What’s the most important part of Facebook ads? The creative.

How can AI help you boost the creativity of Facebook ads.
When it comes to crafting the perfect Facebook ads marketing campaign, you’re immediately faced with a huge number of variables: Are you targeting a specific, niche group – or a broader audience? What type of Facebook ad are you going to use? What tools are you using to give your campaign that extra push? 

But, despite the fact that new innovations, trends and technologies keep making the industry more and more complicated, a fact remains the same: When it comes to our ads, the creative is the most crucial element. 

The creative is crucial
Forgive me if that doesn’t sound very innovative, but it’s something we may need reminding of.

The importance of the creative in marketing has long been a fact, and in 2006, a Project Apollo survey found that 65% of a brands sales uplift came from the creative.

Of course, the marketing and advertising industry has undergone radical transformation over the last decade meaning that other variables in ads have become more important. Yet a 2017 Nielsen survey still found that the creative is responsible for the largest contribution (47%) to sales from that ad. Other factors that are often far more revered in marketing today were much less responsible for success, such as reach and brand, which contribute 22% and 15%, respectively. 

“While the equation today involves several factors, good creative is still the most important element,” concluded Nielsen.

Yet, despite the data and – frankly – common sense pointing to how utterly key the creative is to the success as a campaign, it’s still a fact that’s been taken for granted. Targeting, for example, receives huge amounts of attention from performance marketers, with 55% saying their focus is on using data to target their audience better in the next year – despite it ultimately contributing just 9% to the overall success of the ad. And that focus on data might just be what’s leading people to undervalue the creative. 

Data and the creative
The ‘data boom’ that has swept through the industry over the last decade is, in large, responsible for the declining focus on the ad creative. With data top-of-mind for marketers, the spotlight has shone on results, instead. 

The problem is this means we’ve reduced creativity, what’s supposed to be central to the creation of Facebook ads, to the lowest common denominator. And we’ve overlooked the relationship data and creativity can have by ignoring one crucial piece of the puzzle: Content data.

The imagery used, the layout, the copy and the colours of the ad – to name just a few elements – are all powerful data points, especially when combined with engagement data allowing us to understand which features correlate with high, or low, performance – a process we call ‘semantic content analysis’. Utilising your content data allows you to implement the power of data-driven marketing, while putting creativity back into the heart of your Facebook ads.  

Collaborative AI creativity
Of course, semantic content analysis is all well and good when you’ve got just a few campaigns on the go, but analysing and correlating the performance of hundreds upon hundreds of Facebook ads is nearly impossible. This is where AI can step in to help, because it can conduct this process in minutes, making it an incredibly powerful tool that, when used collaboratively with a creative team or individual, produces amazingly high-performing ads. 

Our tool, Connect, is designed to do just this. Using your Facebook ads’ engagement data, Connect ranks and rates the creatives that you upload using semantic content analysis, so you can see what creatives will drive ROI, before triggering costly campaigns. 

To find out more, contact Jergan or see Datasine’s website here.