Your campaign’s creative is the forefront of your product, this is how you capture the attention of potential leads and buyers. But you’re left with a question, how does one optimize their creative?
When it comes to optimizing your creatives, you generally have to look for 2 things, ad fatigue and effectiveness. Not to be confused with one another as it can be confusing as to how to identify whether your target audience is ad fatigued or your creatives are just not impactful enough to your target audience. But no worries, that’s why we are here to help you.
What is Ad Fatigue?
Ad fatigue is when your target audience has seen your ads one time too many and is generally now “bored” of it. This means that your target audience would end up not paying attention to your ads. This in turn will decrease your ad impression and actions taken for your ads and in the long run cause your ad performance to drop as it affects your ad relevance and quality score, which would have your delivery limited in the future.
Identifying ad fatigue
Identifying ad fatigue is rather simple, it involves looking at your frequency and quality scores and relevance score.
- Frequency > 2.0
- CPL has not increased
- First time impression ratio > 60%
- Quality ranking below average
- Engagement rate ranking below average (this can also be indicative of your ad not being attractive and enticing enough or what is shown is not relevant to the target market)
- This can all be seen on ads manager as your campaign is running, but worry not as well. As Peasy will generally let you know as well if you are due for a creative refresh in Peasy’s report.
What is ad effectiveness?
Ad effectiveness is how impactful your ads are to your target audience. Is the information in your ad copy enticing or relevant to your target audience? Is your creatives in your ads attractive enough to your target audience? You would think that this is pretty much a no brainer, but generally what we have seen to be a common mistake made by various businesses when coming up with ads is that they either have a cookie cutter format for all their target audience or their sales pitch itself is completely irrelevant to their target audience. Let’s take for example of a property ad that we have seen before, their target audience are the first time home buyers and high income target audience. Their ad copy entails the price and the features of the property, but the performance for first time home buyers is poor. Having taken a look at the metrics involved in measuring ad effectiveness, we found that the problem is most likely in the ad copy (the information they provide). A simple change in the ad copy to promote incentive programs or discounts for first time home buyers resulted in a boost in campaign performance. Personalizing your ads to a target audience is important, because what they care about may be different to the other target audience.
Identifying Ad Effectiveness
- Frequency < 2.0
- CPL has increased
- First time impression ratio > 60%
- Quality ranking below average
- Engagement rate ranking below average
- Conversion rate ranking below average
Now let’s move to optimizing your ads
There are various things you can do in optimizing your ads, you can mess around with formatting, ad copies and creatives. This usually is a very time consuming and lengthy process as it involves iteration after iteration to get it right. We can’t stress this enough that optimization is a scientific and methodical process, so test one thing and ONE THING ONLY. If you are testing ad copy length, make sure you only test ad copy length, if you are testing angles, make sure you are only testing angles. Testing many things at once will only serve to invalidate your experimentation because you have no idea what contributed to the success of your experiment and you have no clear understanding of the findings of the experiment.
Optimizing your creatives involves
- Establishing your Hypothesis
- Establishing your Methodology and Key Metrics
- Establishing your Hypothesis Testing
- Drawing a Conclusion
- Implementing learning’s in Creatives
Things you can optimize on with creatives
- Angles, in simple terms would be the theme of your creative. It is how you decide what you want to say and what you want to show to your audience segment. Let’s take for example first time home buyers, you create 2 different angles to appeal to this market segment. Affordable luxury and Attainability, your first angle is designed around the aspect that the property you are selling is a luxurious home with an affordable price tag while the other angle is designed around ease of ownership with an affordable price tag
- Creative format; either it be a video, a carousel or a single image ad
- Ad copy length, you can test on whether a longer ad copy or a shorter ad copy works
How to optimize?
We can’t stress this enough, we’ve seen this mistake done one time too many, when optimizing, change only one thing and one thing only. You want to take a scientific and methodical approach in finding out what works.
- Upload 2 different creatives with differing angles/format/ad copy, and assign both creatives to the same segment.
- Deploy and let the campaign run.
- Peasy will then decide based on campaign performance as to which ad is the better fit by stopping the least performing ad.