In the recent Facebook webinar Get Holiday Ready: How to Build and Test Creative for Holiday Success, there’s one slide that caught my attention.
Quoting the webinar, the slide said:
Ad sets that have both static and video assets see a 17% lift in conversion volume compared to ad sets that have static assets alone.
It means that running both static and video in conjunction would result in better performance than running one over the other.
Yes, Facebook emphasized that one.
As you can see, there are several territories where your ads can be shown, including:
They didn’t have a statistic for percent lift in conversion volume compared to ad sets that have video assets alone. It is possible that most people don’t run video alone.
To give you a proof with the statement above, I’ll give you some history. My client, a B2C in the automotive vertical, has been running Facebook campaigns to drive brand awareness for the services they offer.
As an agency, we know that 2019 is the year of the video so we make it to the point that we create videos for our clients. We “make our ads move”. We develop both static and video ads. We bought into a video so much that we paused static assets once we had developed enough video to have many variations for each product’s ad set.
After pausing our static assets, we started to see a performance slump.
Slightly fewer reach and impressions, and slightly higher costs per page likes. Even we are not running tests with dynamic creative and CBO. Could those be dragging down CPL? Maybe the impressions dip was because our static assets were performing historically?
After the Facebook webinar, we asked ourselves, “Might it be worth a test? Could the static assets help bump up performance?”. We reintroduced static assets for one of our ad sets. We immediately saw improvement in our likes volume, and cost per page like decreased.
A/B test is very crucial and most of the time, we need to go beyond it. Even though in an A/B test, a video may surpass static, yet we can’t pause all static. We need to consider the whole, rather than the sum of the individual parts.
How does an ad set perform when there is video and static creative as opposed to one ad format alone?
As a digital marketer, we used to A/B test everything and that’s not bad. We can trust the algorithm of Facebook to show the right assets to the right person at the right time, but we can still test.
This strategy is going to have a larger impact on overall campaign success. We have to learn how to ask new questions – If I change a certain element, what would be the effect of this in the entire campaign?
Photo by JESHOOTS.com from Pexel