In this article about Ad Aesthetics, you're going to learn:

Just like with your ad copy, a good ad creative is essential to succeeding with Facebook ads. Some of the reasons why this is true may be obvious. Some of the reasons might not be!

One thing that we bet you didn’t know is that Facebook gives you more eyeballs and cheaper clicks for content that is high quality, credible, follows their guidelines and has good engagement. In other words, Facebook rewards good creatives with lower costs and more screen time. The same is true in reverse. Bad creatives get less screen time and higher ad costs. So, the magnitude of your ad performance is amplified by how good or not-so-good your ad creatives are.

Ad creatives, just like art, can be widely subjective in the ideation and creation process. However, with Facebook ad creatives, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but instead is in the eye of Facebook and Instagram users!

This is an overlooked principle of Facebook marketing because it’s difficult for most people, even seasoned veterans, to not pass judgement on ad creatives before having empirical evidence. What we mean by this is people who claim to be experts love to look at ad creatives and say that they are either good or bad. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what one person thinks about your ad creatives. What truly matters is what your customers think about your ad creatives because they are the only ones who are going to be seeing them, clicking on them, and ultimately buying products on your ecommerce site because of those ad creatives. The moral of the story is that true experts use data to cast judgement on predicting whether or not an ad is going to flop or succeed.

With that being said, based on the data we’ve collected, there are clearly some general guidelines that you can follow in order to prevent yourself from running a bad ad creative and increase your chances of striking gold. In this section we’ll give examples of what we believe are good ad creatives and bad ad creatives and then later on we’ll explain how to make good ones!

Were you expecting to find images in this section? Here’s the cold, hard truth: no one really knows what good and bad creatives are. Like we said above, your customers are the ultimate judge.

However, here are a few guidelines to follow:

Test styles and themes, but keep it subtle

Testing is great. You should always experiment with ads that look different from ones you’ve run in the past. However, don’t make them so different that they look like they were created for an entirely different brand. When your ads have absolutely nothing in common with your brand or your website, then you know you’ve gone too far.

Stick to a specific color palette

If you stick to a predetermined color palette for your entire brand, it becomes harder to make ads that are not aesthetically pleasing. When you limit yourself to the options that only exist within your brand’s color palette, color becomes one less thing you need to worry about getting wrong and will give you confidence knowing whichever option you chose was a good one.

Sizing

Poor sizing can kill a good ad. In order to avoid your ad looking stretched, squished, or just not correctly sized, build all of your ads in the format that you’re going to run them in. In Facebook this means that feed ads will be square (1:1 aspect ratio) with 1080x1080 preferred dimensions and story ads will be in the shape of a smartphone (9:16 aspect ratio) and 1920x1080 preferred dimensions. Starting with those dimensions as your base ensures that your ads will always look just right when you actually run them.

High quality images

High quality images will normally beat elaborate edits. What we mean by this is that sometimes no amount of editing can fix a bad picture. Images that are fuzzy, grainy, or low resolution make your brand look illegitimate, even if the creative is editing beautifully. Starting with high quality images and videos completely removes the possibility of this mistake and to be quite honest, many brands rely on quality images and videos over elaborate edits quite extensively. Many brands in the fashion and beauty industry sometimes edit ad creatives very little and instead let extremely high resolution and high quality images speak for themselves.

Gather inspiration, but don’t copy

Lastly, if you want to know what’s hot and what’s not when it comes to ad creative design, take a look at the most successful brands in your space and look at their ads. Whatever they’re doing, it’s working and you should learn from it! However, there’s a big difference between gathering inspiration and flat out copying (which you should never do!) and we’ll talk more about this in the section below.

Doing some market research can be great for giving you some inspiration. It can show you what’s working, but it can’t really show you what’s not working. Here’s why: you’ll really only be doing market research on brands that you know are doing great right now because the one’s who’re doing great are the ones that you’ve heard of. You can’t search for a brand that you’ve never heard of and you hear about brands because their marketing is working well!

It’s kind of a paradox that makes it difficult to find brands that aren’t doing well. So, always keep this in mind when doing market research. Sometimes it’s hard to tell a good ad from a bad ad when you can’t put them side by side when doing research.

The best way that we know to do some market research is utilizing the Facebook Ad Library. This is basically a database maintained by Facebook of all currently running Facebook ads. This means that you can look up your competitors using their search functionality and see all of their currently active Facebook ads.

Now, this doesn’t mean you know how well the ads are doing, but you can see the creatives and the copy. This is extremely useful when you’re having some writer's block or having a hard time figuring out just what exactly is performing well in terms of ad aesthetics, so you can search top brands in your industry and see what they’re doing.

This does not mean that you can just copy their ad creatives. This is plagiarism and in many cases if you’re caught, the other brand can take legal action against you. So, just to be safe, don’t do it! Instead, use this knowledge to give you some creative inspiration.

There’s a lot of talk about UGC these days. If you don’t know what UGC is, it stands for “User Generated Content.” Basically, it is a style of content that is (or appears to be) recorded with a phone or laptop, sometimes selfie style, where a customer who purchased a product or service gives a video testimonial about the product or service that they purchased.

How it Started

In the past, marketers have shied away from this type of content and for good reason. It didn’t work in the past! Social media users liked ads that were considered ‘beautiful’ in the traditional advertising sense.

So what changed? Social media changed. People stopped recording videos on their Flip Video (You remember those things? We do!) and uploading the videos to their Facebook page and started taking selfie style videos and pictures and posting them everywhere. Literally. On every form of social media people post selfies and selfie style picture and video content.

As this content grew in popularity with organic social media, marketers took notice. At first, customers would post videos themselves and brands would ask for permission to repost this content and they found out that other shoppers loved it!

Proof that UGC Works

Without a doubt, UGC is working. Here are some stats that we grabbed from a HubSpot article about UGC content:

Those are some powerful figures that can’t be denied. Customers are loving UGC and for good reason. It’s hard to believe what you read online, but hearing someone's voice and seeing them talk about a product? That’s a heck of a lot more convincing!

How to Use UGC

People trust people, not corporations. They want to see what regular people, just like them, talk about your product. This does not mean that they equally want to see famous influencers use your product. You need to be very careful to not equate UGC to influencer content because they are most definitely not the same and serve very, very different purposes.

Instead, use services like Billo or reach out to real customers, friends and family for UGC. The biggest thing about UGC is that it needs to be honest and spontaneous. It cannot be super scripted or overly edited. The purpose of UGC is to convey a sense of raw authenticity that shoppers can trust when watching the content. If they trust what the individual in the piece of content is saying, it allows them to put themselves in the other person’s shoes and make a decision of whether or not they want to purchase this product. It gives shoppers a sense of connection to a product that cannot be done with any other forms of marketing.

This is why it’s important to know your audience and your end user. If your audience is middle-aged men, then you need as much UGC as possible from middle aged men and middle aged men only. If your end user is still middle aged men, then you need to go after your target audience with content that still shows middle aged men.

For example, if you sell shaving cream and are targeting married women, that married woman is more likely to purchase your shaving cream if she sees UGC content of men that look like her husband or have a beard like her husbands or are her husband's age that are using the shaving cream and loving it. She sees her husband through the middle aged men in the content.

Pushing influencer content as UGC can majorly backfire. It all depends on who your audience is. If you sell cooking equipment and are targeting millennials who are learning how to become home chefs, you need to find very specific types of influencers to promote your products.

Picking the right influencers

A good example would be a TikToker that makes cooking videos or cooking tutorials. A bad example would be an influencer who makes hunting videos and field dresses a deer in their content. While some of your cooking equipment may be useful for hunters to prepare their meal, that type of content will likely not resonate well with your main audience and would be a poor choice of influencer to represent your brand. So remember, just because someone can use your product, doesn’t mean that’s how your customers will use your product.

Knowing when to use UGC over influencer content

Influencer content works great for certain brands, but in some cases it totally flops and ends up being a waste of time and money. Here’s the golden rule of influencer marketing: Your product has to be relevant to the content that an influencer is known for. Paying an influencer to push a product that is irrelevant to their content is the fastest way to flop with influencer marketing.

For example, if you sell silk eyelashes, there are tons of influencers that do makeup tutorials, some of which are specifically about lashes! This is an obvious product where you can find tons of influencers that have a following of people who’re interested in your specific product. But, not all products are like this.

The fastest way to flop with influencer marketing is to pay an influencer to promote a product that has nothing to do with the content that they are known for and that made them famous.

There’s a well known YouTuber that talks about cars. Many members of the car community trust his expertise about cars and car products. So, it would make a lot of sense for them to promote car products. However, one video from this particular YouTuber was sponsored by a company that made ecommerce software.

We found this odd. Maybe this YouTuber has demographic data on their audience and they know that many of their viewers work in the ecommerce industry? Even if that’s true, why do those people want to get ecommerce advice from someone that they’ve been going to for years to get car advice and entertainment? The short answer is: they probably don’t. If you can’t get influencers who are super relevant to your brand or product to promote your products, stick to UGC. It will give you a better value, almost always.