How to Optimize Your Ad Creative with Barely Any Effort

No need to always reinvent the wheel. If you’ve gone through the stages of Rapid Fire Testing and have found a winning combination of ads, let those puppies run as long as you possibly can.

I’ve seen the same ad creative work for months and months across multiple accounts, EVEN during the Great iOS14 Scare of 2021.

Earlier this year, March-April-ish I saw the most disruption in accounts.

Now things are back to more consistent levels, albeit a tad more expensive than before.

I’ve implemented new ad creative with mixed results and everything just seems to go back to what’s already been proven.

Here are some ways to easily make variations of your top ad creatives:

1. The CTA Button: Don’t sleep on this. For Lead Gen, I’ll shift between “learn more”, “book now”, “get offer”, and “no button”. In fact, just the other day I duped the top ad in a med spa client’s account, swapped the CTA and BOOM - a wave of purchases at a third of the price of what was running.
2. Local Area Call-Outs: Take your top ads and add a callout to the beginning of the ad saying something like, “Richmond!”. Yes, all you gotta do is call-out the local area. You could then add in ‘homeowners’ or ‘residents’ if you'd like.
3. Finding the Buried Lead: Often, the best headline is towards the middle or bottom of a medium or long form ad. Find a juicy line in there, move it to the top of the ad above the fold. Of course, be sure that the ad still flows. It doesn’t have to be completely ‘united’ with the ad, but as long as it’s not awkward sounding you have a ton of flexibility in how your sentences transition.
4. The Ol' Flipperoo: Take part of the body copy that's above the fold and swap with your headline, thus making the headline now in the body copy above the fold. Since the most important part of your body copy is above the fold (typically), it basically acts like a subheadline would in a landing page.
5. Test Out Square vs. Horizontal Images: For a while, images that were cropped to be 1-1 seemed to always outperform. They just look so much better in preview and on the newsfeed. If you're cropping images when creating ads, test out the original version. I've found quite often the original will perform better than the 1:1.

So without having to start completely over in your ad testing process, write more copy, or get more images, you can really get the most of your top creative with some simple adjustments.

Simple, and extremely effective.

Heck, once you have these variations in the mix, you’ll give your main creative a rest which you can then flip back on in the coming weeks or months.