After contract signing for Creative Studio, a Creative Lead and project manager will be assigned to your account as primary contacts.
You will:
We will:
The above process typically takes between 5-7 days.
What comes next?
As we work through the creative & media buying strategy doc, we conduct calls to discuss what works/what didn’t work and make adjustments.
The strategy docs are constantly updated/modified based on performance, network changes, and other external factors.
Machine learning has simplified the optimization algorithms at Facebook & Google UAC. With automated algorithms, creative has become the driver of performance, but….
5% of creative will outperform the best ad in your portfolio. That means only ~1 out of 20 concepts perform well.
Compelling creative CANNOT be generated with machine learning. Our objective with creative testing is to move quickly, limit non-converting spend by prototyping ads.
This allows us to work quickly to uncover winning concepts that can be enhanced with colors, fonts, and materials to reach brand compliance once it is proven, would be very helpful.
In fact, it would be more financially efficient, if you could approve imperfect ads (perhaps incorrect fonts, colors…). Allow us to launch these ads quickly, gather learnings and we’ll adjust for the next set of ads. This will allow us to explore more creative concepts quickly, uncover winners and ultimately deliver better results.
To illustrate the scope of the creative testing challenge, here is a gaming company that spent > $15mm on Facebook.
As you can see a vast, vast, vast majority of ads bomb quickly.
We don’t have “test” access but please feel free to register here. You can either connect a Facebook account or not. If you do not connect an account you won’t have access to advanced reporting, our AdBuilder and you won’t be able to upload to Facebook / Instagram or see your media library but the rest of the creative studio UI works fine.
We don’t have a video demo but here is online help.
Here is a basic overview video.
Absolutely, any video/image we design you have the right to use however you want for FREE across any network.
To be clear, we do not provide source materials. (i.e. we are not sharing Photoshop files or Adobe After Effects source files) but any concept we create, you are free to use, create variations, etc.
We provide resizing services to help you get to other networks or your internal team is free to copy the idea and do it themselves.
Consider us an extension of your internal team (aside from source materials).
Absolutely, any video/image we design you have the right to use immediately on any network and we encourage you to do that!
With our best-managed relationships, when we get a winner, we share it and when they get a winner, they share it with us. The idea is to benchmark your internal team’s performance and help improve media buying and creative concepts and variations.
This question is nearly impossible to answer in the abstract. The number of videos we produce is governed by your media test budget that we have to spend and your appetite for financial risk / non-converting spend.
We’ve found that on average there is a 95% failure rate for new creative. That means only 1 out of 20 videos will become a winner – which results in a lot of non-performing spend for media testing.
For example, if we guaranteed 10 videos per month, that number may be too high given a budget of say $200K / month as we may not be able to run them while hitting ROAS metrics.
As important, if we produce a bunch of creative quickly, we’d make assumptions on what works vs using data to guide our process. As a result, we may end up with poor performers that we would not have designed if we had the data before creative ideation began.
Most importantly, we find focusing on a data-driven, quantitative creative testing process very productive. We like to get data to understand what is working and not working and use that data to guide our creative process. Ultimately that saves you media dollars and us time (win-win).
Bottom line regarding creative volume, when we’re running managed services, we do what it takes to be successful.
For some of our large clients, we produce 40 videos/month but their spend in the 7 figures so we have the budget to test without crushing ROAS.
We’ve built our reputation by doing whatever it takes to get to scale and to sustain it. Sometimes it takes a big effort in creative development, other times it is significant account rebuilds for media buying.
95% of all new creative concepts and variations fail. Our objective with creative testing is to move quickly, limit non-converting spend and prototype new concepts and variations.
Don’t let brand requirements force you to noddle all the losing ads and reduce the speed of testing.
If we can win prototype ads, you’ll save time & money. Losing prototype ads typically see < 50,000 impressions, so brand exposure is limited. 60% is our target brand compliance.
As a client, expect small errors: fonts, colors… but don’t freak out, test imperfect ads, kill the losers and enhance winners.
Most companies have people who are driven by their “left brain” or their “right brain”.
We have found that many companies/people what to bring their “titles or opinions” to a data fight.
Almost everyone’s opinions are wrong.
The key to successful performance advertising is to be data-driven, A/B test creative & winning elements, uncover performance drivers and let data determine what to do next.
We believe in a process we call “Quantitative Creative Testing”. It isn’t just a/b split-testing and it isn’t quite multivariate testing. It’s specifically designed for creative production of Facebook and Google UAC ads. There are two types of ad creative tests: Concepts and Variations. Here are the key differences:
Concepts are brand new, completely different ads. They’re big “outside-of-the-box” approaches that can result in large improvements to revenue (or in some cases, large losses). Concepts are the key drivers for creative success but must be used in a limited way. When they fail, they tend to fail badly.
Variations leverage pieces of past, high-performing concepts. So, you reposition existing elements to create something similar but new. Variations don’t have big differences like concepts, but because they’re based on high-performing ads, variations typically generate smaller, more incremental wins and/or losses.
The general idea is to follow the 80/20 rule—spend about 80% of the time optimizing the best ads and creating new variations. This limits the amount of non-converting ad spend and allows us to prototype and iterate new ads quickly. The remaining 20% of the time should be spent toying with new concept ideation; big, grand ideas that often fail but sometimes generate a 100x ad.
Our Quantitative Creative Testing framework is based on 5 phases:
Whenever we start a new client, we begin by evaluating the ads of their top competitors. Why? The success rate of new creative is 5%, we recommend that you study your competitor’s ads to see what they’re doing. If they are spending a lot on a concept that you are not, it is logical to assume they have the same 5% success rate and they’ve identified a winner so you should “borrow and customize” the concept.
Following this process will provide you an endless supply of “tested” concepts ready for you to customize.
HOWEVER… we’ve found that it really matters who is doing the evaluation. UA managers are typically not good at creative analysis and creative staff are usually not good at analytics. The ideal person would have both quantitative & creative skills or you’ll review in a cross-functional team. The objective is to reject as few ideas as possible so you can radically increase your creative vocabulary and testing harness.
To assist in your evaluation, we recommend evaluating Facebook ad spying tools: Adsviser2.0, Social Ad Scout, PowerAdSpy, Connect Explore, SocialPeta, AdSpy, AdSwiper, etc.
If you think of each of your ads as a landing page, your objective should be to break down each ad into pieces. Test each piece to determine its value and financial contribution. Once you know which ad is the primary performance drivers, you can leverage those learnings to keep your best concepts alive indefinitely.
Here are some of the elements we like to test:
There are a lot of elements to test, but here are some of our favorites:
Facebook’s creative studio developed a creative testing framework called “Create to Convert” by evaluating 1000s of ads from top advertisers. Here are the core elements of their framework:
“Create to Convert” offers multiple ways to create videos ads from still images:
Concept ideation is where we attempt to produce a breakout, 100x ad. About 95% of ads will fail to outperform existing ads, with some failing hard. To minimize losses, about only 20% of creative work is focused on new concepts.
To develop these new concepts, you’ll need to:
There are two levels of AdRules (1) Advanced Reporting only and (2) All Features.
If you’re a managed service client, you’ll get 100% free access to advanced reporting while we’re running managed services for any / all of your accounts. Our reporting engine is simply the most advanced tool in the industry.
For non-managed clients it is only $99/month.
If you’re interested in using AdRules to build, launch, manage and report (full features), we offer a 60-day free trial and then it is only 0.7% of spend with a hard cap of $15K month for those spending > $200K / month.
It is by far the least expensive / most advanced tool in the industry. If you’re using our tool while we’re doing managed, that same team will help address your questions. By the way, we have many clients using us for Managed services and also using and paying for AdRules – it is much faster than using Facebook’s Power Editor.
Ready to get started? Contact us today to learn more about our Creative Studio.
