How to Choose Compelling Facebook Ad Visuals

When it comes to Facebook Ads, the most important thing is to make people stop the scroll and notice your brand in their feeds.

No matter how good your message or how great your offer is, if people just continue scrolling down, they won’t even see your brand. Ouch!

Let’s see how you can make sure that more people from your target audience will notice your ads and read your message.

Alling Your Design With Your Audience

When designing visuals for Facebook ads, the first step is to get to know the people you’re targeting.

Spend some time digging through your campaign data and demographics, but also thinking about who else is targeting the same audience. And no, not just your competitors, but also media and brands in other industries. It helps to have an idea of what your audience is already consuming in terms of ads and content on Facebook.

It’s a tricky but powerful thing to try and identify your audience’s visual standards – what they’re used to seeing and engaging with. This way you can create appealing visuals that match or go even beyond this standard.

Image Description: Advertising Utility Providers’ Comparison Website

Image Description: Advertising Broadbands. The campaign makes a reference to Stranger Things TV show release date

Catch the User’s Attention

To stop the scroll, your visuals need to stand out and be interesting, not only relevant to your audience.

Users are now conditioned to simply avoid ads. If you’re using stock photos, or your visual is confusing, or it doesn’t provoke a reaction from the first glance, they’ll just ignore it.

Sometimes it’s even better to put just text on a flat background, rather than using stock photos.

The offer on a purple background with a catchy small icon as a contrasting detail outperformed a visual using stock image.

Keep Your Eyes on Your Goal

What do you want the users to do after they see your ad? Perhaps you want them to visit a landing page or convert directly on Facebook through a lead form.

Whatever your goal is – communicate it clearly and make sure the users understand what is expected of them.Avoid different CTAs (calls-to-action) on your ads. It’s also important to mention that strong CTAs work better on Facebook. An example of a strong CTA is “Sign Up Today”.

Get to the Point

As the huge majority of Facebook users have developed ad blindness, the reality is that nobody is going to read every element of your ad.

They will not consume the description, the headline, and the call-to-action, if they don’t get what this ad is about quickly in the first place.

Assuming that you did a good job on your targeting, if users quickly understand your ad is relevant to them, they will read your ad copy and eventually click on the CTA.

Showcase Your Product

Whether your business is SaaS or eCommerce, there is always a way of showing your product on your ad images. This way you can help people quickly understand what your ad is about and how they can benefit from your offer. We have a great example with one of our B2B clients iCompario – a comparison website for fuel cards. Yes, you read that right. Their business is B2B and we have been running successful Facebook ads for them for over 4 years now.

We were able to test out different concepts and ideas for visuals. What we’ve learned is that showing their product (the actual fuel cards) always performs best.

Creative, Yet Clean Design

You don’t want to overdo your Facebook Ad visuals.

If you add too many elements and design effects to your ad image, it can easily distract your audience and steer them away from your goal.

Keep it clean, while still adding nice touches to the different elements of your design. Make sure the important pieces pop up –  your product and your offer and pricing information.

Don’t Forget About A/B Testing

Well, we’re talking about digital advertisement here, so we can’t skip the A/B tests, and you probably already know that. The caveat is that you need to plan and run these tests properly.In order to test a visual for Facebook, you need to use the exact same copy (both on the ad and the visual itself), targets, placements, etc., and effectively change only your visuals. You could test a different composition on your ad image, changing the colors, or the size of the elements, for example (though not all three at the same time).

Here’s an example of different variations of the same ad image design for a campaign:

What About Videos?

Videos are now an essential part of digital marketing. While Facebook image ads are still working great, every business can benefit from including videos in their advertising assets.

We came up with a 7 step process for an effective video marketing workflow that can help you shape your video strategy and level up your Facebook campaigns.