What is good ad creative?

Here at WebSavvy, we live and breathe paid advertising. We spend our days chatting and working with our clients to grow their businesses and often get asked  “what makes a good ad?”.  Although there’s nothing we’d love more than to send a link to our secret formula or wave a magic wand in the direction of the closest graphic designer, it unfortunately, isn’t that simple.

To make up for our lack of magic wands we’ve snagged some time with two of our Facebook Account managers, Ricki and Campbell to share their thoughts on what they believe makes good ad creative. Having spent 1000’s of hours talking with business owners and marketing managers about tried and tested approaches to paid advertising, this blog post aims to provide a springboard for you to refer back to when your next creative brainstorming session looms on the calendar. 

We’re going to kick this off with the basics, but if you’ve got the basics covered skip to the next section! 

You should begin with ensuring your ad creative is optimised for each platform you are intending to advertise on. Firstly, consider the specific size and ratio guidelines each platform requires of your content – we warned you that we’d be starting simple!! But ensuring your imagery is correctly sized helps to avoid images and videos that are stretched or distorted and aids in your ad being shown to your intended audience. These size guidelines are often updated so it’s a good idea to use a reputable source regularly to double-check.

It’s said a picture is worth 1,000 words and in the wonderful world of advertising the extension of this age-old saying would be that a video is worth 1,000,000. If you ever get the chance to visit WebSavvy’s buzzy office you’ll be sure to walk away muttering one of our favourite catchphrases “Show, don’t tell”. The reason we love this small but mighty saying is that it’s important to know that not all video content is made equal. Showcasing the features and benefits in an ad, quite literally shows your audience what they are missing out on by not visiting your website. In the event that you have no other choice than to tell everyone how fabulous you are in a video ensuring closed captions are included is imperative. 

Advertising is as much a science as it is an art. In the words of our account managers, Ricki and Campbell good ad creative is produced when you “go with your gut – but trust the data”. Having a solid and consistent testing method in place to gather data is key in not only creating good ads but identifying which are the best. 

“Test, learn, iterate” – Campbell

Think of your ad as the storefront of your e-commerce store. The very nature of online advertising allows you the advantage of being able to change the mannequins and signage at any time. Creating variations of similar ads by swapping out imagery, captions and targeting, you can begin to establish a data pool that can be used to identify what’s working and what’s not.  

Try to create ads for all your customers, not your ideal customer – your target market is just a small portion of your customer base (people want to see themselves in marketing)
– Ricki

As an agency, WebSavvy has the great honour of working directly with founders, owners and marketing managers who know their brand inside and out. More often than not our client’s initial direction for ad creative is correct. It’s up to us to spend the time testing, learning and iterating to find what works best. Each of our clients are unique in their own way however, in the spirit of our “show, don’t tell” catchphrase (merch coming soon!) here are some great examples of ad creative that can be a source of inspiration during those times of creative block!

Lastly, good ad creative doesn’t require hours of your time trying to reinvent the wheel – leverage and be inspired by resources like Facebook Ad library.

If you’d like to chat with one of our Relationship managers about how WebSavvy could help you with your paid advertising reach out to schedule a chat!