Megan Winter is a marketing strategist who specialises in Meta ads. In this piece, she explains what makes a successful Meta ad, breaking down a case study of a business she worked with.
Meta ads can drive significant growth for your business. They can also be a huge waste of time, effort, and money if they don’t hit the mark. I’ve audited countless ad accounts and there is one element ad buyers get wrong time and time again.
Now before I dive in, I must say it is important to make sure you’re ready for traffic by having your website, email automations, customer support, and organic marketing ducks in a row. And you need to structure your ads in a way that takes advantage of Meta’s powerful targeting abilities.
But there is one critical element of successful meta ads that is often glossed over, and that is the actual creative of that ad.
Abraham Lincoln famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
The creative is your axe.
How improving the creative can improve results: A case study
I recently worked with an Australian arch-support flip flop brand called Slappa’s Thongs. The business had been running ads for a while, but they weren’t getting a scalable cost per purchase.
Let’s look at the creative they were using.
As you can see above, their ads were focused on the brand’s colour range and the fact that it offered free shipping. Both were solid offerings, but they obviously weren’t resonating with customers.
We used these original ads as a benchmark to test against, and dove into some research about what customers liked the most about the brand. We looked at Slappa’s Thongs’ existing customer reviews and feedback, trawled through the comments on their existing posts and ads, and spoke to users of their product. This gave us valuable insights into the benefits their customers appreciated most – like toughness, comfort, arch support – and what they were actively trying to avoid (pain, footwear slipping, etc).
We then created a suite of images that introduced the product and highlighted the benefits that were really important to customers:
The images were the only element we changed for this test: we used the same primary text for all ads. We also used the same budget, campaign structure, and bidding strategy as the benchmark ads.
The outcome
By testing, measuring, and refining Slappa’s creative we were able to uncover which creative potential customers resonated with and converted from most. This resulted in a reduced cost per result of 86.67 per cent.
Curious which images performed the best? These two are currently getting the best result:
So, what next? We will take the learnings from these winning ad creatives and test different headlines and primary text, as well as create different creative types to test such as video.
So, what makes a great ad?
The job of any ad is to get the right people to stop their scroll, digest the content of that ad, and then click away from the platform onto your website. If it doesn’t do that, it isn’t doing its job properly.
A great ad:
- Speaks directly to your target audience. It should be so magnetic it attracts the right people and repels the wrong people. Don’t be afraid to be polarising. In the example above you can clearly see these ads are for arch support thongs. If you aren’t interested you will scroll on by.
- Uses your unique brand voice. No cookie-cutter copy or same-same creative allowed. We used slang in the ad copy above to reflect Slappa’s relaxed tone and Australian heritage. This copy works because it is unique to them.
- Talks about the benefits your products or service will give the buyer, not blab on about the features. We honed in on the benefits including “won’t blow out” because we’d discovered that this was a common customer frustration with competitor brands.
How to tell which creatives are winning:
Run a small test with a small budget (2000 impressions per testing asset produces enough data) and then analyse those results and see which creatives the audience engages with and converts from. Until you test, it’s just a guess.
You will be able to spot your winning creatives for a purchase campaign by looking at these metrics:
- Link-click-through-rate. Aim for 1 per cent or more.
- Conversion rate from click to purchase. Aim for 2 per cent or more.
- Thumb-stop-rate if you are running video. Aim for 30 per cent or more.
- The cost per result. Your “good” will depend on your average order value, life-time value of your customer, and your gross profit margins.
While there are so many moving parts to master when running successful Facebook and Instagram ads, I challenge you to focus on nailing your creative and see how your results improve.
