What kind of ad images work best? To be perfectly honest…there’s no straight way to answer this. The most effective ad images depend on your ad type and your target audience. We will cover different guidelines and recommendations in this section, but our best advice is to try A/B testing when targeting a new niche.
Use A/B testing to see which ad images generate more conversions!
You can create one ad set and two different ads; use the same text and targeting audience for each ad and only change the ad image featured. After 24 hours or so of testing you should see that one of the ads is clearly outperforming the other; you can then kill the losing ad and focus on scaling the winning ad. Once you know the “ad image style” your audience prefers you could further optimize your ads by featuring that image and use A/B testing on the ad copy.
Ad Espresso has some useful tips for creating effective Facebook ads. Facebook also has recommendations and examples for each ad objective as well as the recommended sizes for different ad images.
Tips for ad images
If you don’t have design software access or experience don’t worry. There are tons of ways to generate ad images. Check out our top 7 tools for creating ad images and check out Facebook’s ad image recommendations too.
- Remember the design should be the focus of the ad so make sure it’s easy to see (especially on mobile devices).
- If you notice your ad’s CPMs decrease over a long period of time (i.e. weeks or months) try refreshing your ad image!
- Lifestyle images are popular—check out PlaceIt to create custom images featuring your designs.
- You can check your ad image’s text rating before launch to ensure you’ll get the highest reach possible
Ad copy best practices
- Include a call-to-action and tell your audience what you want them to do, i.e. “Share with friends!”, “tag a friend who would like this shirt”, “buy yours now”.
- You can ask a question to engage your audience, i.e. “Would your husband love this shirt?” “How many of you would be proud to wear this design?”
- Use short sentences that are easy to read; it’s best to stack them using the enter key so your ad copy is not one line of text (as shown in the examples below)
- Always make sure the listing URL is accessible (either by clicking on the ad image or a direct link)—use links with GET Variables for better tracking.
- Check out Facebook’s recommendations for creating engaging advertisements.
