Ad testing: Why it matters and how to successfully perform it

How confident are you in your advertisement? Whether you want your ad to increase sales or raise brand awareness, you need one you know will work. There's no better way to be confident about an ad than to see that it's tested well.

Ad testing is the process of putting different ads in front of a sample of your target audience and asking for feedback. You can run ad tests on an entire ad or on specific aspects of it, and collect feedback on anything from how much the ad stands out to how believable your audience finds it.

The amount brands spend on ads is astronomically high: more than $500 billion is spent on ads worldwide, and that figure keeps growing.

Brands spend this aggressively because ads work. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, for example, see a solid return on ads across media types. Pre-launch testing to home in on the right ad concept only grows the odds of a strong return.

Measuring advertising effectiveness through testing offers four additional benefits.

Now that you know why assessing advertising effectiveness is so important, you’re ready to dive into the process of testing your ads. Here are the 4 key steps you’ll need to follow:

Your stimuli can take the form of videos, images, copy, audio, or a combination. As you decide on format, also consider content based on where each ad will run; you might tailor a LinkedIn ad to professional networkers differently than a Facebook ad or a Google search ad.

Use at least three stimuli per test for a fair read on your target audience's preferences. The exact number also depends on your survey design: monadic or sequential monadic.

If you'd rather use a monadic design, stick to testing only a few stimuli. If you want a sequential monadic design, you can comfortably test more. Learn more about the pros and cons of each design and how to set them up.

Related: 3 tips for performing concept testing

What makes one ad better than another? The metrics you measure help you decide. Consider these top ad metrics:

Which metric matters most depends on your goal. If your top priority is influencing sales, purchase intent may matter most. If brand differentiation is the focus, uniqueness may take priority instead.

Measure any metric with a Likert scale question following the format "How (metric) is the ad?" with answer choices ranging from "Extremely (metric)" to "Not at all (metric)." For believability, that looks like:

How believable is the ad?

Your ad testing survey should also ask screener, category, and demographic questions. Learn more about each in the comprehensive concept testing resource.

You can only judge the quality of your ads once your target audience evaluates them. Find your target profile and give them a chance to provide feedback in one of two ways.

Once responses come in, compare the ads against each other. To focus on the data that matters most and keep analysis straightforward, use Top 2 Box scores: combine the two most positive answer choices for each metric into a single percentage. If 30% of respondents said an ad was extremely believable and 20% said very believable, your Top 2 Box score is 50%.

Compare an ad's Top 2 Box scores across every metric against the other ads you tested. In one illustrative example, Ad B wins on purchase intent and appeal while Ad A wins on believability; assuming each metric matters equally, Ad B would be the pick over Ad A. This is the kind of side-by-side scorecard result this method is designed to produce once your own responses come in.

Don't skip your open-ended questions, the ones without preset answer choices. A word cloud can help you quickly spot the key takeaways on each ad.

For a deeper walkthrough of every step, read the ultimate guide to concept testing.

You can also try in-market testing, which pushes concepts live and measures performance through A/B testing, showing a percentage of your real audience each ad.

In-market testing tells you how people actually respond, but it's riskier and costlier since some concepts may perform poorly live.

The strongest approach uses both: test ads before they go live, then A/B test the shortlist of winners to see how each performs in the real world.

While your product is in development, you'll have other testing priorities, like name or logo testing.

Begin ad testing once your product launches. At this point, since everything about your ads is brand new to your audience, look for broad, directional feedback, and home in on the messages that resonate most before moving forward.

As your product matures, your testing should get increasingly specific. In the maturity phase, you might test different image concepts for the ad. By the saturation phase, you might be dialed in enough to test only the colors of the image you already plan to use.

Running several ad tests across the product life cycle is rooted in agile market research, a methodology built on frequent rounds of data collection that account for an organization's needs over time. It's a manageable process that empowers your team to make better decisions more often.

Stay on top of these five things as you begin testing.

You've learned why ad testing matters, how to run your own test, and how to keep your results reliable. 

SurveyMonkey offers a range of market research solutions, from do-it-yourself surveys to fully managed studies.

Ad Testing from SurveyMonkey LaunchPad handles the survey design and analysis for you, so you can rest easy knowing the days of launching high-risk ads are over.

If you'd rather hand the legwork to someone else, SurveyMonkey Market Research Services can design, field, and analyze a custom study for you, from questionnaire design through the final report.