Your essential guide to building excellent creative that converts

Building excellent ad creative is the number one priority for a successful ad campaign.

In the past, Meta Add management was a manual process of building robust targeting, understanding how best to optimise your budget, and developing your buyer journey after the click. With the release of Meta Andromeda (their AI integrated algorithm) we saw a significant overhaul of Meta’s ad delivery system that places a greater emphasis on creative content. The term “Advantage+” that you see through the ad creation process, is essentially allowing Meta greater control over your targeting and budget management.

Meta holds thousands of data points on each user. It doesn’t just know your likes and dislikes, it understands your behaviours and likely intentions. Setting aside how frightening that is for a second – it stands to reason that it makes more sense to leave your audience targeting in the hands of Meta, as they will have a far better understanding of who is likely a highly motivated buyer for your ad!

Meta learns who to target based on the content of your ad creative, it reads not only the text but it will analyse video and imagery to figure out who is going to have the best chance of conversion upon seeing your ad. This is why creative is now the number 1 priority!

So what is “ad creative” and how should we be building it?

What is “Ad Creative”?

Put simply, Ad Creative is the headlines, text and imagery that you use to build any ad in the ad manager platform. Meta allows you the opportunity to load in up to 5 different versions of text with each image or video type.

Goals of Excellent Ad Creative

There are three goals when building excellent ad creative:

1. STOP THE SCROLL – This is the absolute number one goal. The average user scrolls around 900 metres per day on their phone, humans are very good at pattern recognition so if something looks like an ad, chances are they will scroll straight on past it. The goal is to create an ad that looks like a normal social media post, and stops the user from immediately scrolling on. Use intriguing and hooky messaging and imagery to entice the engage further with your ad.
2. Build different ads for the different stages of the buyer journey. You need ads that are built for people who have never seen your brand before and that answer the basic questions of who are you, what are you selling, and why should I buy your product? You also need ads for the other end of the consideration journey that are direct calls to purchase your product with enticing offers and building a sense of urgency. The traditional stages of the buyer journey are:
   • Unaware – Generate curiosity with problem led creative.
   • Problem aware – Build empathy and educate the user on your product/solution.
   • Solution aware – What makes your product unique or more valuable than others?
   • Product aware – Demonstrate proof of value and use testimonials.
   • Most aware – Offer clarity, and build urgency.
3. Always offer next steps on your ads, from “learn more” for those that are less aware of you to “order now” for when you’re trying to nudge your potential customer over the edge and convert.

Variety is the key to success

You can create static images, videos or carousels as well as the enhanced catalogue style ads if you’re build a product catalogue to sell from in Meta. Each creative can be loaded in with 3 different sizes, but these are the two main sizes:

• 1080px : 1080px
• 1920px : 1080px

This variety allows them to place your ads in as many different parts of the Facebook/Instagram/Threads interface. My advice would be to create everything in the 1920:1080 format with your content centred into the “square” in the middle of your content. That way you can create everything in a single format and crop to size in ads manager.

One of the main areas that a lot of brands fall down is that they lack variety in their ads, and they stubbornly stick to their brand guidelines so everything looks the same and looks like an ad. The truth is, some of the simplest ads can be the most effective so give lots of variety a chance to succeed!

For the actual ad imagery create many different types of creative:

• Highly polished slick videos
• Lo-fi rough around the edges UGC (User Generated Content)
• Simple before/after images
• Good reviews over b-roll/images

For your ad copy you have 2 considerations, the Headline and the Primary Text, you can input 5 different examples into Ads Manager and the platform will test them all to find the most successful.

A Headline is the short, attention-grabbing text (around 40 characters recommended) acting as a mini-call-to-action to hook users, state a key benefit or offer, and drive clicks by being clear, concise, and using powerful words or relevant details like numbers/locations.

Primary Text is the main text above your visual creative, acting as your core message to hook users, highlight benefits, provide context, and drive action, ideally kept short (1-3 lines visible) with a strong opening line for high impact.

Don’t invest all of your time and energy into a single ad creative that you think looks incredible, because it may just simply not resonate with others in the same way. Variety allows Meta to do the hard work and test every example and find the creative that is going to give you the best results.

We will go into the testing and optimisation elements to hone this variety shortly, but as a starting point build a number of ad creatives for the different stages of the consideration journey that offer your product up in a variety of different formats to your potential customer.

Examples of scroll stopping creative

Good ads are subjective but I’ve got a few examples of ads that I have genuinely stopped scroll for and I’ll explain why I like them:

This is a great example of a really simple ad that simply catches your attention, I’m already aware of Hard Lines so this just does a great job of nurturing me as a buyer and will help to ensure they’re top of my mind when I next need to order more beans.

I love this ad because they’ve used a 2-star review to be humorous but it also caught my attention. It’s a confident strategy but in my opinion it has paid off and makes for a scroll stopping and engaging ad.

This is one of Huel’s longest running ads so that tells you that it’s successful and will be attracting conversions, this a great use of a before and after ad that clearly demonstrates the value of Huel and why it’s an attractive product for some.

Finally, this is an ad that is just generally well designed. It clearly communicates that it’s a highly reviewed product and the chair is still the hero of the image. It makes me immediately want to buy the chair!

Another great way to find inspiration is to look at your competitors on the Meta ad library. If they have an ad that has been running for a long time, then chances are that this ad is giving them good results and they’re sticking with it! Have a look and try to understand what you think makes it good and impart those characteristics into your ad. 

Learn, optimise, and adjust!

We went through the data side of Meta ads previously in another blog, but when building excellent ad creative there are some key metrics that allow you to understand the success of your ads:

• 3 Second Video Plays – shows the amount of times that a video has been played for over 3 seconds, if you compare this to your impressions it should give you an indication of if you’re video is stopping the scroll. If you have a high number of 3 second plays vs impressions that means you’ve got a good hook for your creative.
• Play Thru’s – the number of times the video has been played all the way through, compare this number to your 3 second plays, if people are making it to the end of your video you have done your job well! This means it’s an ad that people want to sit through. Well done.
• Frequency – Ideally you want an ad under 2 on frequency, if you have a high frequency this means that your ad is being shown to the same people time and again, it lowers your chances of conversion if you have a small target audience.
• CTR – Click Through Rate, if you are above 3% then that is optimal and above 6% that is excellent. This means that your ad is convincing people to go to your landing page and find out more about your product. Your ad has done it’s job!

There is so much to consider with ad creative, this blog will give you a framework to follow if you’re planning on running your own campaign in the near future.

If this all feels like too much, then please reach out and let’s make your life easier!