More paid social ads wont fix a creative problem | MarTech

When paid social performance begins to decline, your instinct might be to create more ads.

That usually means a new variation of the existing creative, often with a different headline, a static image, or even a user-generated content (UGC) video that looks similar to the previous one.

You launch the new ads, wait for the algorithm to decide a winner, and then wonder why performance barely moves.

The problem is that you need more creative variables. There’s a meaningful difference between creative volume and creative diversity. You can have 20 ads running and still be testing the same idea in 20 different ways.

Creative diversity isn’t about developing an arbitrary number of assets. Instead, it’s about giving the platform and your team genuinely different inputs to learn from.

Creative diversity feeds advertising algorithms

It’s important for advertisers to feed the algorithm more signals. Meta increasingly relies on automation to determine which users should see your ads in an effort to achieve your campaign goals and respond to your optimization settings.

Broad targeting and automated, streamlined campaign structures have gotten more powerful because of the seemingly unlimited pool of behavioral data that ad platforms can reference when making delivery decisions.

Yet the algorithm can only optimize against the creative inputs you give it. If all your ads communicate the same messages and use minimal variations, you limit the number of hypotheses the system can explore. Testing a red background versus a yellow one won’t move the needle much.

Ultimately, different people can respond to the same product for completely different reasons, so personas also play a large role. One person may care about the price, while another may care more about convenience or a specific outcome. Give the system enough strong creative variations to discover which messages resonate with which people so the algorithm has more opportunities to make that match.

Aim for balanced creative testing

Making more diverse creatives doesn’t have to be a chaotic process. You don’t have to launch every idea that comes up or change everything at once.

Strategy is crucial because you need a clear understanding of your customers, your offering, and your business objective. You also need enough data to make your tests meaningful.

Aim for a balanced approach. Consider the number of meaningful creative variations you need relative to your ad spend and objectives.

A brand spending $2,000 per month doesn’t need the same creative testing structure as another brand spending $100,000 per month. There’s no universal number of ads that every account should run. The right number depends on budget, conversion volume, audience size, product capacity, and how quickly your account can generate useful data.

Build a creative portfolio, not a content treadmill

The strongest ad accounts treat creative as a portfolio of hypotheses. You may have some proven concepts that you continue developing, emerging concepts that you’re actively testing, and brand-new ideas that challenge your assumptions and break some best practices.

With this approach, you create a healthier creative system than you would with ads replaced one at a time. When media and creative teams successfully work together, the strategic conversation should be around what you’re seeing in the data and what creative variables you should introduce next.

Use creative testing to experiment with more ideas

Multiple ads can still represent a single idea. Take a brand with 10 user-generated content (UGC) videos, for example. Each one features a slightly different edit and shows a different creator wearing a different outfit.

But every video opens with the same type of hook, talks about the same product benefits, demonstrates the product in the same way, mentions the same offer, or targets the same customer motivation outlined in the brief.

Strategically, these videos represent 10 creative assets. But they aren’t 10 unique ideas.

Creative testing should introduce meaningful variations across elements to influence how someone responds to an ad. Here are some elements to test:

• Hooks: What earns attention in the first three seconds?
• Messages: What are you saying?
• Angles: What reason are you giving your audience to care?
• Creators: Who is delivering the message?
• Formats: How are you delivering the message?
• Visuals: What does your audience see?
• Offers: What incentive are you presenting to the viewer?
• Proof: Why should the viewer believe you?
• Tone: Is the creative entertaining, emotional, educational, aspirational, or direct?
• Context: Are you showing the product in a home, studio, real-life situation, office, or somewhere unexpected?

Don’t change all of these variables in every creative test. Change one at a time so you can understand what’s working (or not).

Think of creative in terms of concepts

A creative asset is a finished piece of content, and a concept is the strategic idea behind it. If your brand makes 12 videos, you might think you’re creating 12 new assets. In reality, they might represent two concepts, two creators, three hooks, and one core message.

A strong concept may deserve several executions. But you need to be clear about exactly what you’re testing.

If your goal is to understand why performance is changing, counting assets doesn’t tell you much. Instead, map your creative by the variables you’re testing. Here’s how:

While it’s helpful to have options, you don’t need to create every possible combination. The point is to build a portfolio where your creative isn’t saying the same thing over and over. This gives the algorithm more variety, which in turn can yield more and better results for your brand.

Which ad should you make next?

To decide on your next creative experiment, ask yourself which variables you haven’t tested yet. Suppose all your creatives lead with a product benefit. Test starting with the problem first, delaying the product reveal by a few seconds.

Or if your ads are product-focused, test lifestyle creatives. If every ad features polished brand content, seek out some creators and test creator content. If every ad has a serious tone, try humor if your brand can find an appropriate angle.

Instead of targeting a number of ads, think in terms of needing to test three new angles, two new formats, and several new hooks against the concepts that you see are already working.

Your winning ads should influence more tests

A winning ad should serve as the beginning of the next round of testing. For example, say you see that one hook significantly outperforms the others. Take time to assess why it worked.

Was it the visual? Or the creator, the hook, the customer problem it addresses, or the message?

Once you have an idea, build new hypotheses around those insights. Take a winning hook and test different angles.

If it was a winning angle, test different creators. If the message was the winner, introduce additional evidence, such as testimonials or demonstrations.

Avoid starting from scratch each time you need a new ad for your testing mix. Take what you learned and use it to generate your next, more informed hypothesis.

Treat creative variables as more ways to learn

The next time you think you need more creative, don’t immediately focus on how many new assets you should produce. Instead, assess what you’re trying to learn. Will you need new hooks, creators, customer motivations, offers, or ways to demonstrate your product?

Maybe you do need more ads. But if those ads aren’t introducing meaningful new variables, the volume may not give you particularly valuable insights.

The best creative strategies are built around developing enough variations to uncover what works, what doesn’t, and why. From there, you can build on those learnings. That’s the difference between making more creative and having a true creative strategy.