When to Use Facebook’s Dynamic Creative Feature
If you’ve ever had to complement a friend’s cringe-worthy tattoo, or had a fight with your significant-other as to which poster to hang in the lounge room, you’ll understand that everyone has different aesthetic preferences.
The bug-bear of creative agencies and advertisers for decades, trying to pick what an audience will relate to or even like is a difficult, murky task.
Facebook’s panacea-like algorithm is here to help.
The premise is that through machine learning, the algorithm knows exactly what kind of content each user is most likely to like, click on, watch or share. I prefer short, emoji-filled captions whereas my mom prefers long-winded essays.
User A’s internet connection is bad, so she prefers simple images but User B has a short attention span so prefers short, brightly-colored videos.
Instead of producing 10 separate ads catering to every combination of content consumer, you, the advertiser, can upload several versions of your creative and copy.
Once your ad has won an impression in the ad auction, the algorithm generates a hybrid ad out of the options based on what it predicts that particular user will like.
Advantages & Disadvantages
Better results:
It goes without saying that showing someone the type of content they’ve liked in the past is more likely to resonate with them, but what that translates to in terms of ads is better CTRs (On average 2.2x higher than non-dynamic ads), and ultimately more conversions.
The flip side to this, is that Facebook whilst powerful, is not the all-knowing entity it wants advertiser’s to believe, and often gets things wrong before it gets them right.
This means the first 1-2 weeks of results are often quite unstable, and if too many options are plugged in with not enough budget, we have too little data to draw meaningful conclusions
Testing ability
The only way to accurately test something is to change only one variable at a time – so if you have several images, several texts, and several headlines, you can very quickly end up with dozens of ads.
Enter dynamic creatives – you upload all of your assets, and Facebook tests all the options in a rotating selection of combinations. The results are broken down by type of asset (so you can say goodbye to those pesky pivot tables).
Flexibility
Got a brand-new image you want to test ? No problems!
You won’t need to create a new ad, simply edit the existing dynamic creative and add the new image. Once you figure out that a creative isn’t working so well, you can also remove it from the selection without resetting the social metrics of the other combinations.
The takeaway: This dynamic-creative method has a plethora of benefits, which besides the obvious increase in results, includes the ability to test several creative angles in a structured way. No better way to end an office argument over the colour of a logo than to test it in real life!
Learn more about dynamic creative ads here. Interest in Dynamic Product Ads? Read our article about them here. (French). Want to talk customer acquisition ask for à free assessment here.
