by Mark Sloane, Guest Blogger
Mark Sloane is a content strategist, writer, and digital media producer based out of Silicon Valley
Facebook is still the most popular social media platform with a massive 1 billion registered accounts and 2.23 billion monthly active users. Facebook offers a plethora of ways for us to create ads and is continually innovating with new offerings. Although all the options can feel overwhelming, your ad creative doesn’t have to be complicated to get great results.
Remember the KISS principle? “Keep it simple, stupid” is a design principle that states that most systems work best if they are simple rather than complicated. In keeping with this idea, we’re going to look at how simplifying your ad creative can have some great benefits.
Check out these easy rules to create simple but effective ads
- Use four or five words for the headline. Facebook recommends no more than 25 characters.
- Keep the news feed link description short and to the point. Facebook recommends no more than 30 characters.
- For the text, stick to 125 characters or less.
Sticking to these rules will ensure that everything will fit nicely if you want to use the same ad creative for mobile.
In this example we threw the rules out the window. What results is a loss of impact, and a truncated link description that loses the reader.
The link description is lost altogether in the mobile version when the main text is too long.
Keep Things Simple, and Create More
Ad fatigue is a real thing! Ad fatigue happens when an audience sees the same ad over-and-over. They end up ignoring it and may even hide it from their feeds. Ad fatigue turns off audiences, hurts ad performance, and increases CPCs.
By sticking to these simple rules, you can create high-quality ads faster, so you have more to rotate and test. By keeping things simple, you’ll be surprised at how much time you can save.
Simple Ads Are Easier to Test
The more simple your ad creative is, the easier powerful optimization methods, such as A/B testing, will be to achieve. A/B testing is when you present two or more versions of an ad to see which one performs better for your chosen marketing goal. You can tweak aspects of your creative, such as the image or headline, or tweak the audience. A nice thing about Facebook A/B testing is that Facebook can automatically boost the spend behind the more successful version.
To wrap up, keeping your ad creative short and to the point helps you to focus your intent, allows you to spend more time analyzing your ads’ performance, and makes it easier to draw conclusions from the data. Once you’ve found a simple creative formula that works for a particular audience, you can experiment with breaking the rules. But, we think keeping it simple, writing less, and getting great results is a win!