We’ve heard anecdotally that the videos made on our platform create much higher engagement on social media which leads to more site visits, but we wanted to run some tests and associate data with these successes.
We were looking for the best way to do a proper A/B test on social media and found Facebook’s Split Testing Platform for Ads to be the easiest way to do this. We also wanted to test with great content, and were lucky enough to partner with the outstanding Podcast, Making Gay History for our experiment. (special thanks to Will Coley of Aquifer Media for facilitating this!)
The Making Gay History Podcast has been around since 2016, and has surpassed 1.75 Million downloads in that short amount of time. A little bit more from their about page: “The Making Gay History podcast mines Eric Marcus’s decades old audio archive of rare interviews — conducted for his award-winning oral history of the LGBTQ civil rights movement — to create intimate, personal portraits of both known and long-forgotten champions, heroes, and witnesses to history.”
Making Gay History Test
We wanted to determine what kind of unit would perform best in a Facebook split test. We first setup our target audience as English speakers age 18-65 with interest in either Gay Pride or LGBT Community.
Then, we chose an audio clip from Making Gay History’s Season Three episode entitled “Ellen Degeneres” and via Headliner turned that clip into two different types of videos:
Video 1: Animated Captions
Video 2: Single Image Audiogram
We put these video units into a Traffic Acquisition Split test along with the static image. The units appeared as follows
Static Image Ad Unit
Video Ad Unit
The Results
| Type | Clicks | Impressions | CTR | CPC |
| Animated Captions | 468 | 6235 | 7.5% | $0.11 |
| Single Image Audiogram | 660 | 6832 | 9.7% | $0.08 |
| Static Image | 118 | 5202 | 2.3% | $0.42 |
The results overwhelmingly show that video units perform much better than static image units. The numbers are far more impressive than even we expected. The cost per click of the static image was $0.42 vs $0.08-$0.11 for the video units. This means that by simply turning the single image into a Headliner video, we got more than 5x as much traffic for the same amount of ad spend!
So take note all you social media teams and content creators, it’s well worth the time to run your audio through Headliner. Also, stay tuned, we are doing more tests with multiple image videos, and now that we have the ability to add not just images but actual video clips in Headliner, look out for more results
Finally, if you have a podcast and want to team up for a similar test, reach out! support@headliner.app
