In a previous article, I talked about how you should use an evolutionary approach to your ads. You basically start with wildly different ads and run tests on them. You would notice that one performs better than the rest. You come up with variations. 

However, here’s the problem. While people have successfully used that technique to make a lot of money on Facebook, they often do it in a very haphazard way. There’s really no rhyme or reason as to how they make their optimization decisions. 

Often times, they would make wholesale changes to their ads that doesn’t really improve their ads’ performance. How do you know which part of the ad to optimize? How do you know how to set up your ad optimization system so you can produce greater and greater success? 

The secret? Make variations on an element by element basis. Each and every ad you run is actually made up of many different elements. The most obvious element is of course, the picture that is associated with your ad. All Facebook ads have a picture. You can start there. 

For your first ad campaign, you can run ten cheap tests, all using different pictures. Each of them will convert differently, assuming they convert at all. So, you pick the best performing picture. That’s one element. You keep making changes to that element. 

For example, your ad campaign featured a woman with red hair. This was the best performing of the different types of women featured in your ads. You then play around with the picture. 

Pexels Eva Bronzini

Maybe you can crop the picture. You can come up with different angles of her face. Maybe you can come up with different compositions of the pictures. It still features the redheaded woman. You’re still dealing with the same element. 

Once you run these tests and you figure out a particular variation that produces a sustainable, high-rate of clicks or conversions, you should move on to the next element which is the title of your ad. This is easier to mix up and vary compared to pictures. You play around with this. 

Find the winner after several rounds of testing. How do you know the ultimate winner? When you cannot optimize its conversion rate any further, you know you’ve tapped out. So, at this point you’ve optimized the title element as well as the picture element, you then move on to the description. After that, you move on to the link and other parts of the ad. 

At the end of the process, each and every element would’ve been optimized to the point that they cannot improve conversions anymore. The best part to this is you spend a fairly low amount of money because you haven’t poured your whole ad budget yet. You’re just trying to optimize the ad. 

By this point, you should’ve been able to arrive at a winning ad formula or a winning combination of different ad elements. This is when you start spending a huge amount of money. If your ad has been optimized to the point that its conversion rate is predictable and high, you stand to convert a significant chunk of the paid traffic you’re going to be sending that ad.