The Campainless Blog
If you’ve been using LinkedIn Ads for a while, you’ll be no stranger to the importance of a good solid A/B test. Split testing is the fastest way to get insights into any component of your platform activity from audiences, ads, creatives and messaging to landing pages, lead gen forms and the list goes on.
If there’s an element of an ad campaign, there’s likely a corresponding attribute that will benefit from an LinkedIn A/B test and can serve to enhance your marketing efforts.
In this helpful article, we take you through our tried and tested best practices for how to A/B test for optimal results. Pin it to your bookmarks, and you’ll never miss a beat on your LinkedIn marketing decisions again. Without much ado, let’s get stuck in.
Our number 1 tip to LinkedIn testing success is to test only one variable at a time. This means creating two campaigns that are near identical and then changing one element of each e.g. an ad creative, ad copy, audience, bidding strategy etc.
By keeping the playing field completely level in all other areas, you can ensure that the insights you generate are as crystal clear and meaningful as possible. If you have too many variations in play at once, it makes your testing ground very murky and coming to conclusions is difficult.
When choosing the variable, ask yourself what the most impactful answers you can find out could be:
-What seniority level that engages most with your brand?
-Is there a bidding strategy sweet spot to connect with your audience?
-Is there a messaging angle that resonates most with your target audience?
Before selecting one to inform your testing variable, you also need to consider whether it’s actually possible to find out the answer with the test you set up. Once you’ve made your selection, pull together a hypothesis (i.e. I think C Suite are most likely to engage with this campaign) and see what works.
Our second small but noteworthy tip is to make sure you settings are set up correctly for fair testing. For example, if you are testing ad variations e.g. the creative within one ad campaign, you should make sure that your rotation settings are set up to “rotate ads evenly.”
For any ad campaign tests it’s important to ensure you’ve set enough budget for each campaign so your results are statistically significant. In our opinion, this means having at least $100 on each campaign to counteract high platform CPCs and ensure your getting enough clicks to see data quick enough.
The third crucial tip of A/B testing like a pro is to make sure you don’t rush through your testing. Without a decent enough period of testing time, your data won’t be able to reach statistical significance and this makes it difficult to trust any insights that come out of it.
So, what is the ideal testing time period? The answer depends on many variables like the scale of your test and the amount of budget your putting into it, but we wouldn’t recommend running for any shorter than a month.
While LinkedIn says at least two weeks, in our opinion 4 weeks is the minimum time you should be testing anything, unless there is a hands down, no question, straight-off-the-bat winner.
In summary – don’t be quick off the mark. Take your time!
There’s no point of conducting an a b test linkedin ads if your not going to monitor your experiment and record your results properly. Throughout the testing period you should be checking in on you test to ensure nothing is going awry, and getting an initial sense of how things are progressing.
You should also have a report that aggregates data over the entire period so you can clearly see the results. While LinkedIn will retain all the data from your test, being able to see it more visually on a dashboard like funnel.io or data studio can make it easier to focus on the metrics you care about and draw conclusions accordingly.
Once you’ve done one A/B test on your campaign, your hunger and enthusiasm for testing should not come to an end. The best LinkedIn marketers make sure to continually test different elements of their campaigns to ensure that they have the most robust set up possible. It’s the secret behind accessing the highest chance of long-lasting, reliable results. Keep the tests coming!
So now you’ve got a good solid grasp on how to set up an effective, strong AB test on LinkedIn it’s time to put your skills to the test. If you need any help with deciding what the best testing path is for your ad campaigns, how to actually set up a split test in campaign manager or any other LinkedIn ads related questions – please get in touch with the Campainless team today. We’re always happy to help marketers and marketing teams get the most out of the LinkedIn platform.
