With Facebook ads, the creative is the strongest driver of performance. An ad that resonates with and engages people will reduce your CPM/CPC, protect ad delivery and improve performance on your overall objective.
The best part is that Facebook does a lot of creative optimization work for you automatically. With a little extra work, you can reap the benefits and earn great ROI.
In my new whitepaper, the Thunder Playbook for Facebook Creative Optimization, I outline the 4 pillars of ideal Facebook ad creative.
The 4 Pillars
High performing Facebook ads have content that is:
- Objective-Driven
- Tailored to the Audience
- Fresh
- with Optimized Imagery and Copy
Let’s take a look at each pillar in some detail.
Objective-Driven
The goal of the Facebook ad campaign must be at the core of the messaging. The creative shouldn’t just be good, it must be good in a way that will drive the intended action. Make sure that while you are optimizing your creative you never go so far as to off track. In pursuit of the perfect message, it sometimes helps to start from the end result and work backwards.
Tailored to the Audience
Ads that thrive on Facebook must be as relevant to their audience as the other content in a user’s newsfeed. Since Facebook’s audience targeting is the most granular and specific targeting is digital advertising, it is a straightforward process to segment your audience into smaller ad sets using Facebook Audience Insights and create ad content that is built just for that audience.
Tailoring ad content can be a creative challenge, but with Facebook’s automatic creative optimization there is a lot of room for experimentation on this front. As you see what is working, you can start to develop general principles to apply to all your ads for a given audience group moving forward.
Fresh
Anyone who has even run Facebook ads knows that Facebook will start to throttle your delivery after not too long, often 10 days, two weeks, or even days if the performance isn’t great. That means you will need to keep switching things up, trying out different ideas, or telling a story over time with your messaging.
Another way to keep creative fresh is to pause and then reactivate a creative periodically. If you have an offer that performs well, pause the campaign when performance starts to dwindle. Reactivate it 1-2 months later and it will be fresh again to your audience and you will likely see good returns.
Optimized Imagery and Copy
Subtle changes in your creative can increase your returns in a big way. Even high-performing ads can be optimized to perform even higher by tweaking the imagery and copy.
Testing elements like copy length, calls to action and word choice can help you get the bottom of a given audience’s preferences. With images, of course try different images, but you may also want to look to factors like whether a carousel or single image ad works best for you, whether you should crop in more tightly on a person’s face, or if certain color palettes are earning you results.
Get Started Optimizing Your Facebook Ads
Your action step from this post is to examine your next Facebook campaign with these best practices in mind:
- Have you broken your target audience down into smaller segments to test and tailor messages to?
- Are you ready to optimize your campaigns with at least 3 different ads in each ad set?
- Do you have a plan for fresh creative to rotate in after 10 days to two weeks?
- Review your ads with your objective in mind. Try to see the ad as if it was for the first time. Will the messaging you have inspire the action you want your audience to take?
If you enjoyed this post please like and share it. You can also use this link to download for free the entire whitepaper on Facebook creative optimization which includes this information and a lot more. The whitepaper is a quick read full of actionable insights, and in my opinion the design is lovely which makes for an enjoyable read as well.
Good luck!
