How To Stop Facebook DESTROYING Your Facebook Ads!

0:00meta is doing some pretty wild things to our Facebook ad creative they are making far more adjustments than most advertisers are aware of and in this video I'm going to show you what's happening and whether or not you should let meta make those changes so to demonstrate what I'm talking about I'm in an example Facebook ad account um I'm in ads manager and I've created a quick example campaign and I'm at the ad level now you can see that meta has just pulled through a default image associated with my Facebook page but if I come down to this ad setup section um and then I enter my own creative so

0:29let's just delete that what meta put in automatically add media and then I'm going to add in um an image okay so I've just uploaded the image associated with my new podcast which by the way you can check out it's called Ben Heath podcast it's not just Facebook ads topic I'm also talking to people around personal branding and talking to people from all different walks of life and stuff like that in case you're interested but let's say I wanted to run an ad promoting this podcast I've uploaded the image associated with it now the first thing that you'll see here before I get to the automatic changes that are taking place

0:55in a minute is that we've got this crop for placement section so I've uploaded an image that's um in original which is one: one which will work fine for feeds and similar placements it's not going to work so well on stories and reals and vertical placements and again the same with um you know third search results right and column things like that but I'm not going to focus on this too much because I've recommended creating different images for different placement options I just wanted to walk through the process of getting the the um image in place because of this section here okay so what we can see here is the meta

1:26said optimize your ad with Advantage Plus creative and that's really the topic of this video Advantage Plus creative what used to be called um standard enhancements and what meta is doing is they're using um a number of different AI tools to automatically make adjustments to our ad creative to make changes some of those are good some of those not so good what I want to say before I go through each one individually because I think that's important is that we do use most of these optimizations most of the time but not all of them all of the time and you have to go through for each ad and work

1:57out do I actually want this in place is this going to make my ads better or worse is this going to ruin my ad creative because that absolutely can happen if you let meta run a mark and do whatever it wants with this stuff um without actually sense checking it yourself okay now most advertisers and this is why I showed you the process of me adding in this image most advertisers will just go with the default which is to have all optimizations ticked click done and then they move on and then it's just whatever meta wants to do with it um they can go ahead and do it I think

2:25if you want the best possible results you need to take more control and particularly be careful the better aren't going to ruin the way your ad creative looks particularly if you've put time and effort into making it look a certain way okay so we can now see a preview of each of these optimizations each of these enhancements and what that actually looks like and we can therefore decide do we want to go ahead with it in this scenario or not okay we didn't used to have these previews you just have to go with the lot um and um and this is a much better setup okay so firstly we've

2:55got the original creative and you can see we've got different previews here depending on like different placement options and what it's going to look like and things like that so you just get a sense of okay how is this going to look the first optimization as part of Advantage Plus creative that we've got here is relevant comments so you'll have probably noticed this is not just applies to Facebook Instagram also other um social media platforms where they're not just listing out all the comments in chronological order um they will rank them based on relevancy so this will be the the comments that get more engagements more replies to they they um

3:25appear higher up I do think it makes sense to leave that on for most advertisers um it can be a scenario where if you're going to get a lot of negative comments that you might want to not have this on because the comments that then get lots of Engagement those are the ones that going to be at the top and if you get a lot of negative comments because of what you advertise for some reason you probably don't want those to be at the top I would recommend that most meta advertisers go in and manually check those uh once a day let's say once every few days depending on your ad and make

3:51sure you remove negative comments because that's just not a good look for your brand and often people are going to say negative things that are completely untrue and you definitely want to get rid of those but provided you're not in that scenario then um I think leaving relative comments on is fine and that's what we'll do most of the time this next one is really interesting okay music so I think music is probably one of the most common ones that we won't just leave it as is so what meta is looking to do here is they're trying to effectively convert an image in this scenario into something that's closer to

4:19a video I don't think we can really say it is a video because it's an image with some music but it's giving it um some more richness that's hopefully going to help get people to engage with it and of course want people to engage with ad creative because that's the first step that they need to do before they check out our offer come through to website buy become a lead etc etc okay so that's just been added in right I don't think that's terrible for a podcast but in our scenario we would probably want to change that and that's something that we often do cuz often you will see the

4:45music The Meta is automatically grabbed and you go that doesn't really match up with this business's brand we need to make adjustments fortunately you can quite easily right so you can just come down to this little section here and click on change music right and then you can see see that the default here is automatically applied based on your media and music popularity but so they and they give some suggestions up here but we can go through and we can select all sorts of different options some are going to sound very different we can come up to the top here and search for genres specific keywords maybe you've

5:18got an artist in mind you can have a look and see if that's in there and you can go ahead and make sure that your um like what what music is being applied with these optimizations through Advantage Plus creative and actually fits your brand and sounds good and things along those lines and you can see a preview over here on the right hand side when you update this um so obviously this is like an Instagram real version and we can change to the other place and options that this affects where M meta would add music and where that would be appropriate like reals and things for example so um so you can go

5:47through and have a look and this can take a lot of time I would encourage you not to spend ages on it cuz I don't think it's that higher leverage um activity but you absolutely want to make sure that you find something that suits your brand let's go ahead and click next and go back to the enhancements the optimizations that are part of Advantage Plus creative okay the next one we've got is image filter now this is automatically turned on and what image filter is designed to do is designed to um enhance the quality of the image so if we can see the before and after that

6:16this one's a little bit sort of Darker um it doesn't look as good they've brightened this one up they might affect adjust things like the contrast if you've been posting on Instagram as most people have you'll understand like what filters can do to images and things like that well this is all automatic this is using an an AI based tool to make your images look better most of the time we're going to leave that on however if we've got an image that's been taken by a professional photographer and they've already edited it looks exactly how we want it to look um that's the sort of scenario where we might go ahead and

6:45turn it off so just have a think about the image in question and think do I actually want anything done to this maybe maybe not so for this for example this is an image that's been created uh by a graphic designer I think it looks really good it already stands out the colors are great we don't want meta to be messing around with this if we're going to be advertising the podcast so we're going to go ahead and turn that off and that by the way is how you turn any of these off is you just click on the little drop down and then toggle from on to off you'll see that the

7:10default is for them to be on okay so let's now scroll down to the next row of Advantage Plus creative optimizations there are a a whole bunch and here we've got 3D animation now this something went wrong while we were creating your preview please try again seems to happen nearly all the time if you upload a very simple image let's say a basic product and a bit of text then it seems to work sometimes in that scenario where it will animate for example it will bring the text on um things will move within your image it'll it'll make it look that way um but most of the time that just doesn't seem seem

7:49possible if you have got a preview of what that's going to look like and you like what it looks like you can go ahead and use it if you haven't got a preview um like like like this it says it's on but in my experience it won't run um if you want peace of mind you can always go ahead and turn it off just in case they create something whilst you're you know whilst um not being able to show you the preview um but I think most of the time where that is available I would use it and I think as meta improves this AI tool I would expect that we will use

8:16this more and more as advertisers um because I think that animating what could otherwise be a relatively boring image particularly when you combine it with music basically turns an image then into a proper video that's likely to help most advertisers better results not all you can always test it but something to be aware of okay so next we have um image template now you can see what meta is trying to do here right so they've taken the image that I've uploaded which was Square which is 1: one ratio and they've added in this um headline section what they call a template um up above now that says headline that's not

8:45necessarily going to be the headline from your ad it's just some of the text that you have included alongside the ad is then going to be used and put up there cuz it'll usually be be shorter this can look a little bit clunky it can like with this it goes kind of okay because we've got like the dark purplish background so like having a purple head is kind of fine often this does look a bit ugly and a bit clunky and people want to turn it off for that in my experience as with this do tend to perform better so I would encourage you most of the time to leave it on but if

9:11you're like that just does not look good at all we've got a really cinematic style image something that looks fantastic and that headline just it's not unbrand it doesn't look right you can go ahead and and turn off and you can also see that there are um different preview options um here so for example the first preview like that looks at that font looks a lot better than that font in my experience like that one doesn't look so good going with it um and the other option that you can of course do if you do want to include image template but you don't want to go

9:40with the default that meta has generated you can come in here and adjust fonts and colors so you can see that affects two placements so we've got the the Facebook mobile feed and then we've got the Instagram feed so I might decide that the Instagram feed looks fine I'm going to leave that as is but with the mobile feed on Facebook like I I don't like that font at all so in with the Tex Style I can go ahead and change it to you know I'm not going to go through the various options now but let's say I wanted to change it to that font cuz

10:05that's more in keeping with the brand and instead of the color that's automatically been generated based on the image itself I could be like no I want a garish red headline I mean that looks terrible um but um but you might have brand colors brand fonts that you able to use so you can come in here and um and Fiddle around with this and and make it better and make it how you like not something that a lot of Facebook advertisers we of so just wanted to to make that clear okay so I've gone ahead and reverted back to automatic just for demonstration purposes so that was image template then

10:35we've got visual touch-ups now this overlaps to some extent from what I can see with the image filter and that if you har over the little eye next to it they talk about um changing brightness contrast things like that which is obviously something that could be applied in the filter stage although filters could do other things to make your uh image ad look better but the the difference here really for me is varying the aspect ratio so obviously we've uploaded a square image I would usually recommend that you have different aspect ratio images for the three different sort of placement categories the feeds which are square or say four to five and

11:06then you got vertical which could be 96 and and um and so forth um and you can see like what meta might look to do here like to me that doesn't look good cuz we've got the text cut off that doesn't make sense we would need to go ahead and change that but there are sometimes images where you can quite easily change the aspect ratio from within the one image you don't have to have different versions like if we didn't have the text for example maybe that would work just being cropped and expanded automatically to fill a vertical format that's going to really depend on the the image um

11:35that you go ahead and upload but again you can turn this off if you've you know the image has already been professionally edited and you really like the way it looks you don't want any uh contrast or brightness adjustments and also you're very happy with how it looks like you don't want it to be cropped and zoomed in you don't want to lose details you can go ahead and turn this off which is probably what we would do if we were just using that that um that one image then we've got this feature that you may have heard me talk about before called text improvements now I used to have um a different name

12:00but basically what it allows meta to do is take any of the text that you've used for your headline or your primary text or your description and move them about so they could put what you had written for your headline in your primary text and move it vice versa and all that sort of stuff I think that's a good feature to have turned on for beginner meta advertisers because you're probably just writing good things about your products and services and giving meta the freedom to work out which one produces the best results in which location is fine if you're more advanced and you're thinking about it from a a user standpoint where

12:28people see your ad how they're going to go through the ad and consume it you want to take them on a bit of a journey you absolutely want to go ahead and turn this off because there are scenarios where what we've written as a headline would not work as a primary text and vice versa it would just look out of place it wouldn't really make sense it wouldn't flow as we want it to in which case we often turn that one off um but I think it depends on how you've written your around and again how experienced you are as a meta Advertiser okay and then we've got expand image now expand

12:55image is is quite a cool um AI tool that basically takes your image and then if possible will expand it to fill the different placement aspect ratios that we're after so for example often if you upload a square image they will automatically generate what would likely be above the image and what would likely be below the image again this is a tool I've briefly talked about before this imager hasn't been able to do it which kind of makes sense cuz like what would you put above and below it that'd be really difficult to automatically generate but often we might be uploading an image with like let's say the sky at

13:27the top of the image and you can expand more sky to fill vertical if that makes sense the the AI tool can can automatically generate that we've done the same with product images where there's a background it's just like okay we'll just make more background and that's a good tool to use because it's going to make your ads look better usually on the real storage placements where you want to expand vertically assuming you've got a square image or a four to five image or something along this lines again you abely want to make sure that you check the preview I haven't got one here to show you but you

13:53check check the preview to make sure that it does look good and if it doesn't look good absolutely go ahead and turn this off this hasn't worked with this image anyway so leaving it on or off makes um basically no difference in this circumstance but just something that you want to be aware of one other thing I want to quickly mention is a free webinar I've created called three killer Facebook ad strategies to double or more your revenue and in that webinar I focus on strategy because it doesn't matter how good your ad creative looks whether it's optimized or not or all those sorts of things if you haven't got the right

14:20strategy that you're using in the first place nothing else is going to work that's the foundation that you have to get right at the beginning and then you build everything else on top of that into a completely free webinar and if you're interested in watching it there is a link in the video description below you can click on that and literally go ahead and watch it right now I think it'll be well worth your time if you want better results with your Facebook and Instagram ads okay and then once you're happy with all those you can go ahead and click done the blue button on the right hand side and if you do change

14:44your mind you don't have to go ahead and reupload the image you can just go ahead and uh click edit and edit media and that'll take you back into that optimized section well you can also go in and crop as well or or replace the ad creative um for those different placement options you know the the vertical the very landscape and then the sort of square or or four to five um ratio and then of course it always makes sense to just make sure that you're taking a look at the ad previews and what things look like and also keep an eye out if you are served your own ads

15:10just to make sure okay yeah that looks how I want it to every now and then you will see an ad and go oh hang on I don't think I had it set up that way and you to go in and adjust things cuz it's easy to adjust something and think that your ad's going to come out one way and one of these optimizations um through Advantage Plus creative is going to change things a little bit in a way that you you didn't want to another thing that worth noting is that even if you have them all turned on it doesn't mean that meta is going to use them all the

15:32time so let's say for example the image template you know you put in the headline up above sometimes if you have that turned on sometimes meta will use that but not always and they're going to vary that depending on your ad they're also going to vary that depending on individual users and this is where Facebook's machine learning process starts to get very very intelligent where they know that this person is more likely to engage with an ad if there is a headline and and sort of a banner at the top of it versus this person is less likely to if it looks like that perhaps it looks more Addy to them and they're

16:01less interested now these sort of individualized adjustments and optimizations are absolutely going to help us as meta advertisers get better results but just to be aware that again if you've got some of these turned on and you don't see it when you're served your ads or someone else doesn't see them that doesn't mean that it's it's not on or not working it just means that meta at its discretion is working out okay we'll use these here we won't use these here we think this will get the advertiser the better results add creative adjustments are not the only things that meta has changed recently they've also completely changed the way

16:30that Facebook ads targeting Works in this video I explain what the change is and what you need to do about it as a Facebook Advertiser i' strongly recommend you go ahead and check this out