Your Guide To Effective Paid Ads

The paid landscape is changing.

In a recent case study, we discussed how True Classic spends $100k daily on meta platforms while maintaining an impressive $2.5 in sales per $1 spent.

A key? Their creative testing.

However, this process requires a seamless collaboration between media buyers and creatives, establishing a continuous feedback loop to create successful campaigns.

To give you more insights on how you can start creative testing, we interviewed the founder and CEO of Motion, Reza Khadjavi, a platform designed to bridge the gap between media buyers and creatives.

The conversation delves into the step-by-step approach to creative testing.

Implement Creative Tests

Reza is a big proponent of a hypothesis-driven approach to creative production. This allows you to break your creative testing work into smaller, more manageable cycles of work.

The goal is to be scientific about creative testing and give a time limit so you don’t keep beating a dead horse, fail fast, learn faster, and iterate fastest.

Steps of a creative sprint:

1. Start with Hypotheses:

Just like any scientific experiment, creative testing is driven by hypotheses. This systematic approach allows you to identify and test specific assumptions, leading to more meaningful learnings.

2. Create Creatives to Test the Hypotheses:

With this hypothesis-driven approach, each creative is created to test an assumption. Nothing is done without a learning agenda.

3. Ad Creatives Naming Convention.

To maintain efficiency in tracking and reporting learnings, it's crucial to label ad creatives with the corresponding hypotheses.

Motion provides a template for labeling your ad creatives.

Take Big Swings & Iterate

Too many brands focus on iteration instead of exploration.

Ship new creative narratives, types, formats, and stories.

And let creative do the targeting.

Instead of only making small iterations to the creative.

Let Creative Do The Targeting

True Classic is a great example. They’re running ~1100+ ads and each ad is tailored towards a different customer and pain point.

Here are a few of the narratives:

• Tailored towards people who workout
• Tailored to people who don’t like how they look in t-shirts
• For people with big legs and large glutes
• For people who want to feel more confident
• Tailored towards dads

What Determines a Winning Creative?

Reza identifies two key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge the success of a creative:

• KPI #1: Is this getting spend?

A winning creative can scale.

Even if you have one piece of creative that’s performing well in a niche audience, if it doesn’t scale, it won’t move the needle for your business.

• KPI #2: Does this hit your performance target?

If the creatives are spending, you need to assess the creative's performance against your performance targets, such as ROAs or cost per purchase.

The ultimate goal is to find creatives that can both scale and meet these performance targets.

Break Down The Learnings

When you identify a winning creative, the next step is to dissect the learnings.

Some of the pillars you can look at are:

• What’s the hold rate? → Are the hooks working?
• What percentage of people are clicking out? → Is the value proposition working?
• Which creator has the best-performing creatives?
• More Educated Hypotheses

With the learnings, you can form more educated hypotheses to restart creative testing to continuously produce winning campaigns.

Who Leads Creative Testing

Due to the high demand for creative testing, Reza is very bullish on the emergence of a “Creative Strategist” role to lead the effort.

This role sits between distribution (media buying) and creation (creatives). They are in charge of the creative roadmaps, and creative testing, and communicate the test results to the creatives which provide learnings to guide the optimization of future creative efforts.

Creatives (creation) ↔ Creative Strategist ↔ Distribution (media buying)

Again, imagine 7+ hours of creative testing, optimization, and brainstorming, to give you the ultimate playbook for understanding the science & art of performance creative.