How to use Design to Increase Facebook Ads Conversions

Facebook Ads can be a powerful marketing tool for your business. In fact, Facebook Ads provides the highest ROI of all paid channels. A huge aspect of running successful Facebook campaigns lies in ad design, making or breaking the campaign’s performance.

In this blog, we’re going to talk about how ad design affects the success of your campaigns, and how you can use advertising creative to engage your audience and compel them to take action.

Engaging visuals are integral to your marketing strategy, especially when using Facebook Ads. Over 3 million businesses are currently advertising on Facebook, while platform users spend an average of 1.7 seconds on each piece of content before moving on, meaning the grapple for your audience’s attention is more competitive than ever.

With such a short time frame to be noticed and convince your audience to take action, your brand has to invest in compelling and creative advertising design if you want to get results.

As a marketer, you’re probably well-versed in the importance of consistent branding, high-res imagery and a clear CTA. But do you know just how integral your visual communications are to your ad performance?

• Facebook posts with images get over 2.3x more engagement than those without images.
• Posts with images receive a 47% higher CTR (click-through-rate) than those without images.
• Research has shown that contrasting link colours within an image can increase the conversion rate by 60%.
• A study showed that changing the colour of a CTA button increased conversion rates by 14.5%.
• A design report that looked into 400+ companies found that the more they invested in design, the more sales the business made.

A well-designed advert doesn’t just save you money but makes you money by increasing your engagement, improving your CTR and lowering your CPC (due to your relevance score going up).

So how can you make sure you’re creating impactful Facebook ads that stand out from the crowd? We’ve put together some best practices for you to follow below.

Format and placement

Before you start thinking about the design of the ad, you’ll need to choose the format. Facebook currently offers the following ad formats - each will work differently for varying goals, audiences and industries, so choose what works best for your business:

• Photo
• Video
• Stories
• Messenger
• Carousel
• Slideshow
• Collection
• Playable

Your ad will need to be optimised to suit both the format and the placement of the ad. There’s no limit on the number of variations you can try, so feel free to mix and match and see what delivers the best results.

Once you’ve decided on your format and placement, it’s time to get creative. Your visuals need to interrupt the users endless scrolling and inspire them to take action. But they also need to showcase your brand and your products in the best light. Here are some things to consider when you’re deciding which visuals to use for your campaign:

• Photography - Inspiring images are a great way to engage your audience if you’re a product-based business. A Facebook study found that a series of photo-only ads outperformed all other ad formats in driving unique traffic. A good photo ad should have high-quality, relevant imagery that stirs up all the right emotions (just like how these M&S images have us thinking about dinner).

• Video - Investing in video advertising is well worth the spend. Mobile-first Facebook video increases brand awareness by up to 67%. And over 54% of social media users have said that videos are their preferred post format. It’s the best way to bring your business to life by demonstrating how your products can be used (as Glossier has done below). Video is an excellent option for service-based businesses that need extra time to explain their offering and/or experiences, such as Saas companies or events businesses.

• Graphics and illustration - If you have a unique business that can’t be adequately depicted through image or video, graphics and illustrations are a stand-out alternative. A good example of a brand that communicates effectively through illustration is Headspace. As a meditation app, they skipped cliche imagery and went with fun and accessible illustrations. The warm and original content is much more noticeable than a stock photo of someone meditating.

• Motion - creativity is key to eye-catching ads, and what better way to transform your campaigns than adding motion? Motion graphics let you highlight your product, benefits or CTA in a playful manner. Facebook conducted 49 studies with brands that introduced motion design to their ad, and they found that on average, brands using both static ads and video ads saw a 17% higher conversion rate than those who just used static ads.

Whatever visual route you choose to go down, some universal ad design practices should be applied to all of your campaigns.

• Make sure your assets are of the highest quality. Images, illustrations and graphics need to be formatted correctly to avoid distortion. And they should all feature a single focal point that grabs the users attention.
• Keep your copy short and sweet. Too much text on Facebook ads can cause it to be banned. Make your call to action clear, and put your main campaign message front and centre.
• Your landing page needs to match your ad. If your users end up on a page with different messaging and branding, you’re going to get higher bounce rates, hurting your ROI.
• Use contrasting colours to create eye-catching designs that break through the noisy newsfeed. You can try this with a background colour that contrasts the Facebook feed or specific elements such as the CTA button (contrasting colours here has proven to increase conversions).
• Run A/B testing on your campaigns. The only way to find out what works for you is by putting your ads out there and seeing how your audience respond. Experiment and compare imagery, colours and headlines to see which combo works best. Design optimisation is the key to long-term ad success.

To sum it all up, creative ad design is essential when it comes to standing out on Facebook, and if you want your ads to be successful. If you’re unsure of where to begin with the design of your next ad, we are here to help. At Growthcurve, we’re experts in all aspects of PPC campaigns. We love combining innovative ad-tech and world-class design to create amazingly effective campaigns for our clients. If you want to learn more about growing your business through digital advertising campaigns, get in touch.