There are certain facets of marketing that have always seemed to capture more attention than others in regards to growing your business online. One of these is testing.

This adherence (and some might conclude, obsession) with data is not confined solely to the marketing world, as it seems most aspects of society have transformed into “data-driven” models.

Data-driven decision-making in marketing is incredibly valuable, but there is a time and place for everything, and marketing itself is a lot more than just numbers.

Image source

The data that drives successful marketing campaigns can’t materialize prior to creating said campaigns. The chicken that lays the egg that makes testing possible is the creativity that drives results fuels the data that informs decisions.

In this post I’ll walk you through what A/B testing is from a paid media perspective, when it’s necessary, and when human abilities like creativity, intuition, and common sense lay the groundwork.

What exactly do we mean by “testing”?

There are many forms of testing within marketing including multivariate testing, usability testing, and content testing, but for the sake of simplicity within paid advertising we will mostly be referring to A/B testing.

With an A/B test, you create two variants of an ad or landing page, and everything is identical except for one element so you can see which variation leads to more conversions. You can test ad copy, button colors, creative elements, the length of the…