By Owen Fay . Posted on May 11, 2022Assume that you are running multiple digital ads and it’s not working. That is disappointing right? Advertising is risky and the perception of the audience can be different from your assumptions.
To get ahead of this issue, testing your ads before you launch them is a great way to optimize ads. Test your campaigns by presenting multiple ads to the target audience and getting their feedback. This leads to effective ad production and improvement can be made if needed.
Ad testing is the process of displaying various advertisements to a sample of your target audience and collecting feedback. You can perform ad tests on a complete ad or key elements of it to get feedback on everything from ad copy to the headlines or entire design. Testing will give you a lot of information about how people react to your ads. It can also help them fix any major weaknesses in their existing campaign.
If you are starting a new brand, you surely would want it to be successful. Poll the People makes it easy for you by providing you with multiple brand testing options including ads. It helps businesses gather real feedback to find issues and understand if the ads are effective, before spending time, money, and energy on them.
There are some mistakes that you should avoid while launching an ad test on Poll the People for best results. If you are not getting the best results, you might be making some mistakes. Do you think you know your audience? Are you not using the right language? Are designs cluttered or distracting? Do you lead testers to agree with your opinion? Does your ad not connect with your brand? If yes, you have to avoid those mistakes to get the most accurate results.
5 Ad Testing Mistakes to Avoid
Usability testing helps to make data-driven decisions. While testing your ad with Poll the People, you choose two different versions of ads that you think are best and ask the target audience to choose the best and most appealing one.
The following mistakes should be avoided during an ad test with Poll the People in order to get accurate results and optimize your ads.
1. Assuming you Know the Market
Do you think you completely know your audience? You might be wrong, most of the time your audience doesn’t have the understanding or perception of your ads as you do. On an individual basis, perceptions and opinions are different. Biased tests might be created by your gut feelings and assumptions about audience behavior. To conduct an accurate test, you should allow for individual replies and be open to differing viewpoints.
To understand the market for your ads, you should test your ad with an audience that gives you a wide range of opinions and feedback. Multiple opinions can pave way for more creativity and new ideas. This can improve the quality of the ad and help to shape the ad according to the perception of the audience.
2. Using Sales-y Language
Language plays a vital role in our lives, using sales-y or pushy language can lead the audience towards your thoughts about the ad, it creates biases. The purpose of ad testing is to know and understand the views of the audience.
Ad Testing focuses on the choice of audience, you don’t want to pitch your ads to users in the test but allow them to choose the ad that they prefer. The focus should be on the opinion of users not you because they decide the fate of your product or ad.
3. Cluttered or Distracting Designs
The design of your ads plays an important role in their effectiveness. Ads should be well designed, avoid cluttered or distracting designs as they can make the test confusing and hurt the results once they go live. A high-quality ad is simple and explains its value quickly and effectively.
Also, make sure your ads are different enough for test participants to choose the one they like most. Changing the colors, headlines or overall designs will allow users to see differences and give real feedback.
4. Leading Participants to a Decision
Ad Testing collects feedback from the audience in order to understand their opinions. It is solely based on knowing and understanding the perception of the audience. The audience leads the product to success or failure, it’s better to let them use their own judgment on what ad is best.
Biased tests make the results invalid, leading participants to one decision over another because gut feelings or opinions make the test worthless. Instead of leading users to your interest, you should be open to their opinions. Give options to your users and let them choose the best one according to their perception. Do not direct the users to one option that you prefer because your audience might perceive the options differently.
5. Not Connecting the Ad with the Brand
As your ads come from your brand, they should be consistent with the brand name and image. Making ads that use brand colors, messaging, designs, etc. will create the most effective Ads. If your ads are not connected with your brand, it will create confusion among the audience and will lead to ads that fail to portray the brand successfully when they are launched.
Before launching an ad, you should make sure it is relevant to the overall brand and effective in showing your value. The ad talks about what is brand is going to offer, it should be designed accordingly so the audience understands the brand and its offerings.
Ad Testing with Poll the People
“Never stop testing and your advertising will never stop improving.” – David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy, an English businessman explains the importance of continuous ad testing. Ad testing leads to successful advertisements, giving you real feedback from real people in real-time. Your ads take time and money to develop, no one wants to waste these resources on ineffective ads.
Ad testing can be performed in multiple ways. Poll the People provides you with a platform to test your ads by following a simple and easy process. Testing your ads before spending your money and time on them is a crucial step in optimizing campaigns. It allows you to test your assumptions and check if your plans resonate with your target audience.
Your ads should engage the audience. The willingness of your audience to engage with your ad is important. Your ad should meet the user’s needs, if the ad is not appealing to the audience, they will not trust the brand and you won’t see results once ads go live. Poll the People allows you to get feedback from the audience before running the ad quickly, with most tests finishing in under an hour.
Poll the People is a new usability testing platform that gives results in minutes. Take a look at this blog for a step-by-step guide to testing your ads in under 60 minutes.
Conclusion
Ad Testing shapes your ad to engage the maximum audience, without conducting an Ad test your ads are at risk of wasting your time and money. Take a look at what our CEO has to say about testing ads in this Creatopy article on optimizing ad designs. In order to get the best results from your Ad, you need to understand what the audience needs and expects. Ad testing helps you to understand your audience and design your ad accordingly.
If you are not getting accurate results, you might be making mistakes while launching the test. Don’t make assumptions about your audience, avoid sales-y language, make sure your ads aren’t cluttered or distracting, don’t lead participants to a decision, connect your ad with the brand, and eliminate individual bias from your tests.
You will not get accurate results if you are not welcoming the opinions of your audience. Your perception can be different from your audience, it’s important to understand users and create ads accordingly. These mistakes should be avoided to get the best results from ad testing and optimize ads before they go live.
As you begin to put together your testing process, you’ll find exactly what works for your business. Now that you have all this information you can sign up and start testing with Poll the People today.
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