How Dental Practices Can Use Multivariate Testing to Find Out What Ads Work on Social Media Platforms

With the dental landscape being as competitive as it is, it’s critical to drive qualified traffic to your practice’s website that converts. When working with social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, multivariate testing will deliver the strongest performing display ads and high-quality leads. This is because, with multivariate testing, the display ads you put out there are scientifically optimized for conversion, making it easier for you to achieve your advertising objectives.

Why Use Instagram and Facebook for Multivariate Testing?

Instagram and Facebook are the ideal places to advertise your dental practice because chances are, your patients already have accounts on these platforms. This means that they are already using these platforms to engage in the content around them, giving you a prime way to target prospective patients with ads that are already conversion-focused.

The only thing you need to do before you run these ads is to pre-test them with a multivariate test. This test will evaluate your messages, design, and layout, giving you feedback on what performs the strongest.

Once you have your strongest performers picked out, you can use Instagram and Facebook’s Ad Manager to narrow down the target audience. Simply choose whether you want to target patients based on behavior, interest, geolocation, or demographics.

How to Get Started With Multivariate Testing

We recommend multivariate testing because it optimizes your advertising campaign’s content for the highest conversion possible by testing all variables of the ad at the same time. This gives you invaluable feedback on what elements work well together, what elements perform the strongest, and which elements can be interchanged to reflect different combinations of the ad.

The combination that performs best in the test that aligns with your business goal, will be the one to use on social media. To run a multivariate test, follow the below steps:

1. Identify what offer, special, or message you want to test.
2. Create several banner ad variations of the same offer with different ad wording, design, and segmentations.
3. For every banner, you create with different ad variations, create a display campaign in your Google Ads dashboard with the same settings (per banner).
4. Drive traffic to each banner.
5. Analyze the traffic to see which ad performs best.

Using a Facebook Social Media Account to Run Your Display Ads

Once you are done analyzing the traffic from the multivariate test, you will need to add the strongest performing banner to Facebook. If you are new to Facebook, create a Facebook Business Manager Account in order to use the Facebook Ads Manager for ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram (Instagram is owned by Facebook).

1. Sign in or create a personal Facebook account so that you can receive confirmation and notifications.
2. Create a Facebook Business Manager account by clicking here.
3. Fill in the information needed to make an account and follow the on-screen instructions.
4. Finish by adding in your business details.

Once you have both accounts up and running, you can use the Facebook Ads Manager to run the display ads from your multivariate test.

How to Advertise Multivariate Ads on Instagram and Facebook

Running the advertisement campaigns on Instagram and Facebook is relatively simple. You will need your dental practice’s landing page/website, an idea of what your objective is, and creative assets for building your ad.

1. Log into your Facebook Business Account and head to the Ads Manager.
2. Create a new campaign and choose which advertising objective you want. This could be phone calls, clicks to a specific landing page, or lead capture through forms.
3. Choose which audience you want to target.  As a dental practice, choosing a local audience with a target radius around the relevant areas in close proximity to your practice is a good idea. This will ensure your ads are shown to a specific audience within your area, increasing your ad’s potential return on investment.
4. Select where you want your display ads to appear. We recommend choosing the automatic placement option, as this allows Facebook to place your ads where they are most likely to get results.
5. Choose the percentage amount/dollar amount you’d like to spend on this ad out of your entire budget.
6. Build your ad. If you are unfamiliar with building ads, keep your multivariate test in mind and use elements that you learned. Also, remember to familiarize yourself with Facebook’s business ad guide to set yourself up for success.

Then select an ad format, create your ad, and green-light it!