Marketing Videos

Should You Start New Campaigns with Creative Testing?

The podcast tackles a common dilemma for marketers: whether to launch a brand‑new campaign with creative testing built in or to add testing later. Host John Lomer explains his preferred workflow, emphasizing that the creative testing tool should be applied at the moment new ads are created, not as a separate after‑thought. Lomer recommends embedding the test directly within the active ad set that will eventually run the campaign. Although Meta suggests reserving roughly 20% of the budget for testing, he advises allocating the full budget when the campaign is brand‑new, ensuring each creative receives equal spend from day one. This approach yields early performance data and sidesteps the platform’s limitation that existing ads cannot be retroactively tested. He highlights a painful quirk: to test an already‑running ad you must duplicate it, creating parallel ads that compete for impressions and muddy results. As an illustration, a $50‑per‑day test split across five ads (just $10 each) would generate insufficient data, prompting marketers to either test fewer creatives or extend the test period. The takeaway for advertisers is clear—integrate creative testing at launch, allocate sufficient budget, and design tests that are statistically robust. Doing so prevents messy duplication, accelerates insight generation, and ultimately drives more efficient spend and higher ROI.