Introduction

The Creative A/B testing tool automatically analyzes performance to identify any creatives over/under performing relative to the ad group average, based on user settings. The success criteria and settings for creative AB tests (testing the performance of different ad copies) and landing page AB tests are determined at the level of the Marin account.

Accessing the creative testing tool

You can locate the AB testing tool by following these steps:
 

1. Click Admin in the upper-right.
    
2. Head to the Optimization tab.
    
3. Click on the A/B Testing link in the left-hand menu. 

In your AB Testing settings, we recommend using Profit/impression for clients with revenue data and Conversions / Impressions for those without. Of course, you should choose the metric that best suits your account needs, but these should serve as a best practice. The recommended confidence level setting is between 85-95% to determine a clear winner. Advanced settings are available for click, impression and time threshold minimums.

To learn more about setting up your AB Test Settings, check out our support center article here.

Best Practices  

• If you're testing across muliple campaigns or groups, tag your creatives with dimensions in order to determine aggregate best performers. 
   
• When you have a winner, pause your losing creatives and continue the testing process, always pitting your winning creatives up against new creatives. 
   
• Your publisher group-level ad serving settings should be set to Do Not Optimize: Rotate ads indefinitely. To access your creative rotation settings, click into to the group of your choosing, then click on the settings sub-tab, and scroll down to the Ad Serving setting. From there you can update your Ad Serving settings and click Save.

  

How to use the AB Testing Tool

Once your AB Test settings have been established, you can add the AB Test column in the grid to analyze your results. You can learn more about analyzing your results from our Training: Creative Testing article. 

As a starting point, sort your active groups by highest spenders for the month. Bring in a Bubble chart and identify the high spend groups with the lowest conversion rate (revenue return) and CTR. These are prime starting points for A/B testing.

Use the tool to identify best performing ad copy for these groups. Pause the Losers. Clone and create message variations of Winners.

Additionally, utilize dimensions by tagging new creatives with time stamps to easily track progress. If you’re testing the same copy across multiple groups or campaigns, give them one tag within a dimension to determine aggregated best performers.

Note: At this time, Marin only offers creative testing at the creative level. Testing cannot be performed at the group or campaign level. These settings may, however, be available on the channel themselves (on Google or Microsoft's ad site) and we do offer Dimensions to aggregate your creative-level data in any group you would like.