How do I run a split test?

Running split tests with your Facebook ads is a critical step to ensuring your success. Split testing ensures that you are always zeroing in on the best audience for your targeting on Facebook.

Tapcast strongly recommends utilizing the power of split testing if you are still in the early stages of identifying your audience. Also, as part of your iterative process of improving your audiences, you will regularly analyze your audiences with Audience Map and Targeting Ideas. This will yield new audience ideas to test. Split testing is vital to help confirm these hypotheses and ensure that you continually improve your Facebook ad targeting.

There are two big benefits to split testing audiences:

1. Testing only one variable at a time (in this case, the audience) helps you to correctly attribute performance results.
2. If there is any overlap between audiences, Facebook’s split test algorithm guarantees that your ad sets don’t compete with each other for the same people.

A split test limits you to testing a single variable. So if you are split testing audiences, each ad set will have a different audience (the testing variable), but all the ad sets will feature the same ad. This ensures that you can accurately attribute differences in performance to the audience and not to some other variable.

Here are some things to keep in mind before creating your split test:

• In order to run a split test, you should have at least two audiences created in your Facebook Asset Library that you want to run against each other. If any of these audiences is in the dummy ** DO NOT ERASE - TAPCAST AUD ** campaign and hasn’t been moved to your Asset Library yet, make sure you do so.
• Your ad’s image/video and ad copy should be prepared before you start setting up your split test.
• In a split test, you assign a total budget for all of the ad sets collectively. By default, Facebook divides it equally among the ad sets, but you can change that distribution. So if the audiences differ greatly in size, you can distribute the budget accordingly, if you wish.
• You will need to set a time frame for your split test. At minimum, a split test can run for 3 days, up to a maximum of 14 days. Tapcast recommends a week (7 days).

From your Facebook ad account’s Ads Manager, on the Campaigns tab, click the big green “+ Create” button.

When the creation screen opens, make sure you are in Guided Creation mode. If you see a button that says “Switch to Quick Creation” near the upper-left corner, you are in Guided Creation mode. If you see the “Switch to Guided Creation” button, click it.

From this point, you can follow Facebook’s instructions here (click on the “Create a split test with guided creation” link on that page). Make sure to select “Audience” as your variable.