The Most Overlooked Time to Test

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🧠 The Most Overlooked Time to Test

Let’s set the scene: Your funnel’s humming. Ads are dialed in, your PDPs convert well enough, and nothing’s broken. Growth feels… predictable.

This is where most marketers relax.

But here’s the paradox: predictability breeds stagnation.

The plateau isn’t failure. It’s worse—it’s performance inertia dressed up as stability.

And if you’re not running bold tests when things are “fine,” you’re leaving your sharpest gains on the table.

The Plateau Problem

Here’s what happens in the real world:

You hit a baseline CVR and freeze. You optimize within guardrails. Your testing becomes cosmetic—“What if we make the button orange?”—because no one wants to break a working funnel.

But great funnels aren’t found—they’re forged through discomfort. The biggest conversion lifts don’t come from tiny tweaks. They come from paradigm shifts:

• A rewritten value prop that reframes your offer
• A layout that defies the gridlock of “best practices”
• A landing experience that prioritizes simplicity over information

You don’t test these when your funnel’s bleeding.

You test them when it’s steady—because that’s when the signal is clean and the stakes allow for risk.

A Framework for Testing in Calm Periods

1. Test Against Your Own Success

Find your best-performing element (headline, layout, offer) and build a variation that contradicts it. If it loses, you gain confidence. If it wins, you’ve just unlocked a new baseline.

2. Isolate for Insight, Not Just Impact

Not every test has to be a moonshot. Run a few just to understand user behavior:

• What happens when you remove reviews?
• Do people scroll deeper when images are replaced with text?
• Does performance dip when you hide the price until the second fold?

3. Prioritize Experiments That Wouldn’t Be Approved in a Crisis

Your team won’t greenlight wild tests when metrics are crashing. Launch them now—while you have internal buy-in and room to recover.

Platforms like Stellar make this easier. Lightweight, no-code testing means you don’t need to schedule a dev sprint just to test a bold hypothesis. You can build, launch, and learn without friction so book your Demo here! 

Final Thought

If you only test when things are broken, your growth strategy is reactive.

The best marketers test during stillness—when results are steady—because that’s when you can afford to challenge what’s “working.” And the real winners? They never stop asking: What if this isn’t our ceiling?

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🧰 TikTok Expands Brand Safety Controls for Advertisers

TikTok just supercharged its brand safety toolkit, giving advertisers more control than ever before over where and how their ads appear. With new exclusion lists, in-flight moderation tools, and detailed post-campaign insights, TikTok aims to ease brand concerns around ad placement and reputation risks.

The Breakdown:

1. More Granular Pre-Campaign Filters - Advertisers can now fine-tune where ads show up using TikTok’s Inventory Filter, Category Exclusion, and Vertical Sensitivity tools. These allow blocking of content across sensitive categories and industries.

2. New Exclusion Lists for Ad Adjacency - Two major additions—Video Exclusion Lists and Profile Feed Exclusion Lists—let advertisers block specific videos or creators by ID, preventing ads from appearing next to misaligned or risky content. Exclusions are supported by verification partners like IAS, DV, and Zefr. 

3. Mid-Campaign Comment Controls -  TikTok Comment Management enables advertisers to moderate ad comments in real time. Brands can hide, disable, or filter replies during live campaigns. 

4. Post-Campaign Transparency Metrics -  After campaigns, TikTok offers third-party insights into brand safety, suitability, category risk, and misinformation exposure, helping brands audit outcomes and refine targeting for future campaigns.

With increasing scrutiny on ad placement and online reputation, TikTok’s updates offer brands both preemptive and reactive tools to protect their image. From blocking risky creators to moderating conversations, it’s a robust system that boosts confidence in ad investment.

🚀 Quick Hits

🤖 What if you could audit ad creatives like a top-tier strategist—without waiting on one? Motion’s new Expert Agents bring the minds of Dara Denney, Barry Hott, and more into an AI workflow built to spot weaknesses, suggest fixes, and improve performance instantly. It’s like adding a strategist to your team—minus the bottlenecks. Get early access now!

🛍️ ChatGPT topped global app downloads in March 2025, while Threads re-entered the top 10, reflecting sustained momentum. Despite newer rivals, ChatGPT’s first-mover advantage keeps it synonymous with AI. Threads nears 350M users, with Meta apps continuing to dominate overall. 

🎗️ Google is drawing criticism for urging opposition to California’s AB 566, a bill focused on enhancing digital privacy. Marketers and privacy advocates argue the outreach prioritizes ad interests over transparency, highlighting broader industry tensions around data use and consumer consent.

🛒 Temu paused its U.S. Google Shopping ads on April 9, leading to a sharp drop in its App Store ranking. The decision coincided with increased U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports, highlighting ongoing challenges in sustaining growth amid evolving trade policies.

🎫 Following Google’s March 2025 core update, AI Overviews now cite fewer top 10 organic results, dropping from 16% to 15%. While lower-ranked pages gain visibility, marketers face new challenges in tracking performance and maintaining traffic from AI-generated summaries.

🎈 A new study reveals AI agents do engage with ads, with GPT-4o showing 95% specificity in hotel bookings and banner ads proving most influential. Keyword-rich text ads outperformed visuals, with Claude quoting ad language in 35.79% of its recommendations.

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