Test 1: Motivations & Taglines

If your work solves problems for people, you'll need to discover what they're truly thinking and worrying about as it relates to your area of expertise. This is the "motivation" test, in our problem solver testing track inside Click Testing for Authors.

If you write stories (novels, short fiction, serial fiction, or story-based nonfiction books akin to Michael Lewis's work), then you'll follow our storyteller testing track. You'll test tagline ideas (eg, "Mad Max meets Monty Python," which is Ben Wallace's series tagline) to help sell your book or series.

Test 2: Transformations & Headlines

Problem Solvers will need to gain clarity on what their market really wants. This is expressed in the form of a "transformation statement," such as "Discover how to improve your health markers through activities you actually enjoy."

Storytellers will need to test a bunch of advertisement headline candidates to discover which ones do the best job of drawing eager fans to their book page, signup page, special offer, and/or sales page.

Test 3: Testimonials

Storytellers and Problem Solvers will both test their reader / customer reviews in Test 3 to discover which reviews from prior customers do the best job of attracting new customers to try your books.

Test 4: Images

Our brains process and understand pictures up to 60,000 times faster than text. This is why images are the most powerful part of our advertisement.

But not all images are created equal, and not all clicks result in purchases (see the article here for more on the difference between "Curiosity" and "Purchase Intent"), so we have a number of nuanced requirements for our images. I cover those requirements in detail inside of Click Testing for Authors.

Test 5: Expanded Text (or "Story") Test

Many kinds of ads that we can run on Facebook and Instagram have space for the "primary text" portion of our ads. 

Readers often read this section in its entirety, and what we write in this section often makes the difference when a potential customer is deciding whether to buy our books.

So, just like with everything else we put in front of our customers, we test our ideas to see which ones work best for our buyers.

This is the first test in which each of our test variants will be complete advertisements, rather than individual ad elements that we're testing in isolation.

Test 6: Stress Test

Our testing produces high-fidelity results very quickly, and we de-risk those results by incorporating them in subsequent tests as we work our way through the click testing process.

But the math predicts － and in real-life we actually see － that some "false positives" inevitably sneak through.

These are ads that look like winning ads, but are really NOT winners, and should really NOT be shown to your readers at scale.

To make sure we weed out these "false positives," we do a final test called the Stress Test. Those ads that survive the stress test are deserving of your advertising dollar!

But how do we actually execute these tests?

I'm glad you asked :).

Let's walk through an example Headline Test to give you a sense of how it really works.

Most of us jot down a number of headline ideas as we brainstorm how best to present our work to buyers.

This is excellent.

Maybe our brainstorming session produces headline ideas like this:

(and please note that we use REAL reader reviews, not fakes!!)

• "I died!?" It's been a tough week for our heroine. Read now!
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Best writing in decades. Move over, Lee Child!"
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "My all-time favorite thriller author."
• Is Sam Jameson in love with a traitor? Read now!
• International bestseller: Where do you run when the good guys want you dead?
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Best new spy thriller novel of the year!"
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Sam is my new favorite spy novel heroine!"
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "SO intense! I read it in one sitting!"
• "It's 5AM and I just stayed up all night reading."
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "LOVE LOVE LOVE these thrillers 📗📕!"

Also note that we've included very specific headline elements to get readers excited to buy books, and to discourage non-readers from clicking on our ads. I'll teach you how we do this if you decide to enroll in Click Testing for Authors.

Lots of authors brainstorm ideas for their headlines like we've done above, which is great.

And then, most authors make a very costly mistake.

They pick their personal favorite.

We've learned over and over again through our years of testing that in 95% of cases, authors and entrepreneurs pick the wrong ad elements.

They show things to readers that readers don't care about.

What we do differently in our author community is this:

We let potential customers in our market tell us which headlines they like best.

Your mind might immediately say "It's a survey!"

But it's definitely not a survey, because surveys don't work for this purpose.

(I know you might have been told different. But I'm a data nerd, and the numbers are clear on this. Surveys don't work to validate market fit, for reasons which are very interesting but beyond the scope of this article.)

So here's what we do instead. 

The way click testing works is that we place our ideas in front of random customers in our market.

We do this by using an advertisement, which we design in a very specific way.

The way we present each individual idea (for example, each one of the headline ideas we brainstormed above) is exactly the same for every one of our ideas.

When there's only one element that's different between all of our test ads, we can have confidence that the differences in their testing performance are due to the relative quality of the test ideas themselves.

This is called "isolating variables," which is critical to producing valid and actionable information about our market's desires.

We'll present each of the ten ideas we brainstormed above by placing it into its own specially-designed advertisement to be shown to readers in our genre on Facebook and Instagram.

The ideas that random readers in our genre like the most will generate the most clicks.

Meta reports the number of clicks to us, and if we have followed all of the rules that are designed to ensure that we don't fool ourselves...

The readers in our market will rank-order our headline ideas from best to worst. They won't know they're doing us this amazing kindness, because they're just going about their business, following their interests.

And the information we receive from them is truly priceless.

This information comes in the form of clicks on our test ads.

More clicks = more votes.

We show each of the ads in our experiment to a certain number of potential customers, so that each one of our ideas gets roughly the same opportunity to get "votes" (clicks) from readers.

And when each of our ideas has received the required number of opportunities, it's time to evaluate the results of our experiment.

Click NEXT to find out how in Part 3 of 3.

If you're interested and don't want to read any further, the most thorough way to learn more is to watch the brief webinar I put together for you.

If webinars aren't your thing (no judgment :), you can also check out the Click Testing for Authors enrollment information page.

You'll see details about the program contents and delivery, customer results, and payment plan options. 

We've also put together a page full of unedited, unabridged video interviews and reviews from our authors.

We asked them to help you decide if our program and process are legitimate, professional, useful, and effective.

I've never watched these videos, because they were meant for you. So I don't actually know what advice these authors might have for you, but I am confident that they have your best interest at heart.