Improve Your Meta Ad Creatives in 3 Steps

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Today, we’re gonna talk about Meta ad creatives…

Every marketer and agency has their own approach to Meta ads. But sadly, most of the Meta ad accounts I’ve audited did not spark joy.

The most common mistakes include:

1. No proper naming conventions, the account is hard to navigate.
2. Campaigns are not reused but always launched as new, disturbing the algorithms’ learning.
3. Ad sets are not optimised on Sales but Clicks and Awareness.
4. Ad visuals do not follow the best practices, there’s bad copywriting and other visual-related mistakes.
5. Ad visuals are not tested on a regular basis.

It’s easy to point out some marketers’ and agencies’ bad work. It’s much harder to do it better yourself. 😓

That’s why I’ve chosen to write about one of the good Meta ad campaign management practices: continuous ad creative testing.

Managing Meta ad campaigns for my clients is one of my favourite things to work on. There are measurable results, lots of creative freedom, and I can spend time designing the visuals. 👩‍🎨

When I start managing a new Meta ads account, I design and launch new ad creatives every single week.

Below is the Meta Media Library of a brand whose ads I’ve been managing for the past 6 weeks. Note the number of different layouts and styles…

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Want to have an ad creative library that looks just as diverse?

Read on as I’m going to share some advice for ideating + designing new Meta ad creatives faster and elevating your ad experiments game.

We’ll cover three key points:

1. Learn to design your own ad creatives
2. Collect ideas in a structured way
3. Report on every single ad creative experiment

Ok, let’ go!

It takes me about 5h/week to research, ideate, copywrite and design a set of 6 new Meta ad creatives.

If this sounds like too little, there’s a reason for me being so fast:

1. I’ve managed Meta ad campaigns for 10+ years and know what kinds of headlines and visual layouts work best.
2. I’ve been designing Meta ads for 8+ years and have a personal template gallery in Figma.
3. I’ve learned the basics and shortcuts in Figma to give myself complete creative freedom (v.s. counting on a designer who’s always too busy)

(I even designed my own literary blog from zero. See it here.)

This is going to sound uncool and time-consuming and not a low-hanging fruit but…

In order to become a good Meta ad manager, you’ve got to become the creative director, copywriter, and designer.

When hiring a Meta Ads Specialist/Expert, I always expect them to be great at campaign management and at least two more things, e.g. creative director and copywriter. Alternatively, you can hire each one separately (but that’s just expensive.)

As you can probably tell, I’m all for organising marketing work. And I apply the same approach to my design work.

Tip 1: Whenever I run out of ideas, I scroll my favourite brands’ Meta Ad Libraries. My go-to brands include Squarespace, Canva, Grammarly, Revolut, Deliveroo, Vinted, Shopify, Spotify, and so on.

Tip 2: Create a Figma file where you design your ad creatives. Add all your ad example screenshots and other ideas into the file, so that you never run out of ideas.

For example, the ads below that I designed for Arbonics were inspired by the Meta ad creatives by other brands in completely different industries.

While it would be so convenient to just launch new ad creatives, let them run for a while (if they deliver good results), and soon replace them with new ones, there’s also a benefit to proper reporting.

If you document your Meta ad creative experiments properly, you’ll get:

1. A long-term overview of everything you’ve ever tested.
2. A quick comparison of the experiments’ and creatives KPIs
3. A collection of takeaways that helps you become better and not repeat the same mistake twice

I like to use Google Docs or Notion to document the hypothesis, results, and takeaways of my Meta ad experiments.

I also maintain a Google Sheets doc where I add each experiment’s per-ad KPIs (example below).

Documenting each week’s experiment takes me about 50 minutes. It’s well worth the time as designing and launching ads takes 5-10x as much time. By having a better understanding of what works, I’ll save hours and hours.

Check out this article with 205+ Meta ad examples to get your brain started in ideation.