How to Approach Creative Iteration Like a Rockstar

MAY 2024

By Rachael Gorder

Clients want to learn what works best for their brand, but the hard reality and true nature of social platforms like Meta and TikTok is that they're constantly evolving. There's always a different trend or another development, resulting in an ever-changing landscape. 

Given this uneasy fact, our first priority is diversity. Diverse creative ensures we are pushing spend towards ads that differ in format, messaging theme, visual theme, product type, etc.

There's no miracle way of knowing what's working within the creative (the visual theme, product, or asset itself), but you can treat each category like control variables to garner the most effective way forward.

Why is this important?

It's important that we think about creative strategy due to the decreased levers that Meta has allowed us to move structurally in a given account over time.

Creative is truly how we do the targeting, and it's the production and the analysis after that which determine what works for what audience and how to make moves from there. 

At Fluency Firm, we meet with our clients on a regular basis to share the most up-to-date creative insights possible so that we can communicate opportunities and test concepts we think we should try based on the landscape at that given time. 


So, what does creative iteration look like at Fluency Firm?

The first step is analyzing the creative and figuring out what creative is a winner. This may look different given the brand and their KPIs, however, spend and efficiency are king. Once you identify this winning creative, we're off to the races. We like to analyze hero creatives in a few different ways. Whether it's the product itself being leveraged or the visual theme, taking that one asset and splintering it up with those different themes to create four new iterations. 

Step 1:  Rename your ad account to properly segment out the important pieces that you would like to analyze within each creative at the ad level. 

  • Our team implements a custom naming structure across our entire ad accounts to segment each ad by performance on a funnel, product, format, messaging, visual theme, and landing page type.

Step 2: Filter by these segments to gain a better understanding of what's top performing within each given category. 

  • Once renaming is completed, we then utilize Motion AI to create custom reports for our clients. (Need an intro to Motion AI? Message us, we got you covered!)

Step 3: With both these learnings in mind, conduct competitor research to help illustrate these missed opportunities. 

  • We like to utilize competitor research to help guide where we should go next or what opportunities we’re missing out on regarding new visual themes or trending messages to test within our assets.

Step 4: Create content that seamlessly integrates your brand guidelines with the data and visual inspiration from competitors in the industry.

Step 5: Test, test, test, and repeat!

Ad Entity ID

Ad Entity ID: The way that creative is tagged and classified by the algorithm on-platform.

Importance of Entity ID

  1. Creative with high similarity percentages, determined by Meta, will be considered the same ad by the algorithm.

  2. The algorithm favors creative differentiation in terms of media types (CAR, VID, SI, backgrounds, product, category) instead of similar creative with slight iterations.

  3. Ad performance is substantially influenced by the % of similarity across active ads within an account.

When thinking about how to iterate on creative in today's environment, we must keep in mind Entity ID, which is Meta’s way of classifying creative and thus ranking performance via the similarity % that the creative has to others. We keep this in mind when iterating on top performing creative and themes, ensuring iterations are statistically different than the original. 

Example: Should we simply change the headline of the creative, given how Entity ID works on-platform, this would not have given us any statistical significance in terms of whether it outperformed the original as it would have ranked it as almost the same ad in-platform, hence no learnings would have resulted. That's why we have to always ensure that we are spicing up the ad in more ways than one to get the best quality of insights for our clients. 

In Conclusion

The dynamic and ever-evolving nature of social platforms like Meta and TikTok necessitates a diverse and adaptive creative strategy. At Fluency Firm, we prioritize creative diversity and robust analysis to navigate these changes and optimize ad performance for our clients. By treating creative elements as control variables and continuously iterating based on detailed performance insights and competitor research, we ensure our strategies remain effective and innovative. Our structured approach, from renaming ad accounts for precise segmentation to leveraging AI-driven reports and understanding Meta's Entity ID system, enables us to maximize the impact of each creative iteration. Ultimately, this meticulous and flexible methodology allows us to deliver consistently high-quality results, adapting swiftly to new trends and maintaining our clients' competitive edge in the fast-paced digital landscape.

Need help with creative strategy? Let us know!