How to Treat Dollars as Votes

Election Day Special Edition

Today is an important day in the United States of America. It's election day. I'll stay out of politics, but I will issue a unique newsletter: voting with KPIs.

Collecting Votes

You can collect votes for your ad creative by running multivariate ad tests. To recap, the experimentation process involves:

1. Making modular creative assets.
2. Combining them every way possible.
3. Running them as live ads.
4. Analyzing performance per creative asset.

Understanding Your 'Election' Results

Each conversion is a vote for the assets in that ad, as well as for the ad itself. Different KPIs have different meanings as votes.

• Each purchase is a vote with money. The strength of that vote is the amount of money spent.
• Each lead is a vote with data. Strength is measured by how willing someone is to be contacted by a company (name< email < phone number).
• Each click and view are votes with attention. Strength of vote is measured by time to click and time spent on landing pages; or duration of view.

The Application

In terms of vote value, money is more powerful than data is more powerful than attention. But each funnels into the next, attention -> data -> money.

Next time you run an ad test, think about what kind of votes you're fishing for and what you want to do with them. I recommend getting votes on every idea you have:

1. New Products
2. New Ad Concepts/Designs
3. New Messages
4. New Images/Graphics