4 Lessons for Making Better Ad Creatives
People make ad creatives to be seen so it’s understandable why you’d want to make sure that the ones you use are successful. You only need to go so far to look at some of the top performing mobile ads to find out what works and what doesn’t work.
Thankfully, with everything connected today, you can take a look at many different ad creative design measures, see what works and implement these things yourself, for your own benefit. We’ve done exactly that, and we take a look at ad creative optimization, how it all works and give an ultimate answer on the best ad creatives.
Ad Creatives
There are three major ad creatives in the world of advertising right now and most agencies and publishers will master these three types, use them all together and capitalize on the results.
Concept Ads
These are the big money, absolute defining ads at the top. They are expertly produced and put together as finished products and are usually driven hard. They often deliver a crucial message on a certain subject. One such example, is how Netflix concept ads were used to post spoilers on the streets. During the lockdown of COVID-1, people were meant to stay home. The end goal was that if you went out, you would get hit by spoilers from popular Netflix shows. Pretty strong stuff.
Content Ads
Once you’ve seen and thought of a concept ad, the content ads are the ones that use high quality content to deliver a message. It’s usually something that an end-user can engage with by reading, sharing, or commenting. These can be seen mostly on social media sites and generally create interest.
Commerce Ads
You’ll see these almost everywhere. They pop up when you don’t want them, if you’ve searched for some type of brand or similar, they’ll follow you around the internet. You don’t want to see them but sometimes they work.
Images and Recognizing Them
A post from a few years back at MIT said that the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds. That doesn’t mean that this is all you have, but the quicker something can be identified, the better it is for your creative. You could have the Game of Thrones writers (before season 8) putting your copy together, but if you’re using the wrong image, it’s not going to get the desired result.
Use existing brands to leverage creatives. When you have something thats recognizable, then you’re already in the mind of the people seeing the creatives. It’s quicker to grab the attention that you want, as long as it’s not false information.
Text Can Help, But Also Hinder
Avoid a lot of text on images and shorten text as you can. Facebook introduced the 20% rule for a reason, where 20% of an image wasn’t allowed to be text, and images on Facebook Ad were rejected because of it. However, since then, it has relaxed somewhat, making it more of a guideline.
This one serves as an example of overused text
Mobile Marketing Association research showed that it takes almost eight times as long for people to recognize desktop ads than mobile. Keep the text short and clear to get the message across.
Placement is Key
Websites usually have different spots where you can advertise and picking the correct placement is key in making it a success. People aren’t buying on mobile and the conversion rate is abysmally low when compared to PC or desktop. The mobile’s share of purchases online is just 13%, meaning that people definitely browse on mobile, but are less inclined to buy. Sending people an ad for a product that would head to a basket is a waste of time on mobile, so rather don’t do that just yet.
What you should start to do is use a mobile news feed on social media to generate new attention to the product at the top of a funnel. From there, people can learn about it through content and can establish knowledge through it. Once there, feel free to retarget after working hours or in a different section of advertising, such as the right-column. But ensure the desktop news feeds are used to push conversions.
📝 Read more: The 4 Types Of Mobile Ad Creative Every Digital Marketer Should Master
Personalize
You should already know who your target market is and thus, will be able to create interest among people with smarter and more personalized ad creatives. You can set up product feed-based dynamic ad creatives that feature specific products. Feature items that are similar to the ones that people are looking for and pull people in with a CTA (call to action) that is direct and effective.
Our brains will expect some form of CTA, it’s proven psychology. You’re not trying to fool anyone, just making it the next logical step in how it should be done. Neil Patel has a fantastic piece on the psychology of the CTA.
