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Ad formats for your Facebook campaigns

The best way to get the most out of Facebook advertising starts with high-quality creatives. However, in practice, a creative can perform differently depending on your ad format, so it’s important to choose the right one for your campaign’s objective.
Facebook offers a plethora of ad formats and once you start playing around with them, you will quickly learn that some are more performant than others, depending on your different objectives. Here, we’ll mainly talk about the ad formats that are most useful for driving traffic and conversions for your website rather than for increasing Facebook likes and post engagement.

Simple Image assets

The easiest and probably most prevalent ad formats are Image and Carousel ads. These formats are simple to use because you only need images, titles, descriptions and links. One Image Ad shouldn’t take you more than two minutes to create, whereas Carousel ads are essentially multiple Image Ads in one and would take slightly longer. Both of these are good for achieving objectives such as generating traffic, leads and conversions for your website.

Video or GIF assets

The go-to format would be simple Video Ads. This format is just as easy to use as Image Ads and is one of the best performing formats on Facebook. Videos used should ideally be short in length (under 10 seconds), with good rhythm and limited text. Too much text in a Video or GIF could lead to your ad being served less by Facebook. With Video Ads, you can also choose to use formats such as Carousel or Stories, the latter being a placement that is fast-growing on Facebook and has already proven itself on Instagram too. The reason that you might consider this as an ad format, is that you can use it as your only placement. It is always important to make a video that has the correct specs, which in this case would be portrait. We have discovered that Video Ads are best at generating conversions.

Different types of creative assets

If you have different types of creative assets, it’s a good idea to try different ad formats at the same time, within the same ad set. On Facebook, it is always good to test different formats to see which is most effective. Having both Image and Video Ads running in one ad set, at the same time, can be an excellent way to see what is best for your business and for your campaign’s objective.

More complex ad formats

If you’re not afraid of using more complex ad formats, then try Collection or Instant Experience Ads. These formats are good if you have multiple products or assets to promote. They offer more customisations with Title & CTA positions and formatting. There are three templates that you can choose from, or alternatively, do it yourself with a custom instant experience. This ad format essentially creates a mini-website for you, which usually looks better than your typical ad. However, due to this, it takes more than one click to get to your website, which can cause high bounce rates, even before the prospect reaches a landing page. We have often noticed that these ad formats are great for engagement but less so for conversion-focused activity.

Make sure to test your ad formats

If you have the assets, we encourage you to test every ad format you possibly can. Here at ESV, we provide our clients with catered insights, built through previous experience, whilst always encouraging them to test new formats and placements. Something that would not work for a certain business could provide excellent results for another. Moreover, giants such as Facebook and Instagram are constantly tweaking how their platforms work and it is very likely that a format that never worked out for you in the past could end up working six months later.

Do you need advice on which format to choose for your paid social campaigns? Get in touch through the contact form below and our experts will be in touch.

SOLVING YOUR FACEBOOK ADS ISSUES

Learning Phase - After initial creation, your ad will go through the ‘learning phase’; in which the conditions of the marketplace are being determined for optimum delivery. During this phase, you may see slow or non-existent delivery but this should pick up once the phase has ended.

Bid & Budget – Often the marketplace is overly competitive and your ad may lose out to those with higher bids, budgets and relevance. Ensure your bids and budgets are competitive with other advertisers that are targeting similar audiences. Testing the use of the budget optimisation tool and automated bidding can also help improve the delivery of a Facebook ad.

Audience Overlap & Relevance - If you are targeting similar audiences across different ad sets then they will compete against each other, which can result in under-delivery. You can check the audience overlap within the Audiences section of Business Manager (Actions > Show Audience Overlap). In order to avoid this, we recommend combining audiences with an overlap of +20% into the same ad set. In addition, the relevance of target audience is vital: too broad and your relevance score will be low; too specific and your ad may struggle to deliver.

Campaign Changes - Whenever you edit a campaign, ad set or ad it will re-enter the review process, followed by the learning phase. This will result in temporary under-delivery and constant edits may lead to the ad not delivering at all.

Policy Review - Any new Facebook ad is reviewed by Facebook’s internal policy team. This process can take up to 24 hours and if your ad is deemed to not meet the required policies then it will be disapproved and will need to be edited in order to align with Facebook’s advertising policies.

Payments & Spend Limit - If your account has several failed billing attempts, ads will be paused until the outstanding balance is paid. You should also be aware of any Account or Campaign spend limits set by the ad account admin. If the limits are reached then ads will stop serving until the limit is increased or reset.

Dynamic Product Ads - If your DPAs are not delivering, it is most likely due to a Facebook pixel issue. You need to ensure that ViewContent, AddtoCart and Purchase events are all set-up on your website.

CONCLUSION

Resolving any under-delivery issues with your Facebook ads ensures that you are effectively reaching your target audience, thereby maximising the returns from your marketing investment.

Still not sure why your Facebook ads aren’t delivering as expected? Get in touch through the contact form below and let us see what we can do to help.

Ad Formats For Your Facebook Campaigns