In a recent case study, AdEspresso’s team found that Facebook Lead Ads outperformed Twitter Lead Cards by 336%.

The average cost-per-lead in Facebook Lead Ads was $3.48, while for Twitter Cards it was $11.7. Basically, you could get three times more leads for the same budget when using Facebook Lead Ads.

That’s exactly the kind of discovery that your can get from Facebook A/B testing.

Up next, you’ll find five Facebook Ads split tests that will help you to lower your ad costs and come up with new ideas for your ad campaigns.

You’ll find game-changing answers to these five questions:


• Using emoji in ad copy – will it increase your click-through rates?
• What’s the best ad image to use? – product image vs. stock photos
• Which call-to-action buttons return the lowest cost-per-conversion?
• Should you use exclamation marks in your ad copy?
• What’s the best ad placement: Desktop or Mobile News Feed?

Are you Ready to turn into a Facebook ads spy and boost your revenue?

In this case, read on!

Full disclosure:
To get bulletproof Facebook A/B test results, your should have at least 10,00 ad impressions and 500 ad clicks, (for all variations combined). Some of the split tests featured in this article had fewer clicks, so take the results with a grain of salt and consider them more as guidelines for creating your own Facebook A/B tests to find out what works in your case.

#1. Using emojis in Facebook ad copy – does it help?

There’s plenty of research on writing the perfect Facebook ad headline that makes people click on your ad.

For example, by starting your headline with a number, you’re 36% more likely to have people click on your ads.

But there was no information about using emojis in Facebook ad copy. So, we set to find out how adding an emoji to Facebook ad headline affects the CTR and cost-per-click of our ads.

Here’s the question we wanted to answer:

Can you increase the CTR of your ads by adding an emoji to your ad headline? The answer is: YES

In Scoro, we A/B tested two different ads that promoted one of our latest blog posts. We kept all other ad elements the same but added a red flag emoji at the beginning of one headline variation.

Here’s what we found…

The ad with a red flag emoji in the headline had the CTR of 0.846% and while the ad with no emoji had the CTR of 0.351%.

The Facebook ad headline that included an emoji had 241% higher click-through rate than the ad with no emoji.

The next time you run a Facebook A/B test, try adding an emoji to the ad copy. You can even split test which emoji placement works the best: is it in the headline, text or link description?

#2. Showing your product vs. using a stock image in the ad image

The easiest way to create Facebook ad visuals is to download a free stock image and use it as your ad image. But… that’s not the best idea, as it turned out.

We ran an A/B test with three different ad designs:

• Variation A featured a product screenshot along with integration logos
• Variation B featured a product on a light blue background
• Variation C featured a stock image with text on it

 

Here’s the question we wanted to answer:

Should you use a stock image as your ad visual? The answer is: NO

After running the split test for several days, we started noticing a clear trend: the ad variation featuring a stock image returned lower results than the ads featuring our product.

Here’s a screenshot from the beginning of our A/B test:

As you can see, the variation A (that was featuring a product screenshot) outperformed variation C (the one with a stock image) by 220% in terms of click-through rate and by 146% regarding the cost-per-click.

#3. “Learn More” vs. “Sign Up” call-to-action button

When setting up a Facebook ad campaign, you can choose from multiple call-to-action buttons, depending on what’s your advertising goal.

There’s some research showing that the most efficient Facebook ad CTA button is “Learn More” – people are the most likely to click on it.

For example, AdEspresso analyzed 37,259 Facebook ads and found out that “Learn More”, “Shop Now”, and “Sign Up” are all used significantly more than any other call-to-action.

In Scoro, we were eager to find out which call-to-action returns the highest cost-per-results, so we ran a split test to find out:

Which call-to-action performs better: “Learn More” or “Sign Up?” The answer is: “Sign Up”

We created a Facebook split test with two variations: variation A with the “Learn More” call-to-action and variation B with the “Sign Up” CTA.

Here’s an example of our ads:

Guess which one yielded the highest click-through rate?

In our case, the “Learn More” CTA had a 22.5% higher click-through rate than “Sign Up”.

But that’s not the whole story.

No matter how low click-through rates you have, it’s the conversion you’re interested in. So, the real factor we wanted to measure was the cost-per-conversion of the two ad variations.

Regarding the cost-per-conversion, the ad with “Sign Up” call-to-action outperformed the “Learn More” CTA by 14.5%.

When conducting Facebook split tests, remember that ads with high click-through rates do not equal the ads with the highest conversion rate.

Optimize your ads for reaching the ultimate goal at the lowest pricing point.

Here’s another A/B test we ran: call-to-action button vs. no CTA button in the ad image

Variation A included a red CTA saying “LEARN MORE” while variation B had no CTA in the ad image.

It turned out that in this case, the ad without the red CTA button performed a lot better, both in terms of conversions and of cost-per-click (CPC $2.64 vs. $3.17).

#4. Using exclamation marks in Facebook ads – does it help?

Research by Outbrain found that article titles ending with a question mark have a higher click-through rate than those ending with an exclamation mark or full stop.

The same research found that headlines using three exclamation marks (!!!) instead of just one (!) received almost twice as many clicks as those with other punctuation marks.

After reading about this case study, we wanted to find out whether the same rule applies to our Facebook ads. So we ran an A/B test and asked:

Does using an exclamation mark in the text in our ad image increase the click-through rates? The answer is: NO

Here are the two ad variations we tested: Variation A with no exclamation mark at the end of ad image text and variation B with an exclamation mark.

Here are the results:

While it might seem counterintuitive, variation A with no exclamation mark had the click-through rate of 2.32% while variation B with exclamation mark returned a lower CTR of 1.10%.

The ad with no exclamation also outperformed the other variation by 187% in terms of cost-per-click.

Testing various punctuation marks in your ad copy can lead to fascinating discoveries. While using the exclamation mark in our ad image didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean that using these marks couldn’t be beneficial in other parts of your ad copy.

Need some inspiration? Here’s an example of Uber’s ad that uses an exclamation mark:

#5. Ad placement: Desktop vs. Mobile vs. Right Column

AdEspresso recently released a study of 2016 Q3 Facebook ad costs.

The results showed that the average cost-per-click for the Desktop ad placement is $0.29 vs. $0.18 for Mobile and $0.35 for the Right Column ones.

When setting up a Facebook ad campaign, you’ve got plenty of ad placements to choose from:

So which one performs the best?

We ran a test to see which Facebook ad placement works best. It’s important to know that we’re selling a SaaS (software as a service) product that’s mainly used on desktops, and that the test was run as a retargeting campaign.

We wanted to know whether News Feed Desktop, Mobile or Right Column placement has the lowest cost-per-conversion. The answer is: Mobile

Here’s a sneak peek of our campaign results:

In our case, the click-through rate was highest for Desktop ads (0.30% vs. 0.17% for Mobile placement vs. 0.07% for Right Column placement).

But as you look at the results of the second ad group, Mobile (cost-per-lead $6.56) and Right Column (cost-per-lead $6.71) outperformed Desktop ad placement (cost-per-lead $9.61) by 146% and 143% respectively.

In their third-quarter earnings report, Facebook said that Mobile platform’s growing fast. Mobile advertising now represents around 84 percent of Facebook’s total ad revenue, up from 78% in the third-quarter of 2015.

If you haven’t used the Mobile News Feed ad placement for a while, it might be worth giving it another chance and running a split test to see how well it performs compared to other ad placements.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve reached the end of this article, it’s time to review all the key takeaways:

1. Using emojis in your Facebook ad headlines could potentially increase your click-through rates by over 240%
2. Ad images that showcase your product tend to outperform ad visuals with generic stock images
3. While the “Learn More” CTA button usually returns a lower cost-per-click, the “Sign Up” CTA returned a lower cost-per-conversion
4. Using exclamation marks in our ad image didn’t work out but there’s definitely room for further testing
5. Mobile News Feed ad placement outperformed Desktop News Feed by 146% in terms of cost-per-lead

Use these findings to conduct your own Facebook A/B tests to find new ways of lowering your ad costs and increasing revenue. Remember: what works for one might not work for the other. So make sure to take these findings to a test drive!

Have your recently conducted any interesting Facebook split tests? Share your results in the comments section!