As marketers, we have hundreds of questions at the top of our minds- how can we connect with our consumers, what is the best way to do so, and which is the best platform to reach them? Well, to help you deal with this dilemma, Google has come up with a marketing playbook on marketing experimentations and how they can assist you to reach out to your target market segment.
Here are the major highlights of the report.
1. The Marketing Value of Experimentation
Experimentation in marketing can play a key role in enhancing ad performance. However, not businesses tend to experiment when it comes to advertising. This is understandable as the uncertainty in market conditions due to COVID-19 might have made business owners apprehensive about how they spend their ad dollars.
On the other hand, a few businesses also don’t understand where to start when it comes to improving marketing strategies with experimentations. Advertisers who run 15 experiments every year reap proven positive impacts in the following ways.
This is because consumer behavior has been consistently evolving even if we don’t take the COVID-19 pandemic into account. Recent search trends show that shoppers are more inclined toward products that align with their value systems and beliefs even if they have to invest more of their time and resources. This means that there is no guarantee that the marketing strategy that has worked before may still work for brands and businesses.
2. The Fundamental Principles of Experimentation
A successful experiment may not necessarily result in a successful campaign. This means that the results may or may not be according to your expectations. However, this shouldn’t lead you to consider your experiment as unsuccessful. If the experiment helps you to interpret results and extract valuable lessons from it, it is a successful experiment.
Keeping that in mind, Google has put together some core fundamental principles to design and run controlled experiments, regardless of the solution or variable that you are looking to test with.
These principles are-
1. Hatching Your Hypothesis
Every experiment should begin by defining a clear hypothesis- a clear statement of what you want to prove or disprove.
2. Validating Your Victories
Identify what your success would eventually look like. So, figure out your key success metrics first instead of rushing to start and changing your goals midway.
3. Assigning Your Audiences
Split users into comparable, separate, and non-overlapping test and control groups. You can find the impact of the variable by comparing the difference in behaviors between the test and control groups.
4. Responding to Your Results
If the result is in line with your expectations, your hypothesis is proven. You then need to decide how to incorporate the change into your marketing plan.
3. Experiment Methodologies and Tools
Deciding on a testing methodology might seem like a daunting task. However, all this means is to identify how your experiment needs to be carried out to best understand the efficacy of your ads in delivering incremental results.
For example, you can execute your experiment via a user-based, geobased, or time-based partition to assess optimization or incrementality. You can use a plethora of experimental methodologies to understand how effective your campaign is going to be. These are-
User-Based Testing
Brand Lift (for video)
Conversion Lift (for video & display)
Custom-Experiments (for search & display)
Ad Variations (for search)
Video Experiments (for video)
4. Setting Up for Success at Scale
This simple principle holds good for everything from baking to experimenting i.e. the quality of your input determines the quality of your output. Therefore, it is essential to keep the following points in mind to achieve conclusive results.
Tips for Experimenting at Scale
Business leaders can empower and organize their teams to experiment at scale with these three following tips.
Organize: Centralize for efficiency, localize for the noteworthy
Start by identifying the common ground- which steps you should try to replicate each experiment’s specific goals. This can be done by assigning clear responsibilities across teams. Also, create a template as a foundation to scope out each experiment.
Test, Learn, Repeat
Conduct individual experiments to test out ideas before rolling out campaigns at scale. In today’s digital age, this can be effectively done with smaller sample sizes or in a shorter time frame before scaling up.
Cultivate a culture of experimentation
Inspiring an experimental mindset will require you to nurture a culture that empowers marketers to test out new ideas without the fear of failure. Incentivize and encourage your team to be courageous enough to just try, even if they aren’t sure of the outcome. Regardless of the results, every experiment will present an opportunity to learn.
Wrapping Up
In today’s constantly evolving environment, constant learning plays an integral role in ensuring that you stay ahead of the curve. Experimentation can help you understand what would work, why it would work, and what can be done differently for a better outcome. This makes experimentation an important tool that can help marketers keep a finger on the consumers’ pulse and keep up with their evolving nature of interaction with brands.
To delve deeper into the findings of the report, click here.