How advertisers are adjusting to Meta’s ad creative diversification best practices

As Meta invests in its ads models, it’s encouraging advertisers to retool their approach to them behind the scenes.

Meta has provided some updated best practices on how to get ads to be ranked highly by its models, including specific suggestions on diversifying creative, according to some executives Marketing Brew spoke to. Meta is also testing creative insights metrics in its Insights API that provides ad performance data to advertisers, Meta spokesperson Alisha Swinteck said.

One concept Meta has been clarifying to advertisers is that Meta’s engines won’t rank an ad as highly if it has the same look as other creative from the advertiser or has the same opening hook, Olivia Cripps, global paid media director at the social agency Billion Dollar Boy, said. The engines will see it as fundamentally the same ad.

“If you had a video of me, and then also a video of me, and this one has a text that says, ‘Text A,’ and this one says, ‘Text B,’ that would actually be considered the same creative,” she said.

The advice and overall clarification around how Meta’s models perceive pieces of creative has helped BDB’s team structure its creative testing for clients, Cripps said.

Meta also has been breaking down how to diversify creative with more nuance for agency clients. Meta is providing detailed advice such as to mix video and static assets and mix messaging and tone by using different hooks, among other tips, according to Ankit Jadav, associate director, paid social at Rain the Growth Agency.

Swinteck, the Meta spokesperson, said that Meta’s guidance is designed to be broad, as opposed to focusing on optimizing around any one model’s behavior. Diversifying ad creative is a “longstanding best practice as we see it deliver measurable results,” she said.

“We don’t get into the specifics of how our ranking models represent individual creative assets. Our guidance to advertisers is deliberately outcome-based (not model-specific), like ‘diversify your creative, test, and let the system optimize,’” Swinteck, the Meta spokesperson, told us in an email. “That’s what actually improves performance, rather than trying to engineer around any single model behavior.”

During the company’s Q2 earnings in July, Meta CFO Susan Li said Meta altered its models dedicated to understanding user behavior so that they could better analyze organic user activity and match users with appropriate ads. Those changes, combined with the use of Meta’s recommendation model Gem, increased ad clicks by 8.3%, Li said on the call.

As Meta continues to invest in its ads models, it has also been testing creative insights metrics in its Insights API, providing data to advertisers around creative performance. “These insights are not widely available and are part of regular insight tests to help maximize the value of the Insights API to our partners,” Swinteck said.

A “small number of agencies/GCR resellers” have been testing those creative insights metrics since June, according to Swinteck.