Whether you're launching your first campaign on MNTN or you're a seasoned expert, you'll want to craft a creative strategy unique to your business that appeals to your target audience. This article outlines best practices and testing capabilities for an optimal creative testing strategy on MNTN.
Aligning Your Creative with Our Best Practices
Your MNTN creatives are many users' first glimpse into your brand and business. Putting your best foot forward and conveying your brand's value to your target audience is integral.
Before we jump into creative testing strategies on MNTN, let's first revisit our creative best practices. Always ensure your TV commercials align with our best practices, outlined below:
✅ An audible and Visual Call to action
✅ Logo and URL are present throughout
✅ A consistent voiceover
🧠 Pro Tip: To learn more about ensuring your TV ad is set up for success, check out our article TV Ads: Best Practices and Considerations.
Why You Should Consider Creative Testing
Now that we've refreshed your memory on our creative best practices let's discuss how you can test creative.
Testing your MNTN creative enables data-driven decision-making, optimization, and continuous improvement of your ad campaigns. It helps you maximize your advertising effectiveness, minimize risks, and ultimately achieve better results and return on ad spend.
It's important to tactfully test creative to understand the type of creative messaging that resonates with your target audience.
Creative testing can help answer questions like:
🌟 What type of messaging does my target audience respond best to?
🌟 What aspect of my business is most appealing to my target audience?
🌟 What type of sale or promotion garners the most site traffic?
🌟 Is there a certain type of branding that resonates the strongest with my audience?
Below are some example insights and takeaways you can derive from creative testing.
Insight | Takeaway |
Identify Key Success Factors | Pinpoint the specific elements in your creative that are contributing to its success. This could include headlines, visuals, calls to action, color schemes, or any other creative components. Knowing what works allows you to replicate success in future campaigns. |
Understanding Your Audience Preferences | Different audiences may respond differently to various creatives. Testing helps you tailor your messaging to specific audience segments, ensuring your advertising is more relevant and engaging for your target customers. |
Cost-Efficiency | By identifying the most effective creative, you can allocate your advertising budget more efficiently. You can focus your resources on what works, reducing wasteful spending on less effective creatives. |
Competitive Advantage | Testing helps you stay ahead of the competition. By consistently optimizing your creatives, you can maintain a stronger and more appealing brand presence, outperform competitors, and adapt to changes in the market. |
Adaptation to Changing Trends | Consumer preferences and market dynamics can change over time. Testing allows you to adapt your creatives to these changes quickly and effectively, keeping your advertising efforts aligned with current trends and customer expectations. |
Improved Marketing ROAS | When you consistently optimize your creatives based on testing results, you will likely see a better return on your ad spend. Higher-performing creatives lead to more efficient spending and improved campaign results. |
When and How to Creative Test
Every business is unique, so we'll walk through some examples below to help guide you on how to creative test within the MNTN platform, bespoke to your needs.
🔎 Example 1: Testing CTAs in Your TV Commercials
Objective | What to Test | Solution |
You're an online subscription service looking to understand the call to action driving the most free trial sign-ups for your TV ad.
Your average sales cycle is ~ 14 days. To account for your 14-day prospecting verified visit window, you want to run a 30-day test.
This is your first time launching a campaign on MNTN. | You've decided to test two CTAs; "Start Your Free Trial" against "Get Started Now." | Since you're only looking to run a 30-day test, we'd recommend creating a new campaign and not formally applying a creative testing option.
This is because A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing options will lock the ability to edit or replace creatives, edit weighting, or change the creative testing type once the campaign is live.
When using the "None" feature, your audience will be split based on the weighting of your creative groups, with each household seeing only one creative group. Each time the weighting on your creative groups is updated, the audience split will be reset. |
Follow the steps below to complete the applicable creative test:
1. Create a new campaign.
2. Upload your two different TV commercials and select the 'None' testing option.
3. Weigh each TV ad 50/50
4. If you're using multi-touch to expand your cross-channel storytelling efforts, append the same Multi-Touch creative to both TV ads
5. Create a flighted budget with an end date at the 30-day mark.
6. To minimize confounding variables, do not adjust your campaign throughout your 30-day testing period.
7. At the 30-day mark, analyze your results via the Reporting Tab. This could include visit rate, conversion rate, verified visits, etc.
8. Once insights have been derived, weigh the higher-performing creative at 100%.
🔎 Example 2: Testing Storytelling in Your TV Commercials
Objective | What to Test | Solution |
You're an environmental nonprofit currently running an evergreen campaign on MNTN. Now that you've been up and running for some time, you want to know the value proposition that resonates most with your target audience.
Your average donation cycle hovers around the 60-day mark. To account for your 14-day prospecting verified visit window, you want to run a 75-day long test. | You'll test varying storytelling approaches with your CTV asset that conveys different emotional responses.
One TV commercial will be about individual success stories, a second will focus on broader statistics, and a third will touch on the global impact of your work. | Keep your evergreen campaign live.
Create a new campaign specific to your testing and allocate some budget from your evergreen campaign, or allocate a net new budget to your test campaign.
Because you’re testing more options at once, the time to test is longer than a simple A/B test.
With Multivariate Testing, you can run 3+ creative groups against each other to measure the difference in performance.
The creative weight is split based on how many creative groups are in the mix. Each household will see one creative group throughout the lifetime of your campaign.
Once testing is applied, you won't be able to adjust creatives. Since you plan to apply your learnings to your evergreen campaign anyway, Multi-variate testing is a viable option.
|
Follow the steps below to complete the applicable creative test:
1. Create a New Campaign
2. Select Multi-variate Testing. This will automatically weigh your creative set evenly.
3. Create a flighted budget with an end date at the 75-day mark.
4. Launch your test campaign.
5. Once the 75-day flight has ended, analyze your learnings via the Reporting Tab.
6. Apply your learnings from your testing campaign to the creatives in your evergreen campaign.
🔎 Example 3: Testing Ad Types in Your Mult-Touch Ads
Objective | What to Test | Solution |
You're a small e-commerce business looking to drive more cross-channel growth. You want to understand the type of mult-touch ad that drives the most site visits.
Your average sales cycle is ~ 7 days. To account for your 14-day prospecting verified visit window, you want to run a 21-day long test. | You'll test a dynamic product carousel against a static product carousel ad. | Since you're only looking to run a 21-day test, we'd recommend creating a new campaign and not formally applying a creative testing option.
This is because A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing options will lock the ability to edit or replace creatives, edit weighting, or change the creative testing type once the campaign is live.
When using the "None" feature, your audience will be split based on the weighting of your creative groups, with each household seeing only one creative group. Each time the weighting on your creative groups is updated, the audience split will be reset. |
Follow the steps below to complete the applicable creative test:
1. Create a new campaign.
2. Upload your two Multi-touch ads and select the 'None' testing option.
3. Link the same TV ads to your Multi-touch ads.
4. In the Video Creative portion of your campaign shell, weigh each of your ads 50/50.
5. Create a flighted budget with an end date at the 21-day mark.
6. To minimize confounding variables, do not adjust your campaign throughout your 21-day testing period.
7. At the 21-day mark, analyze your results via the Reporting Tab and compare site visits against both multi-touch creatives.
8. Once insights have been derived, weigh the higher-performing creative at 100%.
Formulating Your Creative Test
Now that you have some scenarios to better understand how to creative test, create your campaign's testing outline using the steps below.
Step | Testing Multi-Touch | Testing TV Commercials |
1. Determine Creative Type | If you're testing multi-touch creative, ensure your TV ads are the same. | If you're testing TV Ads, ensure your multi-touch assets are the same. |
2. Determine Creative Elements | Test one element at a time, as testing more than one element can lead to inconclusive results. Some examples include:
| Test one element at a time, as testing more than one element can lead to inconclusive results. Some examples include:
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3. Determine the Number of Creatives | Decide how many variations you want to test.
| Decide how many variations you want to test.
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4. Determine Creative Test Length | Consider your average sales cycle when applying your test length.
Once your sales cycle is determined, add this to your attribution window to provide the fullest picture of performance.
For example, if your sales cycle is 10 days and your verified visit window is 14 days, your test length should be at least 24 days.
| Because you’re testing more options at once, the time to test is longer than a simple A/B test.
Consider your average sales cycle when applying your test length.
Once your sales cycle is determined, add this to your attribution window to provide the fullest picture of performance.
For example, if your sales cycle is 10 days and your verified visit window is 14 days, your test length should be at least 24 days. |
5. Determine the Budget | If you're adding a new campaign to run a creative test, ensure to allocate an additional budget to this new creative test or carve the budget away from a current live campaign. | If you're adding a new campaign to run a creative test, ensure to allocate an additional budget to this new creative test or carve the budget away from a current live campaign. |
🧠 Pro tip: A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing options will lock the ability to edit or replace creatives, edit weighting, or change the creative testing type once the campaign is live. If you want to be able to edit these features during or after your test, use the None option.
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