Where should you run your creative tests – and how should you make this decision?

We break this down, with actual math of testing setups, in today’s episode.

We go into this – and every other aspect of creative testing post-ATT in our new book, which you can download for free: The Definitive Guide to Meta Creative Testing post-ATT.

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Today’s episode covers a topic that we address in a lot more detail in our new book: Definitive Guide to Meta Creative Testing in a Post-Identifier World, which covers every aspect of how to run creative tests post-ATT, so you can run your tests in a world of incomplete data to discover winning ads with confidence.

You can check out this and our other books at rocketshiphq.com/playbooks. 

A very common question we get in our work on our portfolio of accounts is: where should we run creative tests?

Underlying this is the question: how should I decide where to run creative tests?

For the vast majority of advertisers, we typically recommend running creative tests in a way that costs the least while giving you clear learnings.

What does that mean in practice?

For many advertisers that have a global audience but have their highest monetizing users in the US, they could run their creative tests in the US – and that could be very expensive, and lead to high CPMs and CPAs(simply because the creatives are not proven – and the algorithm favors proven creatives due to the Bayesian paradigm that I discussed in our last episode).

Or they could run their creative tests in a lower cost geo – where the costs and the CPMs would be much much lower.

In fact, we shared the actual math behind two different creative testing plans in our book  Definitive Guide to Meta Creative Testing in a Post-Identifier World – so you can compare the math and expense for yourself.

You’ll see that to run tests in the US optimized for a downstream event can cost nearly 250 times as much as tests in a lower cost geo optimized for installs.

In one of the examples we give in the book, we compare a test on Android that is targeted to a low cost geo with install optimization with another on iOS targeted to the US with a downstream event optimization. The budget in our indicative calculations for the low cost geo on Android is $375, and that for iOS in the US is $90k – and as you can see, that difference is astronomical. For most products that spend under a million dollars a month, a $90k testing budget can be impossible to manage.

This is why we recommend running tests so as to minimize costs as much as possible – and whenever possible run your tests in a geo with an optimization event that leads to the lowest testing cost.

Today’s episode covered a topic that I address in a lot more detail in our new book: Definitive Guide to Meta Creative Testing in a Post-Identifier World, which covers every aspect of how to run creative tests post-ATT, so you can run your tests in a world of incomplete data to discover winning ads with confidence.

You can check out this and our other books at rocketshiphq.com/playbooks. 

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!