If you think market research is only to test the waters for your product viability and to receive users’ feedback, here’s the good news. You can use paid online surveys to gauge your audience’s mind about your curated promotions and campaigns. You can use market research at every stage of your product development lifecycle.

Why Should You Test Your Ads?

Because the amount you spend on ads on Google, social media, and apps can sum up to several grand. Maybe millions if you grab primetime slots on TV. And if you use influencer marketing with celebrities, you must cough up again in the same ratio. But what if your ad falls flat and doesn’t resonate with the users?

Testing your ads with online surveys or focus groups is the answer.

Ad testing with market research helps you improve the concept and quality consistently. It gets you improvement ideas while saving a huge chunk of your finance. Insights from real users mean better ads which means more conversions and fewer failures.

Brands like yours also manage to set up benchmarks for the ads meant for the actual audience during testing. You can test your product at various stages, right from the concept to the price and marketing. And perhaps you find a new territory for your idea or product during this process.

Here are 3 wow tips to make online surveys fruitful while testing your ads.

How to Boost Your Ads Testing with Online Surveys

A/B Testing

Yes, A/B testing helps you identify what works for your users, whether it’s print or mass media, social media, or website copies. Even emails. But with these mediums, you’ve already invested a huge sum of money, and one of these ads will be scrapped anyway.

So why not test these versions with only selected users or a population that reflects your target audience and know what they think? Yes, use an online survey to gather opinions.

Here are some pointers for this type of survey:

Demographics

Choose a panel of users that closely represents your target audience. This way, you can get an idea of what works with only 100 to 200 users instead of a Facebook ad targeting several thousand or even million. Sharply segmenting your respondents ensures no one from your respondents abandons the survey, finding it irrelevant or inappropriate.

Content

Share 2 images with different colors or fonts, or themes. You can even change the ad copy while maintaining the same fonts, themes, and colors. 

Questions

Ask multiple-choice questions such as:

• Which of the 2 images capture your attention the most?
• Rate each image on its visual appeal on a scale of 1 to 5.
• What strikes the most in image A? (Pop the same question for the other image.)
• Which one thing doesn’t work for you in image B? (Repeat the same questions for image A.)

The choices for the 3rd and 4th questions can be fonts, themes, colors, taglines, etc.

Ask open-ended questions:

• What thing comes to your mind when you see this image?
• What drives you to choose image B? (This question should precede after asking the user’s choice between A and B.)
• Why would you invest in the product after seeing image B? (Or image A, depending on the choice.)
• Share your emotion that best describes the product shown in the ad image.

Know these 5 tips to write questions and ace a market research survey.

Heatmaps

• A heatmap captures the parts of the ad that appealed most to your respondents.

Facial Coding and Eye Testing

Every consumer has a different way of expressing themselves to a product. And facial expressions and eye movement aid in understanding what your users think about a product. Hitched eyebrows, a faint smile, an imperceptible set of frown lines on the forehead, rapid eye movements from one corner of an image to the other. And these subtle cues increase multifold when your ad’s medium is a video.

So, why not capture these nonverbal cues during your ad testing?

Market researchers measure these expressions using facial coding and eye-tracking mechanisms in surveys. With a huge database of facial expressions and their meanings, market research consultants capture your users’ nonverbal vibes and convert them into quantifiable meanings.

Eye tracking mechanism uses near-infrared technology and a camera to track your users’ glances. This results in a heat map to show which areas in an ad’s image or video grab more attention.

These mechanisms might soon be an alternative to qualitative data, which is hard to collect and analyze.

Read latest AI trends in market research and make your process a cakewalk.

Small Changes, Huge Differences

A few best practices to keep in mind while testing your advertising with an online survey are:

• Keep your questions consistent for all the ad versions you’re testing. For instance, with you’re A/B testing, frame the same set of questions for both ads: A and B. This makes comparison a fair and easy game.
• Your survey should have an exhaustive list of questions while not being exhausting. 20 to 25 questions are enough to test your ad. Lesser number of questions will have incomplete or insufficient data. A higher number of questions can lead to survey abandonment.
• Use images and videos with high resolution. Yes, your ad copy is just meant for a few (hundred) users. But they will set some markers and stats for your actual ad. So don’t slack with the quality of your visuals.
• Don’t ignore the importance of demographics. Choose an audience that reflects your actual users. If your users are diverse, go inclusive and add people from various demographics and psychographics. If you need help, Opinionest’s rich and diverse panel can come in handy.
• You can get inspired by a well-performing ad in the industry from a rival and your old ad to figure out where your ad scores poorly.
• Follow up with two reminders after sharing your survey with the selected panel members.
• Test your ads in all phases of your product development: logo and name, tagline, features, and pricing, packaging and versioning.
• Keep the CTA to one in your sample ads. Don’t add “Call us” and “Visit our showroom” in one ad to avoid confusing your audience.
• Always maintain your branding and brand’s voice even if you’re sharing your sample ad with fifty users.

How Opinionest Can Help with Ad Testing

Opinionest prides to have a panel of 4.5 million users across the globe. With over 25 CATI stations, expertise in online surveys, and excellent project management skills, we have been catering to nearly all industries with market research.

Please contact us here if you want to test your adverts.