How to create 250 banners for A/B testing in 5 minutes

If you’re not A/B testing your ad banners, you’re leaving money on the table.

What is A/B testing all about

It’s hard to believe that A/B testing didn’t really exist before the turn of the 21st century. People would make their best assumptions and launch advertising campaigns without testing actual designs. Now you can use surveys and other A/B testing approaches to create the most effective advertising before you start spending your precious media budget.

The only way to truly evaluate your conversion funnel and marketing campaign is to get data directly from your customers’ behaviour, and A/B testing allows you to do just that.

The latter – also known as split testing – is a way to test two or more ideas head-to-head to see what produces the best result. It’s a way to put some analytics behind testing hypotheses to determine which ad is the “winner” for your business. A/B offers data you cannot ignore for design optimisation and increased return on investment (ROI).

Despite being such a cool method, A/B testing is used rarely or not at all because of the complexity of the process. As a result, money is wasted and growth potential is not realised.

A manual approach to A/B testing

The basic process of creating a set of banners consists of:

1. First, task planning. Describing copies, CTAs, images, references, etc. and transferring them to a designer to create a main banner.

2. Designing and approving the main banner.

3. Resizing banners to every format needed for the campaign.

4. Animating all resized versions in the set.

5. Generating and preparing all banners in the set for the ad network’s tech requirements.

This approach is time consuming and expensive, but it works if you don’t need many banners and don’t make changes to creatives. When it comes to creating several banner sets for A/B tests or making corrections, the workflow falls apart. Any alterations or additions result in the cost of at least a few more hours, or even days, to finalise the banner set.

You will have to repeat all the steps above for every banner you need. If there are, for example, five banner size sets with three CTA variants and you need to change a word in the headline or the button colour, it would be necessary to redo 15 banners. You would then have to redesign, resize, and re-tune the animations for all the sizes again, separately. This is both time consuming, and any additional changes will lead to additional financial costs.

The whole process usually therefore takes a few days and a great deal of money to create a set of banners for A/B testing.

Often, the process can seem overcomplicated and appear to detract from the real business of marketing, sales and so on. And yes, if you’re still embarking on the process manually, watching a snail crawling on a table would be a more efficient use of your time (and probably more fun).

Disadvantages of this approach:

• It’s time consuming and expensive.

• You’re dependent on a designer for making even minor changes to the banners.

• Complicated processes lead to mistakes and require greater vigilance.

The shortcomings of this approach mean that you’re likely to abandon A/B testing and therefore limit the potential for increased conversion.With Viewst’s one-stop-shop for ad production automation and collaboration, the practice becomes both useful and interesting.

The process in Viewst

Viewst has recently shipped the variable content generation feature to let you scale the quantity of copies, images, and call-to-action buttons to create and test new ad combinations in just a few clicks.

What is the workflow using Viewst for generating tons of banners for A/B testing?

The whole process usually takes 5 to 15 minutes and only two steps:

1. Creating a single banner and adding resizes.

2. Adding all needed variations of images, copies, and CTAs.

Even a person with no design experience can create a full banner set for a campaign as well as all the required variations and download them for ad networks in a single place.

New content and design automatically sync across the whole set. If you have the same set of five resizes and three CTA variants, the changes take place instantly. New headlines or a button colour changed in one place will automatically be updated on all banners. All you need to do to receive your updated banners is to click the Download button.

Core advantages of the automated Viewst approach:

• Time saving: all changes are made in a single place and automatically distributed to the whole set; there is no need to manually edit every banner separately.

• Fewer errors because the process is easier: no unnecessary actions, easy checking, everything is clear and synced.

• Easy and quick downloading: there are three generation types to fit your requirements, hundreds of banners are generated and downloaded in one click that are completely ready to use on ad networks.

Comparing the manual and Viewst approaches for banner creation

How to try it?

Variable content generation feature is available to every Viewst user, even on the free Starter plan.

Try now

You can learn more about using variable content generation in the video tutorial or the help article.