In the competitive world of senior living advertising, crafting excellent Facebook Ads are key to attracting your dream residents. But how can you go beyond just throwing digital spaghetti against the wall? You’re in luck! Creating an ongoing practice of A/B testing is exactly what you’re looking for. A/B testing Facebook Ads for Senior Living, is the perfect way to mix and match variations of ad copy, headlines, calls-to-action, images, and more to find the ad that resonates with your target audience the most.
As we mentioned above, what’s important here is making this an ongoing practice and incorporating it into your regular ad maintenance task list. And before we go any further, note that when A/B testing, you want to only make ONE small change at a time. It can be a challenge, but fight your urge to come into Facebook Ads Manager and create 3 completely separate ads. This will not give you the data you need to optimize! Start small and keep iterating.
Test Multiple Ad Formats
As we’ve discussed in a previous post, Facebook has multiple ad formats to choose from, each with its own set of use cases: carousels, single images, and videos. To recap: Single image ads are the most common ad format and are most likely what you think of when envisioning a Facebook Ad. Carousel ads allow you to showcase multiple images or videos that are swipe-able within a single ad, which makes them an excellent way of providing more information about your community or allowing you to tell a story. On the other hand, video ads can be particularly engaging and provide a more dynamic way to highlight your community and resident testimonials, while also offering special tracking abilities.
A great strategy when launching could be to launch three ads all using the same ad copy, headline, call-to-action button, and using a creative that can work in all three contexts. (For video, you can use Canva to add a touch of zoom or motion to make your ad a video.)
Get Creative with Ad Headlines
As we’ve said before, ad headlines might not be the first thing users see when they come across your ad, but they are typically the first thing that users will read. Because of the importance of these few characters, testing out different headlines is incredibly important and can help to seriously boost your click-through rate (CTR) if you find one that connects with your audience.
Try variations that emphasize different aspects of your community, such as “Discover Award-Winning Senior Living” versus “Top-Rated Senior Living Near You.” Just make sure that whatever you put here is relevant to your ad copy and always fits in the space allotted. Facebook’s recommendations are to keep your headline under 40 characters, but you have to keep line breaks in mind for mobile devices.
Experiment With Ad Copy
Let’s move on to ad copy. This is your opportunity to connect with your prospect. Try anything and everything: long-form vs short-form; different calls-to-action; links in the copy vs not in the copy; emojis or no emojis; dry, professional tone or smart casual tone; the options are endless. The most important thing is to actually test multiple versions and keep track of what changes you make! After all, if you don’t know what you changed, what good was the test?
Personally, I try to note what I changed in the ad name. That way I can look at the results for all the ads and quickly see what variation had the biggest impact and can further iterate from there. For example:
Ad 1A
Ad 1B | Copy change
Ad 1C | Link in Copy
There’s no right or wrong way to do this, just be sure you can tell what you’ve changed!
Evaluate Different Creatives
When you’re working with a creative agency (or not!) it’s always a good idea to have multiple variations of creative to work with, so when you are working on a project scope, always make sure to include a line that you want variations to test with!
For example, let’s say your brand colors are blue and white and you are promoting a PDF guide that lists all of your monthly events for the year. You might try one graphic that has white text and a screenshot of the calendar directly beneath it, both center-aligned and on top of a blue background. This could be your A version. For your B version, all the components are the same, except now your background is white and your text is blue. For a C version, you might try a whole new image altogether! Maybe instead, you have an image of smiling residents on the right side of the graphic with a blue gradient overlay and some white text on the left side of the graphic that tells the prospect your offer and includes a call to action button right on the graphic enticing prospects to click!
An example of a video could be outdoor drone footage of your community with a voiceover from a member of your staff or a resident providing a testimonial. You could make one version that fades to white at the end with your logo and contact details and one that just loops over and over!
Anything is fair game here. Just remember to ensure your visuals are high-quality and authentic to build trust and appeal.
Assess Targeted Audiences
Facebook allows you to target ads based on a wide range of demographics and interests. Testing facebook ads for senior living includes A/B different audience segments can help you identify which groups are most responsive to your ads. For example, you might test ads targeting adult children of seniors versus ads targeting seniors themselves. You might try running a campaign where you’ve opted into Facebook’s dreaded “Special Ad Category” vs building out a campaign where you can use detailed targeting options but you have to be more careful about the contents and claims of your ad copy.
The most important thing you can do here is to run several tests and then dive into the data and tweak your targeting strategy!
Analyze Ad Placements
Facebook Ads can pop up all over the place, like in the News Feed, on the right column, on Instagram, and even in the Audience Network. But how can we be sure we are running ads only where we get the most engagement and performance? We test, of course!
When launching a new account or campaign, I always recommend that you leave placements set to “All Placements” or “Advantage+ Placements” (or whatever they’ve chosen to call it this week.) Once you’ve run ads for a good amount of time, create a custom report in the Ads Reporting area to identify your most profitable ad placements, both by device and platform. Once you have this data, you can choose to run ads specifically on those placements in your next campaign.
BONUS: Budget Optimizations
Another thing worth A/B testing is your budget optimization settings. You might not have even known this is a thing, and that’s okay. Facebook Ads offers multiple ways to set budgets, but the two most important ones are choosing between Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) or Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO). (Note: CBO has since been renamed to “Advantage Campaign Budget +.)
The main difference between these two options, which you probably guessed by now, is simply where you set your budget: do you want to set it at the campaign level where Facebook will be in control of distributing your budget across your various ad sets depending on what it sees as “performing well” or do you want to set the budget for each individual ad set yourself?
Again, there is no real right or wrong answer on how you set this, but my personal opinion and what I do for every account that I manage is to set my budgets at the ad set level. By doing this, I ensure every ad set gets a fair shot, based on the amount of budget I assign to it. For example, let’s say I have one campaign with five ad sets, and with a total budget of $25/day to spend.
On CBO, I would set my budget at the campaign level to $25/day. In theory, this should give each of my five ad sets $5/day of budget to work with. It might start that way, but after a day or two, Facebook will identify its favorite(s), give all of the budget to those ad sets, and leave the others to die on the vine.
On ABO, which is what I recommend, I would set each of my ad sets to have a daily budget of $5/day and check back on their performance in about a week. This ensures that each of the ad sets will have a fair chance to perform or not perform and I get to make the call on what gets turned off and what gets more budget.
In Conclusion
There’s no silver bullet when it comes to A/B testing facebook ads for senior living, but once you start and run a few tests, you can build a list of initial tests to run regularly (maybe even right at launch!). Just remember that A/B testing is practice that is never really done! It also takes restraint to only make small, seemingly insignificant changes to your ads, but those small tweaks could be the difference between a winner and a loser. Happy optimizing!
As always, if you’d like a member of our team to take a look at your Facebook Ad campaigns and offer some helpful direction on potential A/B tests you could be running or help setting up that custom report mentioned in the Ad Placements section, please let us know by clicking the green “Request An Audit” button below and filling out our contact form. We’d love to work with you and help your community grow!