Three steps to optimize your performance with creative diversification

Marketers are maximizing their campaign performance by using a creative diversification strategy to give AI-enabled tools more ads to choose from. This helps more people get the right ad with the right message at the right time.

Creative diversification, or using a variety of ad creatives to reach different customers, is so vital to campaign performance that it is one of our top tips this holiday season. To get started, here are three easy steps to deploy more ads in your campaign and drive results:

Step 1: Launch new ads every week

First, launch new ads into your Advantage+ shopping campaigns with regular frequency. The best creative diversification leaders routinely launch new ads on a weekly basis but if you’re just getting started your schedule may look different based on your resources.

“As we see our industry enter the Algorithmic Era, our approach is to rapidly gather insights on what’s working and consistently create new ads,” said Clive Record at Dentsu. “By relentlessly testing and optimizing in real-time, we’re not just staying ahead of the competition—we're unlocking the full potential of our advertising campaigns to drive superior results.”

Creative diversification is a dynamic process and the goal is to understand what ads are resonating with your customers and upload new ads that are built off those insights to optimize performance. As a best practice, we recommend maintaining at least 20 diversified ads in Advantage+ shopping campaigns and dedicating 20-30% of your overall ad budget towards testing new ads.

Step 2: Analyze your ad performance and build your creative brief

After introducing new ads, the next step is to analyze what is driving performance so that you can create new ads rooted in those insights. We recommend reviewing a creative brief of your Advantage+ shopping campaigns in a weekly meeting with your ad buyer and creative teams. That could include agency partners and creative departments or a scrappy internal marketing team. The goal of this meeting is to identify your top performing ads within your campaign and use data to build educated guesses on why these ads are more performant.

• Your creative brief should include your insight into what’s currently working, a new opportunity or audience you’d like to reach and a creative direction that could resonate.
• An effective creative brief could include the insight that Gen Z customers seem to be resonating well to ads that feature creators as spokespeople. The strategy for your diversification could be to grow this incremental Gen Z audience by launching new ads with creators and arming them with messaging that highlights new use cases for your product.
• With a clear brief marketers can make decisions on what formats, creative and messages can best bring that vision to life for their intended audience.

Listen to Kitsch’s VP of Growth and E-commerce Yingying Kuang share her thoughts on keeping things simple to start.

Step 3: Create new ads with the help of creators and AI tools

Forget the idea of a "perfect ad" and focus on creating multiple, diverse ads variants with different attributes to reach incremental audiences. One way to do this is to build personas that outline different customer needs and blockers to purchase. By identifying these customer personas you can align different value propositions and messages for these audiences in your ads. For example, younger shoppers might be more receptive to deals or value based messages and older shoppers might be more receptive to product reviews and demonstrations to feel confident in making an online purchase. With your creative brief in hand, marketers can now make decisions on what tools to use to amplify their diversified message.

Creators and partnership ads

Creators can be effective messengers for your ads, helping unlock new incremental customers with their community and iterating your messaging for new audiences. When working with creators marketers can use partnership ads to note the advertiser and creator in the ad’s header. In a recent study, businesses that used partnership ads reduced their CPAs by 19% on average.

Lenovo recently incorporated partnership ads into their campaigns and saw a 22.4 point lift in brand awareness, 8.3 point lift in favorability and 3.9% lift in purchase intent.

In addition to partnership ads, marketers can also tap into tools for retail businesses and video for their campaigns.

Use Gen AI to optimize performance, faster

More than 1M businesses - of all sizes - are already finding value in our generative AI ad creative tools to aid in creative diversity, saving businesses time and improving the performance of their ads.

“Copywriters love to craft the perfect line of copy that connects with customers. What they don’t love is rewriting that copy 40 times for 40 different ad units as part of their creative diversification strategy,” said Tak Yan, Vice President Product Management, Meta. “Generative AI tools like Text Variation can help marketers iterate quickly while preserving their brand voice and tone.”

For example, digital marketing agency, Tinuiti, used text and image generation tools for their client, Unilever, to diversify creatives and drive more website purchases, resulting in an 18% increase in purchase volume.

Another example, a small business and e-commerce platform, ObjectsHQ, saw a 60% increase in their return on ad spend when testing the Text Generation feature in Advantage+ Creative Campaigns.

Dynamically use the right product creative for the right person at the right moment

With dynamic media marketers can upload product video and photo creative into a catalog and our AI will figure out what combination of creative works best for audiences. This feature is a great way for advertisers to tap into Meta AI and put creative diversification into practice.