What's more important: the right ad or the right audience?

Today I set up an A/B test with a couple of Facebook ads designed to acquire us some qualified likers for our WordPress Training coming up.

I decided to target the same user base using two completely distinctive type of ad. I wanted the interactions to be qualified so I targeted Brisbane based small business owners over the age of 18.

These are the results at the moment I wrote this. The test continues but the data is interim. I just noticed a couple of points that seem to trend towards certain truths.

I am actually surprised to find that the results right now are so close. So far there hasn't been a great amount of data to predict the final result but every indication is that the CTR will be roughly the same. I was expecting to gather a lot more interaction from the colloquially written ad. The indication to me is that in this niche at least, the ads are not so much the reason for the click as much as the intention behind them. I would take from this that targeting the right people is more important than designing the right ad. As long as you can get across that you aim to fix their website woes, then a person who is qualified to click will. So spend less time on your ad and more time refining your targets would be my educated suggestion.

Other interesting findings were the fact that more clicks were made on the Patrick Stewart meme image than the "Does Your Website Suck" while the inverse was true on the other ad, with more clicking "Learn WordPress Brisbane" than the image. I take that this means that some were drawn to the image over the text, so I would take from this that ensuring you have a captivating image and a call to action in your ad subject makes a better ad. Combine the two elements if you will.

Note: This is a small amount of data with which to qualify statements but the trends towards the direction of the click are what interests me.