Every online marketing professional will tell you that you should always be testing your ads. Test new copy, test new targeting, test new landing pages. But it doesn’t always have to be a complex change. Every so often you can make a major difference with a minor modification. We like to follow our own advice as often as we can, so we ran some testing recently on a Facebook advertising campaign.

The Launch

Our objective was to bring some more fans to three of our local office Facebook pages in New Jersey. We set up a series of basic Page Like Ads and let them run for two weeks to get a baseline for results.

Facebook New Jersey Basic Ad
Quick setup with our logo as the default image.

The Test

These ads did well, but we wanted to see if we could ramp up the performance a bit by changing a single element. We dug into our stock photography library and pulled out a few images that had some more interest to them. We kept one control ad the same, then modified the images on the other two ads.

Facebook New Jersey New Ad
A very minor update, but now we’re taking advantage of the full image size.

The Results

For the control ad, we saw almost exactly the same behavior over the following two weeks. We ended up with the same number of likes at almost the exact same cost per like. The ads with the new images were a much different story. Each of them saw a 200%+ increase in the number of likes, even though both of them had a lower number of impressions over the testing period than the original run. These were CPM campaigns, so the lower impression count also resulted in a lower overall cost per like.

With a few minutes work, we’d created a more effective (and cheaper) campaign. We can’t guarantee you’ll get the same results with your ads, but for that little time investment it’s certainly worth a try.