# This Facebook Ad Format Gets Insane Results (and nobody uses it!)

Channel: Ben Heath
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M36tVQD26TY
Duration: 17 min
Language: English
Words: 3748
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/M36tVQD26TY

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[0:00] My agency spends almost $10 million a month on Facebook ads. And right now, the most underused and underappreciated Facebook ad format by far is flexible Facebook ads. Flexible Facebook ads are awesome. And using them very often leads to a significant improvement in results. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use flexible Facebook ads so that you can get more leads and sales. So, before I show you how flexible Facebook ads work, flexible ad format as it's referred to um in Ads Manager, I'm going to quickly explain what they are. So, it's an ad format where you can upload 10 creatives and allow Meta to have

[0:33] quite a lot of flexibility, hence the name, um, with what they do with it. So, with these 10 creatives, they might show them as an image. They might animate them and add things to show them as a video, turn them into a slideshow, um, or just animate the one image and turn that into a video. They might display them all as as a carousel. Um, there's no ability or need to customize by placement. So meta itself is going to mess around with different aspect ratios and which images to use where in terms of what's going to look good vertically on stories and reels, what's going to

[1:01] look good square or close to square on on feeds, etc., etc. Right? So it is a very flexible Facebook ad format where you're giving a bunch of creative to Meta and saying go ahead and and run with it. Quite different to dynamic creative. I'm going to get um into that as as we go through that. But at its

[1:17] base, that's what flexible ad format is. And you can probably if you're familiar with Facebook ads and how they work, probably start to think already of the potential benefits of Meta having the extra creative assets to be able to do lots of testing and playing around with to try and get you um the best results possible. So, with that said, let's go ahead and demonstrate how we set this up and go through the process. And as we do, I'll I'll talk about the important

[1:40] things you need to do and watch out for. So, I'm in an example Facebook ad account here. I'm in Ads Manager. There's nothing in here because it's an example account. And I'm going to go ahead and click on this plus create button. Now, the first thing to mention about flexible Facebook ads is that they only work with two campaign objectives right now, which is sales and app promotion. If you're going to give a lot of creative or or even a lot of control over any aspect of Facebook advertising to Meta, you want to make sure that Meta knows what it is that you're optimizing for. They can see what a conversion

[2:12] looks like and they can work to get you those conversions, which is why they've only made it available for those two campaign objectives so far. you wouldn't want to use this with something like traffic even if it was available. So, I think that's a good move um by Meta, but a lot of you watching this will be using sales campaigns. That's probably the most common campaign type or it is the most common campaign type that we use as an agency. So, let's go ahead and select sales. Click okay on that. So, as part of this video, I'm not going to worry about the campaign settings or the adset

[2:38] settings. I'm going to focus very much on uh flex flexible ad format. If there are other things that you want to know about what to do at the campaign level, adset level, I've got lots of videos on my channel that you can check out for more info on that. I'm going to in this video jump straight to the ad level, which is where you use flexible ad format. So, if we scroll down, select the ad level, scroll down, and we get to this ad setup section. Create ad is what we want to do. Not going to be using a catalog in this instance. Um, and then

[3:04] you can see under here we've got format. The default is single image or video which I'm sure you're familiar with but we can select this option here which is called flexible. You see we'll show your ad in the format we predict may perform best. So it's giving um meta some extra flexibility like we've already discussed. Right. Then we scroll down here to the ad creative section and we can go ahead and click on add media. So I'm going to go ahead and click on add media, add images and then I'm going to go ahead and upload uh the images that I want to [Applause] use. So, you can see we've now got these

[3:36] 10 um images added in here and we can see the ad previews have turned on and then we can take a look at what our ads are going to look like, what this creative is actually going to look like when it's put in front of people with all the different variations. So, this here is going to be Facebook feed. Uh you can see, you know, above each image of different images. By the way, for demonstration purposes, I've just grabbed a bunch of images um that I've

[3:56] had taken of of me to uh to show this. Um, and I'll talk about creative strategy and like what images, what creatives you would want to use in a minute because that's that's a really important part of this. So, we've got a whole bunch of options. You can see we've added in some like a bit different ones, bit fun ones. But, if I come down to the bottom here and I click on see more variations. So, you can see here, obviously, we've got those Facebook feed options, but if we keep scrolling down, we can start to see what Meta would look to do to our to this creative depending

[4:22] on that's going to be what's going to look like an Instagram feed. Obviously, that's pretty similar, but if we keep going, we're going to start looking at what Meta will do if we're going to advertise on Instagram reels, right? Okay, so they're going to take this image and they're going to put headlines on it. They're going to put descriptions on there. They're going to uh make, you

[4:36] know, put an image with an image here. Do all sorts of different options. And you can go along the list, right? You can select specific creative and be like, well, what would you do for, you know, this image in the different locations? What's that? What's that going to look like? And then it will show you. You can see here by placement,

[4:51] Facebook feed, Instagram feed, stories. You can see a little bit of fun we had on a photo shoot at one time. Um, taking photos in uh in my son's little toy car. All sorts of things that you can check out within this preview section to make sure that you like the way your ads are looking and the different creative. Now, at this stage, you might be thinking, this feels quite similar, this flexible ad format, to dynamic creative, but

[5:12] there are some significant differences. So, in flexible ad format, it's an ad format as opposed to something you do with the adset level. If you want to use dynamic creative, you need to turn that on at the adset level and then it only allows you to effectively have one dynamic ad within that adset. Whereas with flexible ad format, you can run a flexible Facebook ad alongside a regular image ad or a carousel ad or a video ad

[5:36] or something something different, right? So instead of it changing the whole way the ad set um is done, it just affects that specific ad. Now, one of the interesting things that come out of that is that allows us to test and we've done lots of testing between say regular ads, more traditional image ads, uh, video

[5:53] ads even versus flexible Facebook ads. And when you do that, Meta nearly always puts more money into the flexible Facebook ads and they typically get better results. That's why Meta's diverting more budget there. That's one of the reasons why I think a lot more advertisers should be using and experimenting with flexible Facebook ads, particularly if you're an imageheavy Facebook advertiser and you

[6:14] don't have highquality video to lean on. Um, this can be a really good way of improving your results, making your creative look more interesting um and and a lot of other good things beside. Come wait a sec. Take a look at this. So, this is in my mentorship program, right? And the results and wins channel and Tara said this. In 2 weeks of joining, my rows went from 0.7 to 8.03 and I've only implemented maybe 30% of the feedback that's given me so far, which is that's just incredible. That's awesome. So, Zoe up here, she joined the mentorship program with 35,000 raffle tickets. Was thinking she

[6:46] wasn't going to sell them and she ended up selling out completely with 2 days to spare. And we've got loads of others in here. We've got tons of people just sharing information around how they've done well, great results they've got. If you're interested, you can click on the button beneath this video. That'll go through to a page on our website. You can book in a free, no obligation call with one of my team members to find out more information. Hopefully, we get to work together. Hopefully, you join and you'll be sharing fantastic results like Tara and Zoe have done just here. Okay, so let's talk about some best practices

[7:13] when it comes to flexible ad format. Things you should do and probably more importantly, things you shouldn't do to get the best results with this. So, like I've already described, Meta can take your creatives and use them as images or videos or use multiple creatives alongside each other and put them in a carousel. Now, what that means is that your your creatives need to work either standalone because it might be the one that's put in front of your prospect or they need to work together alongside each other if Meta is going to use them as a carousel. And in my experience, meta does turn them into carousels quite

[7:44] often. Carousels can uh produce great results for certain advertisers and they're often underused. What that means is this is not a place to split test different creatives. Like you don't want to have different creatives that are very similar, but you're just split testing a different background color or or something along those lines because if you do that and meta does put them alongside each other, well, that just doesn't really make sense. Likewise, you don't want creatives that are just one part of a of a whole. Um, if you make creatives specifically for a carousel, sometimes people will use carousels and some of the creatives will complement the others

[8:21] in terms of it'll only provide part of the information, another creative will provide another part, another creat and and by itself, it's just not powerful enough to to get the click and potentially get get the lead or sale. So, the way to think about this might be you might have different images of the same product or of a product range that could be standalone or it could be featured in a carousel. It's going to work either way. Or you could have different creatives that highlight different aspects of your service, but make sure that they're important enough to to potentially get the click and get the conversion all by itself, right? You

[8:51] could say, "Oh, we benefit our customers cuz we save them loads of time. We get them much better results. Here's a testimonial." You know, those sorts of things. They could be displayed together or they could be displayed um in isolation and they would make sense. The next thing is around your primary text headline um ad copy. Again, that needs to be something that would work either with any one of these creatives standalone or with the lot displayed together in a carousel format. So, just make sure that that's not too specific and customized to that particular creative. Most advertisers don't run into this as an issue, but it's just

[9:23] something that needs needs saying like just have a quick sense check. Okay, does that work with that? Yeah. Would those two work together yet? Would those two work together? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And just go down the list and and tick the boxes and then get to the point where you're happy and and ready to go. Okay. So, the next thing I want to talk about, if I scroll down, is this advantage plus creative optimizations um section here, right? So, with flexible ad format, you can either have it on or you can have it off. What you can't do is customize each one. And if you're familiar with this feature, it's

[9:54] where Met is going to take your creative and they're going to do all sorts of things to it to try and make it a better piece of ad creative that can perform better. So, we just click in and see possible um options here and then click into single image. I've used images in this example. You can see that what Meta might do as part of advantage plus creative optimizations is add music, turn it into a video, add catalog items, site links, u add text overlays, you know, we saw examples of that previously. visual touch-ups. Change the aspect ratio, up the brightness, up the contrast, try and make the the colors

[10:24] pop. Expand the image so that if it's just square, it fits the vertical formats like stories and and reels, comments, text improvements, etc. And there's also options if you're using video uh and carousel as well that Advantage Plus creative optimizations are going to use. Now, my typical advice with that feature with other types of ads, not flexible ads, is use them, but go through and check each one and make sure that the music they've added is appropriate for your brand and that they haven't put text overlay that now covers something really important and and basically take a look at what they're doing and and with other types of ads,

[10:57] you can turn on off and on specific ones. So, you might say, "No, I don't want any music, but yes, I'm happy with text overlays. No, I don't want you to expand the image." you know, you can be be choosy, which is normally what I'd recommend. You can't do that with flexible Facebook ads, and that is unfortunate. I wish that you could um but it's not an option. So, you effectively need to leave it on and just trust Meta is going to do the right thing or turn it off. My advice would be to leave it on. I think overall, yes, there might be some ads that are put in

[11:26] front of people for a while that don't look ideal, but overall, it's going to be more beneficial than it is harmful. If method does apply these creative enhancements in a way that doesn't quite work, like let's say they put some text overlay on an image that covers something important, well, that image just won't perform as well then. So, Meta will see that data, see those results. That's feedback that will then inform Meta going forward and they'll stop doing that, right? So, I think that there are advertisers that are quite afraid of this. I wouldn't be. But if you just can't get your head around that and it's really important to how your

[12:00] brand is presented in every single scenario, then you can go ahead and uh and turn that off. I'll get back to flexible Facebook ad format in a second. Before I do, I want to let you know about Mod Dash. Modash is the leading end-to-end influencer management platform for Shopify brands. If you've watched my content for a while, you'll know that I love using influencers in Facebook and Instagram ads. It's a great

[12:20] way to massively improve your results. Mod Dash makes it really easy to find and contact great influencers to help promote your products. And if you're on Shopify, you can ship products, create discounts, and run your affiliate program in Mod Dash, too. So, I can come down here and I can start adding in filters to specify what it is I'm looking for. For example, I might decide that I want to just find influencers that are UK based. I can add in all sorts of other criteria. Uh, I can see follower numbers. I can specify I only want to work with people that have at least 20,000 followers. You can choose

[12:49] different numbers. For example, there's things around follower growth, engagement rate, really good stuff. And then we get into sort of categories, topics. You can start specifying according to the type of niche that you're in. So, let's say, for example, I sold products related to dogs. I could go in and select dog as a topic. And you'll see that Modash will produce a list here of 40 profiles. And then I can go about having a look at these and deciding which ones I might want to work with, which ones I might want to to reach out to. So, for example, if I click here on Rebecca Drake as an

[13:18] example, I can see all sorts of really interesting information to decide whether or not I want to work with this person. So, I can see their their growth, their follower numbers. I can see uh what percentage of their followers are fake. So, 23% here, which is below average, which is um bit of an eye opener there. I can see engagement rates, you know, average engagement rates, estimated impressions on their reels, how many uh plays did they get on their average reel, um what's their estimated reach on their stories, what's the breakdown of their audience, male, female, etc. Uh locations, ages, all really useful stuff to decide whether or

[13:51] not you want to work with them. There are also a number of ways to reach out to any influencers that you want to get in touch with. Um, one of the best ways is to click unlock on this email section and then be able to send them an email in a way that's far more likely to cut through the noise of sending them DMs or or something like that directly through the platform where they probably receive a lot of inbound communication. Right now, Mod Dash has a 14-day free trial, no payment details needed. Just log on and get started within minutes. Check

[14:15] the link in the video description below. And a couple of extra things you need to know about flexible ad format is that firstly it takes longer for creative fatigue and fatigue to set in. Unsurprisingly, right? Because you've got lots of different creatives. Um there's more going on. There's more variation. People are going to take longer to become bored of them. So that's great. They do require more effort to create the first place, particularly if you're producing more um involved creatives, you know, more difficult to produce than like the examples that I gave there, which are just simple images, right? So more upfront effort but likely to to uh

[14:49] perform for longer which is great in my experience. You are more likely to find winning options because meta is going to test a lot. The more you provide meta with the more opportunity it has to experiment the more likely it is you're going to find a creative that performs really well or even a combination of creatives cuz as part of flexible ads uh Meta can turn them into carousels that can that can work together. Okay, so that's another really big positive, another good reason to at least give this a go. One thing we have found because of that, because you are throwing more at Meta and relying more

[15:22] on their optimization process, is that flexible ad format ads, they do take a bit longer to get going and perform well, but they do continue to improve in performance over time. So, we've done this a number of times where the result we get within the first week or two is significantly worse than what we see, you know, a month, 6 weeks, 8 weeks out from from setting them live. And that makes a lot of sense, right? Because there's just more options to test that takes meta some time to do to get the data to see the feedback to then be able

[15:51] to optimize and uh and improve things. Um, so that's just something to be aware of that if you give this a go and you're testing it against other ad formats and you see it doesn't perform as well in the first few days, don't necessarily turn it off straight away. You might want to give it a bit more time and you

[16:05] might see better results by doing so. So, flexible ad format is more straightforward than most people think, as you now know, having uh seen this and uh been through this. If you do decide to give this a go, let me know how it goes in the comments. Always very interested to uh hear that feedback and how this performs for people. And before you go, I strongly recommend you check out this video next because Meta are in the process of releasing a brand new type of Facebook ad called omni channel ads. Very exciting stuff. If you haven't heard about it, could be a game changer for your business. So definitely go

[16:35] ahead and give this a

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