- Dynamic Creatives are touted by Facebook
as an automated way
to set up high-performing combinations of our Facebook ads.
They form part of Facebook's Power 5,
which is the way they recommend
setting up our Facebook ad campaigns.
But are Dynamic Creatives
really the best way to set up our ads?
Do they get us the higher levels of performance,
meaning the lower costs, that Facebook tells us they will?
Or are there some times
when you just shouldn't use Dynamic Creatives?
Stick around, because that's exactly
what I'm going to talk about in this video.
We'll walk through the pros and cons of Dynamic Creatives.
I'll talk about when I think you should use them,
when you shouldn't,
and I'll explain how I use Dynamic Creatives
in our own campaigns.
But before we do, if you enjoy this video,
all I ask is that you smash that like button.
And if you wanna hear more from me,
whenever I release a new video about Facebook ads
for online course creators, coaches, consultants,
then make sure you hit that subscribe button,
and hit that little bell to get notified
whenever I release a new video.
All right, so first things first,
let's talk about the difference
between a Dynamic Creative and a regular Facebook ad.
A Dynamic Creative is simply an ad
that allows us to upload a bunch of creatives,
meaning images and videos,
and a bunch of different text or copy combinations,
and from there, Facebook does the heavy lifting for us.
Meaning, Facebook will take all of those creatives
and all of those pieces of copy,
form different combinations,
and in theory,
it's going to optimize for the best performing combinations.
On the flip side,
when you create a standard or a single Facebook ad,
you put one creative, meaning an image, a video, a carousel,
and one piece of copy, one headline, and that is your ad.
If you wanna create more variations,
you have to create each one individually.
So what are the benefits
of a Dynamic Creative over a single creative?
You probably think, well, dynamic sounds great,
because that sounds really easy.
I just throw everything in one pile, Facebook does the rest.
And that is the premise of a Dynamic Creative.
That's basically what Facebook wanna achieve with these.
They want to make it easy for you
to throw a bunch of creatives and copy into one ad
and allow the algorithm to do the heavy lifting.
The idea is that you're leveraging the power
of Facebook's algorithm to find the best combinations,
and you rely on them
to then go and show those combinations more frequently.
Meaning you get the best bang for your advertising buck.
So that's sort of the core benefit,
and the other benefit is they're really easy to set up.
If you wanna set up a campaign
and you wanna test a bunch of things,
then these are really simple.
You just click a bunch of images, select them all, and boom!
You've got multiple creatives there to test, and off you go.
And that's all great, in theory.
But let's talk about the disadvantages now,
and why the theoretical benefits don't always pan out
as actually being benefits.
Facebook tells us that Dynamic Creative make it easy
to find higher performing combinations
of creative components and drive higher performance,
but that is no longer the case.
We can't actually find
our best performing creative components anymore
because of a massive change that's recently happened
across the whole advertising ecosystem.
And that is the advent of Apple's iOS 14.5.
It's kind of dropped a bomb
on the whole Facebook advertising industry,
and it's made a lot of things in terms of reporting
that were previously possible
and available to us, no longer available.
And when it comes to Dynamic Creatives,
what it's done, is it's actually taken away the ability
for us to see a breakdown of which components
within those Dynamic Creatives
are providing us the best results.
We can still go in and see a breakdown
of our Dynamic Creative assets.
And what that's going to show us inside the ad manager,
is each of the creatives
and pieces of copy that we put into our Dynamic Creative,
and it's going to show us some metrics for each of those.
But it's only going to show us
things like the number of clicks
and the click-through rate and a few other stats.
It's not going to show us the most important metric
that we wanna see, which is our cost per result,
meaning our cost per liter, our cost per purchase,
or whatever conversion event you are optimized for.
And without that information, we simply have no idea
which creative or which pieces of copy
within a Dynamic Creative are performing the best.
Yes, we can get a bit of a feel for it
by looking at our click-through rate,
but that's not an absolute.
The absolute performance metric that we usually wanna use
to measure is our cost per result,
meaning our cost per conversion.
And if we can't see that,
then we simply can't reliably use a Dynamic Creative
as a tool for testing.
The other problem with the Dynamic Creative
is that it's unreliable for testing.
And this is not a result of iOS 14.5,
this is something that has been the case
ever since Facebook released Dynamic Creatives.
And that is that they are simply unreliable
when it comes to running a test.
You see, when we run a test with our Facebook ads,
we're usually testing to see which creative
or which piece of copy performs best.
And the way we run these tests is we run them
for a certain amount of time with a certain amount of spend
until we have enough data to make our results
statistically significant.
If we don't have enough data
then our results are unreliable.
We need enough data to make an intelligent decision
and know that that data is actually valid.
That's where Dynamic Creatives for testing fall down.
As you can see here,
we spent about $2,000 on this particular Dynamic Creative.
But if you look at the breakdown,
and when you see this list of creatives on screen,
you can see that Facebook spent $500
on one of the creatives,
and then if you look all the way down to the bottom,
Facebook only spent 99 cents on another.
Now, we simply don't have enough data
from that 99 cent spend on that creative
at the bottom of the list there,
to actually know if that creative was a high performer
or one that was not going to perform for us.
And Facebook as a machine still needs a lot of data
in order to make a good decision.
So there's no way that the algorithm could have made
an accurate assessment on the performance of that ad
with just a 99 cents spend.
So because Facebook has such a discrepancy
in the way that it allocates the budget
across our different Dynamic Creative elements,
we simply can't rely on it to get enough data
and make the intelligent results that we need
before it starts to optimize and to allocate
more and more spend to those different creatives.
So to sum that up, man or machine,
you need a statistically significant amount of data
to make good decisions in your tests,
and if you don't have that,
then the test simply isn't valid.
It's a waste of time.
Which leads me to the next disadvantage
of a Dynamic Creative,
which is wasteful from a spend or a testing standpoint.
If I actually wanted to do a valid test
of all of the creatives that you see on the screen now,
then the way I would need to do that is run ads
to each of these creatives
until I had a statistically significant amount of data
on each one.
And ideally,
the most efficient way to do that would be to spend
roughly the same amount of money
on each creative over the same period of time,
and then assess my results
and make decisions based on what I see.
Now, if I had allocated that $2,000 budget
evenly across all of those ads,
I probably could have got enough data
to start making those smart decisions that I need to make.
But now I have to go and spend even more money
to make sure that those ads
that got only a few dollars spend against them,
have enough data.
I need to go put more money into those
to get the data that I needed to now make my decision.
So for something that I could have spent $2,000 on,
I need to go and put more money into
because Facebook overspent on some ads
and under spend on others.
It's an extremely inefficient way to run tests,
and it means you end up having to spend more money
to get the same information.
So you're probably wondering,
well, where do Dynamic Creatives fit in?
And the answer is, they do have a place,
and I do use Dynamic Creatives
and I recommend you use them as well.
Here's how I generally do this.
If I'm testing new creatives, and copy, and you assets,
I always do it with standard ads, okay?
I take a very structured approach
so that I do exactly what I just mentioned
in terms of having a fairly even distribution of spend
over my new assets
until I have enough data in order to make those decisions.
So I would use standard single creative ads to do that.
Once I have creatives and copy
that I know are proven winners,
meaning I've run my tests, I know which ones are winners,
then I will take those winners as a bunch
and roll them into a Dynamic Creative,
because that's where I think they really shine.
And we do tend to see better results
when we start to use Dynamic Creatives in this way.
We take our best performing creative
and our best performing copy,
we roll them into our Dynamic Creative,
and we target the audiences
that we know tend to get us good results.
And that actually helps to lower our overall lead costs
and our cost per purchases in most cases.
So that is how I actually prefer to use Dynamic Creatives.
Take your winners, roll them into one Dynamic Creative
versus using Dynamic Creatives as a test bed,
and a testing environment.
And that's even more important now with iOS 14,
and the lack of ability to look at the breakdowns
and see which creative elements
and which copy elements are actually giving us
the best cost per lead, cost per purchase,
or cost per whatever conversion event.
You're actually setting these things up for.
So if you've enjoyed this video, you've found it useful,
all I ask is that you do tap that like button.
It really does make a big difference to the channel.
It helps me keep putting out more free content like this.
And if you wanna learn more from me
when it comes to Facebook ads for online course creators,
coaches and consultants, make sure you hit subscribe.
Hit that little bell,
and you'll get notified whenever I release a new video,
which is every single week.
All right, thanks again for watching,
hopefully I see you soon.
Bye.
(upbeat music)