Paul Ryazanov shares a practical lesson in ecommerce advertising: before spending money on paid ads, test your creatives first. In this post, Paul asks his community to help choose between two banner designs for an upcoming Ecommerce Camp event — and explains why this kind of A/B testing should happen before any ad budget is committed.
Before We Spend Money on Ads, Can We A/B Test First?
This is a question every ecommerce founder should be asking before launching paid campaigns: have we actually tested the creative?
Too many brands jump straight to spending money on ads without knowing whether their banner, headline, or visual is even the right one. The result is wasted budget on creative that underperforms — and no clear data to show why.
So before committing ad spend to promote our upcoming Ecommerce Camp, I did something simple. I posted two banner options and asked people to tell me which one they’d click on.
What Happened When We Asked
The responses were immediate and genuinely useful. Some people preferred the clean, minimal design that communicated the key details at a glance — the date, the format, the time commitment. Others leaned toward the bolder, more colourful option that listed all the speakers and sessions upfront.
What made this exercise valuable wasn’t just picking a winner. It was understanding why people preferred one over the other. The reasons ranged from readability and hierarchy to trust signals and visual clarity.
That kind of feedback is worth more than any amount of ad spend on untested creative.
Why This Matters for Ecommerce Brands
If you’re running paid ads for your ecommerce store, the creative is often the single biggest lever you can pull. The same audience, the same targeting, the same budget — but a different image or headline — can produce completely different results.
A/B testing your ad creatives before committing budget isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s how you avoid burning money on something that doesn’t resonate with your audience.
The simplest version of this is exactly what we did: show two options to real people and listen to what they say. You don’t always need expensive tools or complex split tests. Sometimes you just need honest feedback before you spend.
Related Reading
If you’re focused on getting more from your ecommerce marketing before spending more, these posts go deeper:
244% Growth from the Same Traffic: How Conversion Wins Over Traffic — how focusing on conversion rather than traffic volume can transform your revenue.
From 0.2% to 1.2% Conversion Rate: The 10 Changes That Made It Happen — a detailed case study on improving conversion rate through incremental, evidence-based changes.
The 8-Second Upgrade That Can Change Your Entire Product Page Performance — why small improvements to your product pages can have an outsized impact on conversions.