5 Case Studies That Prove Smart Ad Testing Works

Marketing for Growth With Smart Testing

We’ve said it hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and we’ll say it again: always be testing.

Testing—especially smart, methodical testing—is the key to building a sustainable marketing strategy. The hot new thing (for good reason) is viewing digital marketing as a tool for growth marketing. 

Growth marketers apply the scientific method to marketing to create strategies that are as data-driven as they are idea-driven. That’s essentially the basis of what EmberTribe does: ideate, test, iterate. 

🌱 We're growth scientists, and you can be too! 

Growth marketing relies on structured, repeatable processes to develop hypotheses, discover results, come up with conclusions, and iterate on findings. This is smart testing.

How Smart Ad Testing Achieved Big Wins

Anyone can run paid traffic, but just running paid traffic won’t always get the results you want. You have to use that big brain of yours to engage in serious testing to find the wins you're looking for. 

We’ve been able to prove time and time again that if you test your assumptions and follow the data, your ads will begin to meet and even exceed your goals. In this post we’ve gathered 5 case studies that illustrate how testing brought insights to light, that we were able to leverage into profitable campaigns.

1. Testing ads before a new collection launch leads to sales exceeding launch goals.

For this gift and accessories brand, we started out by seeking strategies to expand cold audience reach. By launching multiple campaign ads that spanned a variety of messaging angles, we discovered what messages resonated with this client’s audiences.

With this data in hand, we then rapid-tested ads for a new collection launch to identify winning creative among them. Our method resulted in their second highest sales day ever, just behind Black Friday sales.  

2. We tested our way to discovering a hard-to-pinpoint core audience.

This sports coaching subscription service couldn’t seem to find enough audiences on Facebook to validate their strategy. We began running traffic to test which got the best engagement and build their Pixel data. 

We ran more lead generation campaigns offering valuable content (ebook) and nailed down our audiences further. By continuing to optimize ads for audience, urgency, and cost, we achieved 8.77x ROAS. 

3. Moving from traction to revenue by testing factors in a buyer’s purchasing decision. 

This children’s clothing boutique had a great product, but at a higher price point than competitors in the children’s wear market. We set out to find the right audience for this store. 

We extensively tested creative formats for cold audiences based on interests, behaviors, and lookalikes. By restructuring the strategy from broad reach to testing and refining highly targeted smaller audiences, as well as consistently retargeting all engaged people, we achieved 2.71x ROAS. 

4. Using market research and testing to scale user acquisition via Facebook traffic.

EmberTribe researched the client’s target audience, it’s competitor’s advertising campaigns, and it’s competitor’s content before beginning to conduct tests. 

Armed with a substantial amount of market research to go along with a series of targeted audiences, EmberTribe created and tested hundreds of ad variations and made adjustments and iterations as certain ads proved to be successful. This resulted in scaling up to 400k unique user sign ups per month.

5. Finding new opportunities to leverage Facebook ads to scale revenue. 

Knowing fit was crucial for this high-end lingerie brand, we focused on showing the fit through videos of models moving in the bras, and including testimonials, social proof/awards, and short copy hitting on the discomfort many women associate with bras.

Our team also tested and iterated extensively with optimizations and creative including dynamic broad reach targeting, single images, videos, carousels and Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs). Our testing resulted in a 300% lift in revenue compared to the previous period.

Always Be Testing

Just say no 🙅‍♀️ to a “set it and forget it” mindset! We cannot say this enough. Testing, when done well, will create the foundation you need to iterate on successes and collect data to help you make educated decisions for your campaigns.