It's important to always be testing multiple Facebook Ads, and I highly recommend starting by testing multiple creatives, though you could test a number of different elements including audiences and/or copy.
Facebook is changing in September – first, we'll talk about how things are right now… then we'll talk briefly about the future.
Right now this is the breakdown of how ads are built/structured:
- Campaign – Objective
- Ad Set – Audience, Budget, Scheduling
- Ad – Creative Copy
One of the biggest mistakes I see is that people will spend too much time creating one “perfect” image – or they create multiple images and then ask a group of people on Facebook which image they'd prefer. But, the people in that group are not your ideal audience – and even if they are interested in similar things, it's not as effective as using the Facebook Ad algorithm to optimize the ad campaign based on the actual activity on your ads.
In the beginning of a campaign, Facebook will automatically serve your ads out a little bit, and as people start responding to your ads, they'll automatically optimize delivery to get the most people to act.
I often recommend starting with creative because that's what gets people to slow their scroll.
When you are testing images, you can test any number of images – but you want to keep your budget in mind. You need to have a big enough budget at the ad set level to fuel your multiple creative testing. So, with video views (for example) you can easily test 2-3 videos with only $5/day since those views are likely to come through at $.01-.03 – but for a conversion ad you may need a substantially higher budget depending on the cost per conversion for your business/product.
Just to recap – anytime you are running a campaign you should be testing out multiple ads because it allows Facebook to optimize the creative so that you're getting the most results at the lowest cost.
Big Changes are coming in September
Primarily, the budget is moving form the Ad Set level to the Campaign level, which will change the way in which the campaign will optimize. This will change the way in which we set up multiple ad testing a little bit – because if you're testing more than one Ad Set with multiple Ads, it's going to require a larger budget to fuel that Campaign. So, while I will ALWAYS recommend you are always testing, going forward you're going to want to be mindful of how many variables you're testing and whether your budget is high enough to support that testing.