Allow yourself to be proven wrong – the beauty of testing in advertising

If you’ve been running ads for a little while, you’ll know you start to develop an intuition for things.

You can look at a set of images and know in your gut which one will be the best performer. You can see a call-to-action and know the tweaks that need to be made to give it more oomph.

But, the longer you stick to the rigidity of your “intuition,” the more likely it is that you fall into the trap of believing your own bullsh*t.

And, when it comes to marketing, the most dangerous thing you can do is believe your own bullsh*t.

Especially when you believe it above all else.

Don’t believe your own bullsh*t

Sometimes, your client approaches you with an idea that you don’t like, or Google releases some new “best-practice” that seems counter-intuitive to how you’re currently running an account.

Yes, yes – I know. “You’ve done this long enough to know better” and “you really don’t think that image format will work at all in ads.”

But the thing is –

You’re doing yourself a disservice by not at least testing things.

4 months ago I was vehemently against this new “Performance Max” campaign type on Google Ads.

I was a manual-CPC control-freak through and through. “As if some silly algorithm knows better than ME?! I don’t think so!”

Test everything

And while sometimes this is true – (I still can’t let my campaigns run wild on Broad Match quite like Google seems to want me to) – I have recently been converted to the power of Performance Max.

I was speaking to a fellow ad-manager who changed my mind. The conversation went something like this:

“What? You’ve not tried Performance Max yet??”

“No!! How can Google just show ads to anyone anywhere on the internet?? I don’t trust it!”
“You’d be surprised. I tested it and got 17x ROAS”

“I’m sorry, what?”

17x?

Seventeen. Times????

Needless to say my entire world view shattered and everything I ever believed up to that point was called into question.

So I bit my tongue, and I tested it.

And I am very happy to report that I was proven wrong.

Listen to the data

On the account I tested it with I found

• 44.52% Decrease in CPA
• 163% Increase in conversions

All in 1 month.

I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t expect the results to be so impressive. I love to be proven wrong, but I didn’t expect to be proven THAT wrong.

It certainly refreshed my view on testing. We all know it’s important to test, but I think we take for granted testing out the things that we think won’t work.

I am now a fully-converted Performance Max champion. I now also test every image my clients feel strongly about (policy dependent) – but thankfully, I’ve not been proven wrong on the creative-front yet.

TL:DR?

Just test it out – you might learn something unexpected.