How To Use Creative Enhancements on Your Facebook Ads

0:00Are meta's ad creative enhancements actually improving your results or quietly hurting your performance? In this video, I'll go through the enhancement options and break down what each one actually does, when it helps, and when you're better off not using it. So, to explain and demonstrate this, I'm in an example meta ad account. I'm in ads manager at the campaign level. I'm going to go ahead and create a quick leads campaign in this instance so that we can then go to the ad level and go through those creative enhancements. And but what I'm about to show you will absolutely apply to other campaign objectives as well. So, if you're

0:29running a sales campaign, for example, you can absolutely still follow along and implement what we talk about. Then I'm going to jump to the ad level. I'm going to scroll down to the ad creative section. I'm not going to worry about the other settings and things at the ad level or or elsewhere because I've got videos covering just about all those other things anyway, but I really want to keep this video focused on the creative enhancements. So, if we go ahead and click on setup creative, um I'm going to show this for both an image ad and a video ad because the creative enhancement options will differ

0:58depending on your ad creative format. So, let's go ahead and start with image ad. I'm going to skip past this creative setup section. That's not what this video is about. I'm going to create a separate video all about this um in the near future. Uh let's go ahead and click next and we'll jump to media. So, I'm going to go ahead and use this image for demonstration purposes. If I click next, um this is an image ad that we've run quite a lot that's worked quite well for us that is advertising my meta ads mentorship program. We've put a square version in there. Uh we do have a

1:26vertical version, so let me go ahead and replace that. That is something we you typically want to do. A lot of ad impressions are delivered square, mostly feeds, and a lot of ad impressions are delivered in a vertical format, think reels and stories, far fewer in a horizontal format, although you can of course create horizontal versions as well. If you don't have separate versions for the different aspect ratios, then that is one of the creative enhancement options is for meta to be able to expand your image. For example, if you've just got square to vertical, um or you can crop going the other way to make it fit

1:56other placement options. We'll see more about that as we go through. Going to skip through the text section um because I really want to focus on on creative. And before we get to the actual enhancements, just a quick note on this image generation. So, if you've been through the process recently, you will see that Meta is now taking the image that you provide and using AI to generate images that are similar, variations that you may want to test. Um sometimes they're good, often not so much. You very much need to be the filter as the advertiser. So, for example, we could use this option. Uh we

2:26could potentially use this option because maybe even this one as well because these are basically just different color variations and backgrounds and what we've already uploaded. We could not use image of someone else entirely or a sort of weird, you know, skinny version of me um or other people because this is very much advertising a mentorship program that is centered around me and without that it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be able to sell. So, Meta doesn't have that context. This AI doesn't have that context, so we won't be able to to use those. I'm actually going to deselect this um as we go through the process,

2:55but just a little side note on that. Absolutely use these, but very much be the filter. Only select ones that you think, "Yeah, these look good." And you can see that Meta's talking about um 11% CTR lift and 8% commercial rate lift. So, not worth passing up. Not something that you don't want to pass up um if there are options that you can use. Anyway, getting into the main meat of this video and the Advantage Plus creative enhancements. So, what Meta typically does is they'll analyze the image that you've entered and they will work out, "We've gone ahead and applied these. We're not sure about these other

3:29ones and you should review." That's going to depend on the type of image that you upload. Um so, so let's go through them. So, they've got two up here for review. So, these are basically the ones that by default turned off in this instance. This will vary depending on your image. In this instance, and Meta's saying, "But have a look cuz you

3:46may decide that you want to use them." So, we've got enhanced media text. If if hover over each one has this little information sign. So, it says here, "We'll replace the text in your media with AI-generated text that can better engage educate people see your ad. Your visual media creative won't change." Now, we've got text within the media.

4:03So, we've got "Want me to mentor you?" and then we've got these um testimonial sort of screenshots of people saying they've had fantastic results inside uh my mentorship program. We do not want Meta replacing those in this instance. Like, that is not going to fit well, most likely, for this image ad. If you think about the likely alternatives, it could totally distort the meaning, particularly if the text not just maybe this sentence up here could be changed, but these other options with the testimonials absolutely can't be. So, that has been switched off by default. I like that for this instance. But, there are other images where actually that

4:39would work. Let's say it's a product image, and you've got a simple text overlay featuring one benefit associated in just a few words associated with the with the product, or you've got text that uh talks about a specific offer that you're running right now. Meta could experiment and change those change those options out. I think there's a world in which that could help improve performance. So, enabling that might be something you want to do. Just be wary, this is in beta, so likely this feature will improve over time. Might be something that we're all using um in a few months or few years' time, but in

5:12this instance I'm going to turn it off. There are instances where you where you want to play with it. And then the next one we've got in for review is enhanced CTA. So, if you hover over that take a look at what that is. You've got "Will pair key phrases from your ad sources with your CTA. You can view all the phrases we've collected before running your ad." So, this is one of those and there are some enhancements aren't like this, but some are just like this one where you can turn it on, but then have control over what Meta's AI has

5:37generated and what actually gets used. So, this seems like something we would actually want to use. I'd be quite comfortable with. So, if I go go and turn this on, and then I can show you if we scroll down, we've got examples that we can click customize. If I just go into customize, what this is basically doing is Meta is changing up our call to

5:55action. So, we've got see details here. We've got see for yourself. You know, these aren't default options that you would see as part of the ad creation process. And these are the ones that Meta has come up with for us and said that they will cycle through and test to see which ones are going to produce the best results for us. So, we've got see details, check out our site, take a closer look. You know, curious, check it out. So, some to some extent a different vibe, a

6:18different feel. If you don't like these, then don't use it. If you think, "Yeah, those could work. It's a little bit different from the standard call to actions people see, that might help it stand out." There may well be options that perform much better. You can see they're cycling through examples here. You've got see for yourself. As in this kind of story, I I'm quite happy with that as as an option. So, I'm going to go ahead and actually turn that one on. And I think that will work most likely help improve performance when it comes to an image ad like this. Okay, then we get into the

6:49media section before we do the text section. And in here, these are ones that Meta has turned on and thinks it'd be a good idea for us to use. Sometimes I will agree, sometimes I won't. You will see as we go through it. So, this first one here in this media section is visual touch-ups. So, it will automatically crop and expand your chosen media to fit

7:08more placements. I am happy to leave that on. I think in most instances that's going to work well. Meta's going to be able to do that in a way that looks visually fine, doesn't look silly. Now, if they were to crop this image, probably not great. If they were to expand it, probably fine. If they were to crop the vertical version, probably much less of an issue. But one of the things that we're seeing now is that with new ad placement options being available, so Threads for example, the ad creative formats and aspect ratios might be presented to people a little bit differently do are on feeds. It

7:42might just not be as simple as like your square, your vertical, your horizontal. Within that, there might be 4:5 aspect ratio, for example, across different placement options. So, that gives Meta the flexibility just to be able to adjust things a little bit and and make them fit more and fit better where they're being demonstrated. Basically, I'm happy for for Meta to be able to do this one with an image like this and with most images. Sometimes there are cases where you think maybe not, but that's going to be specific to your uh to your ad creative or what you're looking to do. You can see some examples

8:11of what Meta might do. So, here you've got an example of it being expanded out to full. We've already uploaded a vertical version, so I don't know how much of that would actually be used, but you can scroll through the examples and have a look. We'll get back to the video in a second, but first, I want to tell you about Motion. In 2026, Meta's algorithm tests

8:27and kills creatives faster than ever. Keeping up with the constant demand for new ideas can feel impossible. And Ads Manager's metrics don't give us the insights we need to make confident strategic decisions. Motion is an AI-powered creative testing tool that shows you exactly what's working and what to do next. Instead of racking your brain for new ad ideas or spending hours digging through Ads Manager, Motion gives you the inspiration and answers you need in one place. Inside my Motion account, I can check reports like creative type comparison to quickly see which formats perform best or hook score, which ranks hooks by how effectively they grab attention, so I

9:00know which styles to use in future videos. Then, to feed Andromeda the new ideas that fuel ad success, I jump into the Inspo section. It suggests ad formats we haven't tested yet, shows tons of competitor you can easily filter through, highlights what's trending in your niche, and lets you deep dive into brands or competitors to see exactly what's working for them. So, you end up with a ton of ideas for your next test

9:21backed by insights from your own data. And maybe the most useful feature, Motion's AI chat, Brunette. It can answer anything from detailed data questions to creative ideas or even full ad briefs. It's basically your own creative strategist trained on your own ad data and brand context for tailored recommendations. If you're serious about running Meta ads, it's one of the cleanest ways to turn performance data

9:41into a sustainable creative plan. There's a 14-day free trial if you want to try it. Link is in the video description. Music. Now, this one is probably one of the more controversial ones, particularly for those advertisers that are really focused on their brand. So, by default, Meta's going to add some music, and let's have a little listen to what they've come up with for this ad in

10:01particular.

10:11Super corporate, right? I mean, that's like you'd expect to hear that in an elevator in like a big office building in New York. Like super corporate. Not really the vibe that I would want to to use. So, what we could do in this instance is turn it off, or we can customize. So, we say, "Look, I don't like the idea of that." Um and you can see here, automatically apply music including an AI-generated music based on your media music popularity, or we can go ahead and click manually select. And we can go through these and start So, the Meta's got some suggested ones, or you can just go through you can start

10:44searching, try and find things. Uh let's have a little Like Like we can't use that for an ad that's advertising mentorship program. That would not fit at all. I wouldn't spend a huge amount of time on this because adding music is not a big needle mover. A lot of people are going to consume without sound on anyway. But, for those that do, it might just help grab their attention if they've got the sound on as they're scrolling through and for example and it helps engage that extra sense, makes it more likely they're going to pay attention to the image ad. So, you can go through, you can search, you can find all sorts

11:19of options, or you can just come in here and go, "No." to the music. But, just be really careful about making sure you don't just trust it blindly and you do check because that original option I do not think would work very well with that particular offer that we've got. Okay, next we've got add animation. Now, this is a real This is one where whether or not you use this is very specific, I think, to the ad creative that you are

11:44using. So, in this instance, with this image ad, I don't like the idea of adding animation. It's quite text heavy. You want that to be relatively stable so that people can read it easily at a glance. You don't really want it moving. But, if you've got, say, a product image or an image that's, you know, demonstrating the installation of a brand new kitchen, if you're That's what you did as a business, right? Something that's very visual without much text, much happier for there to be animation to make things look alive and move. And remember that a huge part of the job of your ad creative is to grab people's

12:16attention in the first place. So, if you can incorporate movement, which Meta will do with animation, without having to And a big advantage here is that you don't need to go in and create a separate file or turn it into a video, things like that. You can take advantage of what Meta will do for you automatically, so it's very, uh, labor efficient. But, yeah, just I think I'll probably say most of the time we're going to leave this on. In this instance, I want to go ahead and turn

12:39this off. And then we've got flex media. If I hover over the I, it says "Show media you chose for a specific aspect ratio across all placements when it's likely to improve performance." So, you know how we changed out, um, the square and then we had a different file for the vertical, um, image. Well, what this is basically saying is that, for example, on Instagram feed, they would usually use a square option. But, if you have this on, Meta could go ahead and use the vertical option, which actually would take up the whole screen, take up much more scroll space, more likely to grab attention, more likely to get the click,

13:06more likely to get the conversion. So, very happy to go ahead and leave that on. And then we've got the text section. The first enhancement here is add overlays. So, you see it says, "We will add overlays that show text you've provided along with your selected ad creative when it's likely, um, to improve performance." So, this very much depends on if you've already got text within your image or not. If you do, I normally recommend turning it off. You don't want overlay good easily get very messy and confusing. Like how's Meta going to be able to do that? This is like a less sophisticated version of

13:35what we talked about up at the top. I can't remember the name of it now. Here we go, enhanced media text. Um I imagine that that the enhanced media text as of the recording of this video is in beta. That'll probably replace um this option or or a version of it. Um but if you don't have any text in your image, it's just like a product image or service-based image or something that shows what you do, allowing Meta to be able to add in text overlays may well help. We know that adding text overlays to images can make a big difference sometimes in terms of how that ad performs. So, something I

14:06would turn off if you don't have text. If you do have text particularly this one which is very text-heavy, I would turn it off. And then we've got text improvements. If I hover over the eye again, any text you provide may appear as primary text, headline, or description. So, they can move it around. You know how you write that out when you create your text. I'm usually happy to leave that on now. I think Meta's pretty good at working out this would work well in this instance, this would work well in this instance. And as Meta's ad platform gets more sophisticated, what it's able to do is

14:32work out that you might want to use different combinations for different individuals. So, for some people, the headlines that you've written as headlines will be used as headlines. But for others, maybe the primary text that you've written or the start of it would work really well as the headline for that particular person. So, let's go ahead and and move those around. We also have to be conscious of um the different placement options, right? So, primary text on say a Facebook mobile ad feed is going to appear above the image, whereas it's

14:56going to be below in uh on Instagram. So, that can So, giving Meta the flexibility with this would allow them to move things around to help with that potential issue as well of the sequencing of the copy and making sure that it all makes sense. You may see more. Meta does change these and add uh once in a while from time to time, but hopefully by going through that process and talking through not just the specific ones, which is mostly what you will see, but also the logic of do we use this, do we not, in what instances do we do, that'll be helpful for anyone

15:26as you go through as well. So, that's image. Let's go ahead and click cancel and delete this out and then go through the same process with a video. So, once again, I'm going to skip through the creative setup. So, I'm actually going to go ahead and upload a video to demonstrate this. So, here we've got example video ad. So, let's go ahead and

15:45click next. And then, if we want to, we can trim from within here. This is already an edited video and trimmed, so we don't need to do that. I can just go ahead and click skip and continue. So, then we can crop this video for the different uh placement options. So, we've got this is a vertical video that we loaded, so that's all good to go. Again, this is

16:02advertising uh my mentorship program. And uh we can add in a square version. We do have square versions, but that is in a the actual ad account we run this out of as opposed to this example one. I don't have the file ready to hand, so I'll leave this as is. If you don't, by the way, you can actually just go ahead and crop just like you can trim, so I could be like, right, let's just go ahead, you know, I won't have my uh dog featured in there in this one, but um you know, I could go ahead and and use that as the aspect ratio. Ideally, you

16:26would have a separate file that works, you know, well in that uh in that square format. And then again, you'd do the same with vertical, but just demonstrating that these are options as you go through the process. Let's go ahead, click next, and again, we're going to skip through the text. And then we've got the creative enhancements. Now, the creative enhancements for video are far fewer than for image. And that's not surprising because there's less that Meta's able to do to a video than they are to an image. Things like animating, well, it's already moving. Things like adding music, well, there's already audio to the video, usually. Um things

16:58like uh text overlay. Mm, much easier to get that right on an image than it is on a video. But, we can still go through the the various options, right? So, we've got again, same situation for review media text. Uh we've got add video effects. We will add color and visual sharpening enhancements to make your video more engaging, more likely to improve performance. They've left this off. You can see that that video that we uploaded, like it's already pretty bright and colorful and the editors have done that on purpose to make it look a certain way to help grab attention. So, we wouldn't leave this off with that

17:28instance, but if you're looking at the video that you've got and thinking, "Yeah, that is a little bit dull." If if Meta goes ahead and turns up the contrast, for example, so that the colors pop, that's going to be beneficial. So, you can absolutely turn that on. I wouldn't have an issue even with this instance turning that on, but I'm going to leave that off for the reasons um that I've described. Then in media, we've got visual touch-ups. If we go ahead and click the hover over the eye, we will automatically adjust the aspect ratio of your ads creative. This can help improve the visual quality of

17:54your ad and improve performance. Um so, this is quite similar to the image variation. This is turned on by default and in this instance, I am happy um to leave this in because, like I said, there's not just the three uh formats that your ads going to appear in, it's also going to be 4 by 5, which is you know, we've got square, vertical, and horizontal. 4 by 5 doesn't quite fit into those. I'm quite happy for Meta to just expand and contract a video like that. We are going to plan with that in mind. So, if you see video ads of mine, the captions are always going to

18:23basically be in the middle, so that Meta can do those sorts of things. We're going to make sure that the really important information is not right at the top, right at the bottom, um so that if it does get cropped or or moved around that it's all still there and still visible and we're demonstrating what we want to do. So, I'm happy to leave this on in this instance and to be honest, in most instances, I would rather Meta has the flexibility to change up the size, effectively, of our ad creative, whether it's an image

18:50or a video. And we've got text improvements here. Again, if I hover over any text you provide, may appear as primary text, headline, or description. That's exactly the same as what we saw with the image. That's not really actually creative-based, that's more text-based. And once again, I'm happy to leave that on for the reasons mentioned. You may see other options in here, uh depending what type of video that you've uh uploaded. Simpler ones tend to have more creative enhancement options because if you just think about the sophistication of the of Meta's AI and systems to be able to make adjustments, the simpler the video, the easier it is for Meta to

19:22be able to do that in a way that still looks good. So, less of an important thing for video in general, for image can make a really big difference, but wanted to run through that anyway because definitely something that if you are trying to produce the best ad creative possible and trying to get the best results from your ad creative, which is super important nowadays. We know that creative is one of the few levers that you can really compete and win on, creative enhancements is an important part of that. And speaking of testing new Meta ad creative, a lot of Meta advertisers are struggling to test ad

19:51creative properly after the Andromeda update. So, I've created a video which you can watch here that walks you through exactly how you can still test properly. You can introduce new ad creative which you know is incredibly important to long-term success of your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns and actually give them budget and testings in a way where you get real data and can make data-driven decisions. So, go ahead

20:12and give it a watch.