When preparing your new promotion or email creative a good way to achieve success is to run several rounds of tests. Running tests before picking the winner can have a profound impact on your bottom line. In the coming weeks we will discuss more about the concepts of A/B split tests, and how to measure their results.
In the following two examples you can see two variations of the same advertisement concept for a hair coloring product. Which one would you have picked to run with?
Example 1: Model is looking at the reader
Example 2: Model is looking at the product
Example imagery from Bunnyfoot
Focus group’s findings:
“Changing where the model looks changes consumer behavior. In the advert where the model looked at the product (instead of out of the page) consumers spent a proportionately longer time looking at the product name than the strap line. For this ‘cued’ advert subsequent recall tests showed that the product name was also more frequently remembered.”
What does this tell us?
There is an old cliché that says “looks can be deceiving”, but in the above two examples the advertisement looks almost the same with a slight variation on the direction in which the model is looking. But based on the heat map visualization it is very apparent (indicated by the red color concentration) how the focus group participants eyes looked at that ad. Concentrating on the product shot in that ad would have caused more people to notice the product, instead of the pretty face in the background.
A lot of marketers would not have spent the time to consider the differences in these two examples and would have picked one over the other subjectively. However this example does emphasize the importance of testing and not merely relying on instinct.
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Tags: A/B split test, focus groups, heat maps, split testing
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