9 Easy Steps to Designing a Creative Experiment

SweepLift Promotion User Experience

In a constantly changing world with evolving trends, running experiments is the only way to stay ahead of the curve. While running experiments sounds fairly straightforward, the use of a well-defined process separates a simple experiment from a creative one that can further develop into a worthwhile hypothesis.

According to the creative experiment ideation framework, here are a few steps that can help you design a creative experiment.

1. Experiment Name

Adding clear names and dates will help your team, and others identify the experiment easily. This step is beneficial for teams that are working on multiple projects at the same time. Since many people will read the title, it is essential to choose every word with utmost care. 

2. Research

Whatever experiment you’re conducting, collecting reliable data is a must as it provides indisputable evidence. There are two types of data that you can collect for your experiment:

• Qualitative Data - Collected by using questionnaires, surveys, observation, etc. Qualitative data describes qualities or characteristics. For example, customer feedback.

• Quantitative Data - This type of data helps quantify an experiment and answer the “what” or “how many” questions related to the research. For example, analytics data.

Source: Qualitative and Quantitative Data

3. Campaign Alignment

An experiment becomes much more helpful if you can apply it to the real world. Thus, when planning an experiment, look for upcoming campaigns with which you can align the experiment’s insights. If such a campaign is being designed, look for its brief and share it with the team members for reference. 

The ideal advertising playbook is to run a SweepLift Study to test your creative and target audience on the platform of choice. Then run the campaign with the guidance from your SweepLift Study. After the campaign has completed, then run a Brand Lift study with the platform you ran the ads on (i.e. Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc.). 

Optimal Creative + Audience Advertising Approach:

SweepLift Study → Campaign Launch → Campaign Completed → Brand Lift Study

4. Hypothesis

Hypothesis statements can help you turn the data you collected into focused proposals and enable you to drive meaningful experimentation. 

SweepLift Creative Hypothesis Template

Here’s what a hypothesis consists of:

• The Variable - This is the ‘if’ of the hypothesis, which is usually the problem the experiment focuses on that is represented by an element in an ad or a variable of an ad. For example, specific storyline, actor, music, etc.

• The Result - This is the ‘then’ of the hypothesis that predicts the experiment's outcome. For Brand Marketers this is represented by brand lift metrics and digital ad performance metrics. For example, the like rate, view-through rate, cost per view, cost per lifted user, etc.

• The Rationale - This represents the logic behind choosing the particular variable for the experiment. This will sum up the “Why?” of your prediction supporting the hypothesis. 

5. Top Metric

The top metric determines the probability of your experiment being a success. Setting a top metric ensures your experiment is always on track towards achieving the objective behind conducting it.

Likability of a given ad by a given audience could be a primary metric. This would represent a need by the advertiser to increase the effectiveness of the advertising experience that is delivered to the audience.

SweepLift Study Insights

6. Secondary Metrics

While the primary metrics directly help evaluate the experiment's success, secondary metrics provide additional information that helps with your overall understanding of the outcome.

Audience Retention is another creative advertising metric for video that can be a primary metric to focus on the goal is to increase audience engagement through advertising. 

SweepLift Audience Retention for a Video

7. Audience

Determining the target audience participating in the experiment is key to ensuring that the data collected is reliable. To do so, one can use metrics such as age, gender, demographic, etc.

Google Audience Profile on Fashionistas

8. Duration

Duration has a significant effect on the measurement of the outcome of an experiment. In the context of an experiment, the duration can either be time-based or data-based. 

9. Next Steps

Complete the following steps to get your experiment rolling:

• Experimentation Prioritization - Creating an index for your experiment will help you prioritize your experiment ideas.

• Experiment Roadmap - Creating a worksheet with the roadmap of your experiment will help you refine your ideas.

• Team Communication - It is critical to communicate the experiment plans with all the relevant teams involved.

SweepLift Experiments 

At SweepLift, we help marketers build their brand using our state-of-the-art sweepstakes lab, the world’s first laboratory for creative experiments. The lab enables us to run all the experiments efficiently and cost-effectively. As a result, we can help brands achieve the same results as an advertising experiment on Youtube that would cost around $60,000 in ad spend for as little as $1,000. If this is of interest to you, contact us, and we will help you create path breaking experiments for your brand!

 

SweepLift Creative Experiments Platform

Visit us at www.SweepLift.com to read more about our Creative Experiments-As-A-Service offering.