GTM Sauce

Practitioner pattern · Alper Taner

Track cost per new ad that beats your current ads, not how many you test

Expert says fewer, better-reasoned tests beat 500-a-month volume; no numbers

Unknownpaid-socialexperimentation

What they did

Instead of racing to test 500-700 creatives a month, measure success rate and cost per successful creative, i.e. one that beats the business-as-usual (BAU) ads. Test fewer creatives with stronger hypotheses and more analysis. High volume tends to split UA, analysis and briefing across siloed people and pushes teams to arbitrary low spend thresholds like $100 per creative.

In their words

Creative Misfires, False Positives, and Meta's Auction Flaws — Alper Taner, Stealth-Mode App Studio

Play the episode

Alper Taner… second failed. It's the same concept. It's just slightly different messaging and such. So, that's why you would always test with few variations just to avoid such cases where you don't just jump to conclusion of a whole concept and so on. I think that's also important. So, there could be, of course, false positives and so on like nothing is perfect, but also, I'm not also saying like, "Oh, you should trust algorithm blindly and stuff like that."

Alper TanerWhat I'm just saying is we should be able to interpret the results and then drive conclusions to shape the next creative iterations based on that. So, that's when you need to interpret the output. And then what matters at the end of the day is your success rate and not the amount of creatives because I think LinkedIn nowadays is full of, "Oh, you know what? We just tested 500 creatives." "Oh, no, we tested 700. How much did you test?" Kind of race that is not so meaningful because those numbers alone don't matter if your success rate is very low. I would more look at your cost per successful creative that is beating the BAU ads performance. And it doesn't matter if you test 20 versus 200. Of course, okay, 20 versus 200 might matter, but it doesn't matter if you're testing a very high amount of creatives with a little success.

Alper TanerIt matters more you test less amount of creatives, stronger hypotheses, stronger investment from an analyzing and hypothesizing way with a higher success rate than what matters more than just the total number of creatives that you are testing. I see potential issues when the creative amount is on the higher end, because then the mindset is like, "Hey, look, I just have to test these. Let's just move on." And then having less emphasis on why it …

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: meta, creative-testing, creative-volume, success-rate