How To Set-Up Facebook Dynamic Creative Ads

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Create A CBO

The first thing that you need to do is to create a CBO, which is a campaign budget optimization campaign. 

What that means is that you're controlling the budget for the whole campaign versus an ABO, which is an ad budget optimization. It just means that instead of controlling the ads that go to that particular audience, you're telling Facebook that you have control.

To do this, you want to go to create campaign. 

Make sure that you choose conversions. Big mistake that people make is going for store traffic or just traffic in general, go towards a conversion campaign. 

Set it up as a new campaign. Make sure that you turn on this campaign budget optimization. The on button should be there. 

Set your daily budget. 

One thing that we would tell you is to make sure you don't touch anything else at that point because there's nothing else you need to change. A lot of people try to change things because there's so many buttons and they think that they should push them all. You shouldn't. 

Targeting

Step number two is targeting. Not specific, not general, just letting Facebook do its work. 

We’ve talked about this in previous videos and you may or may not know this so we’re going to explain it real quickly. Facebook is an OCPM platform, which means that it's an optimized platform for you, for your audience, for everybody who's on there. So when they pull out their phone, or it could be on the desktop. We still see a lot of people who are on desktop. When they pull out their phone or look at their desktop, they have different experiences. We all go to different websites. No one has to share what websites they’re going to, but they're specific for you. But what Facebook does know though tracking and it is following you around everywhere. 

As just a side note, you should be OK with them following you because it's just a personalized ad experience. It  doesn't mean that you're not going to get ads. It just means that the ads are better for you. So if you're looking at cell phone cases, you probably want ads about cell phone cases. That is what the OCPM platform allows you to do. 

So when you're setting up targeting, label it however you would like. We’re going to call this Broad because we’re running to a broad audience, meaning I want Facebook to go and find people who they know have looked and have been to websites that we want people to retarget from. 

So if you’re going to look for shoes, we want Facebook to find other people who went to a shoes website so they can show them my shoe brand. Clothing, same thing. Doesn't matter what the product is. 

The trick here, though, is that you should narrow by a few things if you know your audience. If you don't, then leave it at 18+. But if you know that your audience is 25 years and older, then change it to 25. 

Location. If you know that you're selling hats for people in Tennessee, why the heck would you go and run hat ads for somebody who lives in Florida? You wouldn't do that. So change the location. So that's one of the other things that would change 

Then gender. So if I'm selling women's clothing online, I'm probably not going to target men. But you're thinking, oh, but the husband may buy something for the wife. Well, that's really good thinking. And a lot of good husbands are out there, but they're not searching around on websites for women's clothing all day. OK, that's just not happening. So who buys women's clothing? Women buy women's clothing. So then you should change it from all genders to women.

So by doing that targets the audience a little bit more. But everything else, we're not going to go do interest groups. We're not going to go do all these other things. The reason why you don't do that is that Facebook creates interest groups based off of people who are searching for certain things or have taken certain actions. Well, guess what? Whether you liked a certain politician or didn't like a certain politician or loved him or whatever, it turns out that if you engage with it, you're now in that group. So not only are you a part of that group, but you may actually have people you're targeting to hate it. 

So if somebody if I'm talking to everybody who likes Nike, well, turns out there could be this group of evangelists who just hate Nike and they're all aboard Adidas train. And because they're all aboard the Adidas train, they hate Nike. So they talk about how Nike sucks or they don't like Nike. They don't really care. They don't care about Nike, but they're part of this group and you're targeting them. Well, guess what? Now, if you're targeting an ad towards somebody who doesn't like Nike saying I'm going to target people who are interested in Nike, you're going to get some negative feedback. And what happens with negative feedback when you get negative feedback on your ads, you get shown to less people, which means you're going to pay more for your advertising. 

So just a quick tip. Don't worry about the targeting too much. 

One thing you do want to change and one quick tip that a lot of people get wrong. Seven days after clicking, you want to change this.

You don't care about seven days after clicking. Most people make a buying decision that same day doesn't mean that they weren't looking before, but Facebook's finding them at that particular stage. So if Christian is looking for a t-shirt, he may have done it for three weeks prior to this, but Facebook finds him today and they say, hey, you were interested in other t-shirts. I'm going to show you this really cool t-shirt. And guess what he may buy today. He's not going to wait another seven days because Facebook found him at the right time and because they found him at the right time, you just want to look at a one day click. 

So what happens after they click? Unrelated to Facebook but super related to business. The only thing that you should be caring about is if I spend a dollar today, did I make two dollars today? Did I spend a dollar today to make three dollars today? So you want to see that in a one day click, did youI get results today and did you make money today? And if that's the case, that's what you’re looking at, you’re looking at that parameter only. You don't need to look at a seven day window because then your data is going to be skewed. And what Facebook's going to do is it's going to attribute the sale to Facebook when it could have happened through email. And then Facebook is going to say, hey, oh, the email got sent three days later. Facebook's on a seven day click. And guess what? Now you got two places reporting that they had the sale. You have two places of reporting on sale you can't track. Did Facebook work or did email work? The answer is they both did, but you need to give the data to Facebook and you need to be able to test your results from that. 

So when you're targeting, leave it broad and focus on age, gender, location and then choose a one day click. If you set that up correctly, you can leave it as manual placements or automatic placements, it doesn't really matter. You could just do the feeds completely up to you. So let Facebook do the targeting side of things. 

Adding Your Creative

Number three is adding in your creative,. You can add up to 10 images or videos and we would highly suggest that you do this. 

So if you had a chance to go play the lottery and you had 10 chances to put in tickets and then you decide you’re only going to do five chances because you like your odds, that's just basically what you're telling Facebook. So use all 10 options if you can. If you can't, no worries, but you should use all 10 options if possible. This gives you a higher chance of Facebook finding a winning combination for you. It also is going to allow you to do five sets of text and five sets of headlines. What Facebook's going to do, it's going to take image number one, text number one, text number three, text number four, text number five and then headline number one and image number three. And it's going to run into a crazy algorithm that nobody understands and it's going to figure out the right audience at the right place at the right time with which type of creative. 

If you've seen any of our other videos, the only way that you're going to win at Facebook long term is with amazing creative. What this allows you to do is creative at scale and not have to spend. Now, if you're CVS or Nike, if you're a billion dollar company, cool. You're probably not reading this blog, you're most likely a smaller brand and you don't have $500,000 a day to spend on that. You would have to spend too much money to actually do a correct split test and AB test to make sure that this works. Facebook's so smart that they created this dynamic creative ad, which you get access to, where you can literally go inside of there and set up ten different options and combinations and they're going to find the winner for you. 

To do this, in the ad that you are creating, you’ll go to Identity and select the page you will go to. 

We would select the page and now that we're in the ad level, again, labeled the ad however you like. 

We’re going to label it as the Dynamic Creative Ad and then do a date range depending on when you're running this, because dynamic creative is only really step one. Probably talk about step two a little bit later, but this is to test your creative to figure out which ads you're going to pull into another combination of winning elements. 

Underneath that, in the Ad Setup section, make sure to click the button under Create Ad so that Dynamic Formats and Creative is on. 

So now that you have the dynamic creative, you label it whatever you'd like. This one is based off of a collection. So it's literally a summer dress dynamic. You could do it by date range, completely up to you. For this particular brand we're switching out products so often that we just labeled it as summer and summer dresses. And so we're just constantly pulling in the winning elements and testing them. 

So you have a set up here, the format. You can do single images or videos. That's what we would suggest, because if you do that, that's what you can do. Basically you can copy whatever winning elements were in one of the ads and move it over to another ad set. Again, probably a step two. This is going to get your results as well. But that's like next level. We'll talk about that in another blog. 

So get to where you can select images, we have ten. You can have up to ten images. You’ll click select images or select videos, we have seven of ten running right now. All you need to do is drop in the images.

For text, we put in five different sets of text. 

We put in five different sets of headlines and we have them all going to one collection on their website. 

That's a trick too is that if you're testing one particular product set or collection, you probably want a space for all of those to be in one part of your website. So if you're selling shoes, you probably wouldn't do a dynamic creative of the shoes and hats or shoes and t-shirts. Just do one for shoes, do one for t-shirts, do one for hats, because it's going to send them to one particular page on the website. That's kind of the only downfall is that there's only one link that they can send to. So just be aware of that as you're creating these things.

After you've created these, one cool thing to do is make sure that you're figuring out which ones are the winners and which are not winners, which is what we're going to talk about here in a second. And if you figure out what the winners are or not the winners, you can switch them out. It's not going to have to relearn. Dynamic creative takes you out of the learning phase, which Facebook hates and does not like it. It just means it doesn't have enough data to make actionable results. It takes you out of the learning phase almost immediately. A lot of very good things that can come out of the dynamic creative, but the long term effects for it are super helpful because it's going to help you start winning at the creative side with Facebook. 

If you're a clothing brand looking to scale through Facebook ads, you should check out the video here.It's going to walk you through exactly how we were able to scale a clothing brand in the worst month for retail online. 

Figure Out What’s Working

OK, so this is the part you've been waiting for. Setting up your dynamic creative is step one, two and three. Step four or more so, a bonus tip, is that you need to figure out which ones are working or not working.

So if you're inside of your ads manager, typically you'd go to your resource center and look at performance, but go to the right hand side, the icon with the horizontal bars, you can scroll down to dynamic creative element. Here you will want to look at your headlines, your image, etc. For the purpose of this video, we're going to look at image. 

Now, if you have IOS 14 and are concerned, thinking it won’t let you see which images are working. Well, you can look at some insight there. So what Facebook is saying is, hey, we're not showing you much data, but what you can see is that these particular ads have spent more money. 

So this one right here, this top one has spent $604, the one below that $428. And then it just kind of drops below that.

So we have a majority of our spin happening in two elements. So that tells us that these two images are probably doing OK, these ones that are spent fifty dollars or seventeen dollars, not going to be as effective. 

And one other quick tip you can see here is if it's by image, we’re going to make a note of this particular image right here. 

That image is probably doing well, but we don't know if we need to get rid of it yet. 

What we can do, dynamic creative, and go look at text. Which line of text is doing the best?

Well, this is a clear winner. Must have trendy dresses for summer is spending $1000. The other one, $256, the other one didn't spend a dime, which means that OK, here's a clear winner and we're only testing three sets of text. 

So what we want to do is throw in two new sets of text and get rid of the bottom two because we have one clear winner. So we want to test four more options to figure out which text is going to do better, because how do you lower the cost with Facebook ads? You don't change a bunch of stuff, you add in new creative and let that be the determining factor. 

And one last tip here is not only check the image or the text, check the headline.

So clear winner here for us, too. There's only three headlines going on. We should have five. So there's a change we need to make there, but there's a clear winner. New summer dresses available now spent $860. One of them didn't spend a dime. And then this one over here is shop summer dresses spent $400. So we’ll probably leave those two and then bring in three new elements. 

The goal is to just continue to get more efficient with your Facebook ads and hopefully this will change. But previously you could actually see how many clicks and how much money was attributed to each one. And this is why you have to go a little bit deeper. But the data is still here for us to make very educated decisions on what's going to work, because Facebook's not going to spend money unless it believes that it can take action and get a result. 

So very clearly, you can see here this one went to 36,000 people and this went to 20,000 people. This third one went to one person on this one, so they don't feel very confident with that headline. So that is how you're going to be able to test your creative and lower cost.

We can see our purchase here is $27. Tomorrow, our focus would be to add a new creative to get that down to $25. It's not always spend more money to become more effective at ads. It's how can we be more efficient and then scale. That's how you grow online through Facebook.

All right, guys, thanks so much for reading. If you would like to watch our “How To” video on this subject, you can watch it here. What I want to know from you is what kind of brand do you have? Are you a clothing brand? Do you sell hats? Do you sell desks? What kind of brand are you? Drop a comment in the video. Maybe somebody will network with you and we want to know so we can create the best type of content for you. 

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