Test Your Advertising While You Do It

Advertising is expensive. You’re buying space in a newspaper or magazine, airtime on radio or television, or some other medium to carry your message; how do you know it’s working? How do you know how well it’s working?

Every time you run an advertisement you need to be thinking about testing it and measuring the results as well. Only by testing and measuring your advertising can you have a good chance at being confident that it’s going to do what you want it to do.

It’s just like changing the suspension settings on a racing car then giving it a run around the track. By testing the handling of the vehicle and measuring its performance in a real-life driving situation the crew can tell if their new settings are working better than before the change.

There’s nothing worse than simply placing an advertisement, letting it run and then trying to decide whether or not it made a contribution to your sales, yet this is what far too many business owners do every week. What usually happens is that if sales rise the perception is that the ad was “good” and if sales don’t rise the ad was “bad”.

But leads and sales aren’t the only way to test and measure the effectiveness of your advertising. You might have a good advertisement that brings in some extra sales, but how do you know it’s the best advertisement you could have run? Every advertisement is an opportunity for research and the biggest expense is in the cost of running it; the testing and measuring cost very little extra.

Every Advertisement has Variables

There are a number of variables in every advertisement. For this example we’ll use a print advertisement in a newspaper, but the same principles will apply to any advertising communication:

1. The headline
2. The illustration
3. The body copy
4. The offer you’ve made
5. The layout
6. The size of the advertisement
7. The newspaper in which it runs

Each of these elements is a variable with opportunities for experimentation. Each element contributes to the overall success of your advertisement and can be optimized through testing and measuring.

Think about how you look at an advertisement and you’ll have a better idea of how each element interacts with the others and plays a part in the success of the whole package. First is the headline; it’s got to attract your attention or you won’t read the rest of the ad.

The Headline and the Offer

Headlines can be changed fairly easily. They usually sum up the offer you’re making to your prospects and how they’re worded can make a big difference to the success of your ad. You might, for instance, be reducing the cost of a $20 item by $2, but does your headline say “$2 off” or “10% off”? To find out for sure which is the most effective, try changing the headline in consecutive advertisements. And is the product you’re offering the most attractive to your customers? You might make an offer of another product and get a better response — it’s also worth a try.

The Copy and the Illustration

The copy in the body of your advertisement is where people get the details of your offer. If the headline gets their attention and interest they’ll start reading the rest of the details until they feel they have enough information to make a preliminary decision about their response. To find out which details are the most important to consumers you can experiment with their order in the copy.

The illustration is another critical part of your advertisement. It should support the headline and help communicate your offer. Do you show the product in use? Do you just show it on its own? Do you need color or will black and white be sufficient? More chances for experimentation are here.

The Layout and the Size

The layout is another variable — really, a set of variables. Where you place the elements of the ad, what size each has, and whether you put a border on it or not are all variables and decisions you need to make. The layout of the ad is critical to its success and you need to be sure your layout is the most effective way of presenting your offer.

The size of the advertisement is usually related to the response it gets. The bigger it is, the better, but also the more expensive. Doubling the size of the ad won’t necessarily double the response but it will certainly double the cost. Find the size of the advertisement that gives you the best return on your investment and don’t be too quick to take a small size to save money — it could actually be costing you money to run an advertisement that is so small nobody notices.

The Advertising Medium

It’s also a good idea to test one publication against another. You might get a lower cost from one paper but find the other, more expensive one is a far better investment. You won’t be sure unless you’ve tried the same advertisement in both papers and measure the results.

Testing and Measuring

Here’s a simple way to try various combinations of offers and advertisements — use them as the basis of leaflets for a letterbox distribution. Put a different coupon in each variety of leaflet, or use different phone numbers or some other way so you can tell which leaflet got the best response. It’s inexpensive market research and gives you instant feedback that can help you decide before you start spending media money.

You have to have a measurement system that collects and records the responses you get from every experiment you try. You can even extend it to track which advertisements attract the leads that are the most likely to convert to sales. Test and measure every advertisement you run and you’ll build up a very useful bank of promotional information.

When you do feel you’ve found the magic formula, great. But don’t stop your testing and measuring. Even the best advertisement will run its course and begin to lose its impact, and because of the testing and measuring you’ve been doing you’ll be able to come up with something even better when you have to.

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Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.