad sets you’ve created, not the overall campaign.

After 24 Hours (Approx. $10 spent per ad set)

Kill if you have less than 5 clicks

Chill if you have any conversion events triggered

Scale if you have 2 or more orders

After 48 Hours (Approx. $20 spent per ad set)

Kill if you have no conversion events triggered

Chill if you have at least one sale

Scale if you have 4 or more orders

After 72 Hours (Approx. $30 spent per ad set)

Kill if you have only sold 1 or less

Chill if it has turned a profit

Scale if you have made 5 or more sales

In between each kill/chill/scale threshold I’ve suggested, you will notice that there is some grey area where it can go either way. As you find yourself here, you will need to determine how much of a risk you are willing to take by continuing to spend money.

Make this judgement with a combination of data like CPM, conversion rate, cost per click, relevancy score, engagement and conversion events as well as your own intuition.

Do you think that this ad set’s performance has a decent chance at improving?

If it does begin to improve, how much potential do you think it has?

Once you have made it past the first 3 days of advertising, you are hopefully left with a few ad sets that have scale potential. Check out our Ad Scaling Case Study to see real data and results from the first 14 days of two successful apparel campaigns.

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