Creative Best Practices

Even the most well-thought-out campaigns' results are limited or amplified by the effectiveness of their ads. Successful campaigns require both effective creative and periodic refreshes to maintain peak performance.

This guide outlines essential strategies to optimize your creatives, build them for maximum impact, and determine when a creative refresh is needed to combat advertisement fatigue and re-engage your audience.

We strongly encourage regular creative swaps every four to six weeks to keep the advertising experience fresh for users. If you don’t consistently provide new creatives, the click-through rate (CTR) will continue to struggle monthly, even with regular optimizations for each campaign. People grow tired of seeing the same advertisements appear, so switching creatives with new messaging every month to six weeks is highly encouraged to maintain a high CTR. If you need new creatives made, we have display ad creation services available. We also recommend focusing creatives on ongoing deals or incentives the client offers to encourage people to click through. 

How we Maximize your Campaign’s Performance

We optimize your campaign in many ways before suggesting changing the creative to improve results. Any optimization our team implements is customized to each individual campaign and product. However, please see below for examples of potential optimizations.

Optimizations we Implement Before Reaching Out 

  • Turn off the lowest-performing advertisement group. 
  • Increase bids on top-performing devices.
  • Decrease bids on lower-performing devices.
  • Remove audience segments performing at a 0% CTR.
  • Increase bids on top-performing browsers and fold placements.

Optimizations we Implement with your Approval

  • New creatives.
  • Add in additional creative sizes.
  • Include Site Retargeting (pixel must be placed and firing).
  • Track conversions (pixel must be placed and firing).
  • Remove the block on gaming sites and applications.
  • Update geo-targeting or audience targeting.

Do’s of Creating Effective Creatives

  1. Clear and Concise Messaging
    1. Keep your message straightforward. Avoid clutter and focus on a single, clear message.
    2. Use attention-grabbing headlines that convey the value proposition or key message.
    3. Write concise and compelling advertising copy that speaks directly to your audience's needs and desires.
  2. Reflect your brand identity.
    1. Use your logo.
    2. Your visuals should align with your brand's personality and values.
    3. You want the feeling of the advertisement to show off the emotion your brand causes (joy, safety, nostalgia, pride, luxury, excitement, exclusivity).
    4. Your website and physical store are great places to begin getting inspiration for this.
    5. Use quick testimonials.
  3. Appeal to your target audience.
    1. Your advertisement needs to speak to your specific target audience.
    2. Different audiences have different wants, needs, and values. For example, younger audiences value excitement and novelty, while older audiences appreciate comfort, nostalgia, and security.
    3. Retargeted advertisements should talk to people as if they already know the brand well.
  4. Use strong calls to action (CTA) and make it the most visually prominent part of the advertisement.
    1. Ask them to do exactly what you want them to do.

      Examples of brand-awareness and consideration-focused CTA’s:
      - Learn more
      - See more
      - Discover
      - Visit
      - Check out
      - Find out
      - Explore
      - Compare

      Example of conversion-focused CTA’s:
      - Act now
      - Call today
      - Sign up
      - Click here
      - Book now
      - Save now
      - Try our
      - Shop here
      - Start today

Don’ts of Creating Effective Creatives

  1. Don’t forget to make your call to action the focus of your creative.
  2. Don’t mix your messages or ask the viewer to do more than one thing. Focus your advertisement on one topic and one call to action. If you want to include multiple topics in your advertising, create a separate ad set.
  3. Don’t overcrowd your creative with too many images or text.
  4. In most cases, don’t use QR codes.
  5. Don’t make text or images too small. Remember, this needs to be legible on small mobile devices. Before finalizing it, test this by looking at the creative on your phone. Can you read it?
  6. Don’t make your advertisements too visually different from your website. When the viewer clicks on the advertisement, the website needs to look like what they expected based on your advertisement.

Need Support for Your Creative or Campaign?

Please contact your campaign manager in the relevant campaign line item inside Ui.Marketing from the Orders tab. If you don’t yet have a campaign, please email us at Support@ui.marketing