Dynamic Creative: How To Improve Your Facebook Ads

Working in social media it is very easy to talk about how to portray yourself online, how to sell your business and how to reach your target audience. All of these things are very important and the first things that your business will need to work out. However, if you’re a little bit further into your social media journey and feel like you’re plateauing, it can be difficult to find any tips and tricks that are relatable. But what I’m going to talk about today is the third love of my life (after Netflix and pizza), and that is something called dynamic creative. In fact, let’s just broaden that to dynamic assets.

It’s important here before I start to make a clear distinction between dynamic adverts, and dynamic assets. Dynamic ads is usually how you refer to the adverts that you build using a catalogue, that you have imported from your e-commerce website, that you use to retarget people that have abandoned baskets or you’re looking to up-sell to. Think the ASOS ads that follow you around Facebook and Instagram. Dynamic creative is different.

So what is dynamic creative?

Dynamic creative really is what it says on the tin. Your creative is dynamic. The reason I broaden this to dynamic assets is because it is not only your creative (imagery, video, carousel etc.) that are dynamic, but you can extend this to your CTA button, your headline, your main copy and your image. You add in multiple options for each of these, and Facebook automatically generates different combinations of all of these, serving them to your audience and allowing you to work out what is performing best.

So why should I use dynamic creative, I can just use split tests?

Wrong. A/B tests are great, but their efficacy is slowly dying out due to the introduction of campaign budget optimisation (one of the other great loves of my life) and dynamic creative. When you split test, you can only test one component e.g. creative. But to make it a fair split test, you would have to manually create every combination of 10 headlines, 10 main copies, 10 images, 10 videos, 10 CTAs etc. etc. etc. You get the point, it’s a lot. With dynamic creative, you add the options in once et viola Facebook does the rest of the work for you. But dynamic creative is not just amazing for testing …

Dynamic creative can stop your audience getting bored!

If you run lots of social media advertising campaigns, you will be familiar with frequency. Frequency is your best friend and your worst enemy. If you take a look at your best performing campaigns in terms of ROAS, it will probably be your retargeting campaigns. However, take a look at your frequency – I bet it’s over 10, maybe even 15. If you have any phone call with any Facebook Marketing Expert, they will immediately tell you to bring that down to 2.5 max. Why? Because if your audience is seeing the same advert 15 times on average, what is the likelihood that they will eventually be sick of your adverts and hide you from their feed? Quite high. That will immediately affect your quality ratings and subsequently, your performance.

“But my retargeting campaign is giving me the best return?” Exactly. So how do we ensure that this audience, that clearly is converting well, doesn’t get bored and hit that pesky ‘hide’ button? Dynamic creative! If there’s over 50 variations of your adverts, if they see your ad 15, 20 times, they’re still not exhausting all the combinations available. This leaves you with an engaged audience and a shed load of data.

Ok you’ve convinced me, how do I start using dynamic creative?

It is quite simple, and you’ve probably skipped past it whilst designing your adverts a hundred times before. When you’re building your ads on the adset level, right near the top will be this option to turn on dynamic creative. Once you’ve switched it on, you then create the rest of your adset like normal, and when you’re at the ad level it will say ‘+ option’ under the headline, image, copy etc. and that really is it. Add in all your options. Add in the CTA buttons that you really don’t think are going to work but they potentially could, add in the long copy that you’re sure goes against all best practices but you never know, it might work! Every audience and every campaign is different.

All that’s left to say – you’re welcome.

There you have it, my all time favourite Facebook ads feature. I’m sure I could ramble on and on about it, and give you some amazing stats to back up my big claims. If you want to find out more about Facebook advertising, get in touch.