This association isn’t complete invalid, as agencies do build out a variety of ad creatives, but they are a function of brand exposure. And in the world of sales-focused advertising, the creative game is shifting. The heavy-hitter in direct response advertising creative is not a team of designers, but data-driven automation.
Dynamic ads for Facebook & Instagram utilize an advertiser’s product feed to populate product images direct into the ad template, allowing advertisers to build unique-to-user ad campaigns for large catalogs of products with little effort. However, product feed images can oftentimes be fairly bland and don’t always fit Facebook and Instagram’s image size requirements.
To solve these problems, we’ve built creative automation into our platform with Dynamic Image Templates (DIT), allowing advertisers to automatically adjust image size, overlay feed creative with dynamic elements, and test creative variations for best results.
Dynamic image templates are a type of dynamic overlay applied directly to your product feed images. This overlay can incorporate both static elements (like a logo) and dynamic elements (like strikethrough sales pricing) that will automatically update to display correct product info for the item presented. DIT can also be used to resize feed images, an issue advertisers most commonly face using dynamic ads for Instagram. Templates can incorporate borders that resize product feed images, avoiding any awkward cropping.
We have a variety of pre-made DIT template options to choose from, so even retailers without creative teams can benefit from this type of automation. For advertisers with more specific brand needs, we'll take your custom creative and set it up for you. After it's creative, it'll be available in our platform for continued use.
One of our clients, a large-scale online fashion retailer, recently reported the use of DIT in a prospecting campaign resulted in a 38% uplift in clicks and a 12% increase in conversion rate. On average, clients using DIT have seen an 18% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS).
DIT can be adapted to fit targeting strategy, whether you’re retargeting current web visitors or prospecting new audiences. Our clients have seen success incorporating a variety of product info, including categories, sale info, stock levels, and more. In using DIT, it’s best to test a variety of templates to determine what will work best for you. Speaking of testing…
Through our dynamic campaign workflow, you can create up to 10 creative permutations for a single campaign. This means you can test various overlays against your standard feed image to isolate top-performing design and product info.
On top of testing the actual overlay's performance, you can also test how different product sets perform with different overlays. Certain product groups might work better with different styles of creative or different supporting campaign info. In our campaign workflow, you can add up to 20 product sets, allowing advertisers to get granular in testing creative against product types. For products with multiple images within the feed, you can also choose to test displaying all available product images within the ad, against displaying the primary product image or displaying the primary product image with an overlay added.
These automated testing options make it really easy for advertisers to gain deep insights on the impact of creative. And with these deep insights, narrow in on creative that drives the most revenue.
Facebook recently released their own version of DIT called dynamic creative overlays (DCO). While more limited, dynamic creative overlays allow you to add price to your product image, and specify some basic creative elements like shape, font, color, and placement. Unlike DIT, DCO is applied at the ad-level, meaning the overlay will only be applied to the product set specified for your campaign.
While we’d suggest using DIT for more specific creative needs, DCO provides a good option for a last-minute campaign edition. Facebook’s DCO is now available in the StitcherAds platform.