Imagine this: You’re at a meeting at 6PM on a Friday and someone on the performance marketing team has the brilliant idea of running ads on social media for a new product promotion cycle.
Great idea until you try to execute it because creating thousands of ads is not a cakewalk. That’s because evolving customer needs have made personalization crucial to a campaign’s success.
And there’s enough data to back this up. According to Salesforce, 97% of marketers put in more effort into personalization in 2020 and nearly 25% of marketers saw a spike in revenue higher than 20% due to it.
The question is how do you take real-time data to create thousands of personalized ads at scale to turn users into customers?
Scaling campaigns and applying data from analytics is now well within the capabilities of in-house marketing teams and agencies thanks to dynamic creative ads.
This is what all the top brands use to personalize their offerings to their customers. And today, I’m going to show you exactly how you can use dynamic creative for your brand.
Before we jump into the nitty-gritty of dynamic creative ads, let’s define what dynamic creative and dynamic creative optimization is.
What is a Dynamic Creative?
Dynamic creative fuels personalized digital advertising by delivering the right message, at the right time to the right person. Dynamic creative ads allow you to swap out ad components to build new creatives automatically.
What is Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)?
Dynamic creative optimization or DCO allows you to serve personalized ads based on data sets you provide - location, interest, language, device, behavior among other metrics.
Note:
- Dynamic creative: represents an ad unit whose image, product, text or calls-to-action can be different in order to deliver relevant messages or an offer to an individual user.
- Dynamic creative optimization (DCO): technology that allows for optimization of ad delivery and performance based on campaign performance data at the moment of ad serving.
Dynamic creative on Facebook means taking multiple media (images, videos) and multiple ad components (such as images, videos, text and calls-to-action) and then mixing and matching them in new ways to improve the ad performance. It automatically builds creative variations for each person who views the ad.
Facebook’s Dynamic Creative/Dynamic Ads is the same as Dynamic Creative Optimization for all practical purposes. You’ll often find DC and DCO being used interchangeably.
What does DCO mean for marketers?
Relevant ads are essential for successful advertising.
73% of consumers reported in 2022 find personally relevant ads far more enjoyable.
But, the current social ad experience oscillates between two extremes - completely irrelevant advertising that crops up everywhere or hyper-personalized ads that track personal details and follow users everywhere on the web.
The latter has been addressed to a great extent thanks to Apple’s ATT update. But it has left businesses reliant on generic social ads that they blast to audiences on an endless loop.
Want to know how to beat privacy updates? Read our guide to navigating iOS 14
Generic ads annoy customers. But apart from being annoyed, consumers also face ad fatigue.
And here’s the thing: Not only are audiences aware of personalized advertising and have their purchase journey influenced by it but they also expect it from brands.
Must Read: How to overcome the privacy-personalization paradox
When marketers fail to deliver, it leads to lower conversion and disconnect for the user even if they have already visited your website because most Facebook retargeting is abrasive and static.
That’s why Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) is the holy grail when it comes to personalization at scale. You have more personalization options with creativity and gradation.
Data informing the creative process – instead of dominating it – is the ideal outcome.
Do you need Dynamic Creative and DCO?
Human attention spans are short.
Marketers have less than 2.5 seconds to capture the user’s attention on Facebook—that’s the average length of an ad played.
But with dynamic creative ads, standing out from your competition and giving your shoppers a unique experience is easy.
No two users are the same and their shopping journey shouldn’t be either.
What is the cost of not using DCO?
It’s the cost of lost opportunities. Dynamic solutions allow you to explore and use creative data in order to scale.
Data-driven Dynamic Creative: Data filters to use
With feed-driven creative, you can build 1000s of social ads in real-time for product-based retargeting, creative personalization, audience segmentation, or phase of the customer journey automatically.
All of this can be optimized with a feed-based algorithm that completes multivariate testing.
So, what kind of data filters can you use?
- Feed data
- Price range
- Previous engagement
- Location data
- Weather data
- Sales data
- Demographic data
- Contextual data
- Google Analytics data
- Interests like a favorite sports team
- Astrological data
8 Dynamic Creative Optimization examples
P.S. We’ve curated a collection of 17 dynamic creative examples in a separate guide for engaging, unique, personalized Facebook ad campaigns that capture the user’s attention.
1. Dynamic Feed-based campaigns
Feed-based ads are mainly focused on e-commerce stores but are just as relevant for all other industries like travel.
Product-focused dynamic creative campaigns serve viewers with customized products and offers using data pulled from a spreadsheet.
A user viewing a travel ad with DCO targeting can enjoy far more personalized ads. Instead of showing the user generic destinations, you can display specific airline fares to locations that the user is likely to travel.
Dynamic campaigns target consumers who have browsed product pages or have shown intent based on Facebook Pixel events. These types of campaigns are particularly useful for abandoned cart promotions or cross-selling.
They re-engage users with Facebook Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) after they’ve left your store, with only the products or offers they’ve expressed an interest in.
Facebook DPA is a subset of Dynamic Creative.
All you need to do is connect a data feed to your master Dynamic Creative template. This will show products and offers you want to be displayed across Facebook campaigns.
2. Geo-targeting data
The power of geo-targeting, combined with Dynamic Creative, lets you serve locatized ads and drill down to a granular level.
You can localize the content in your ads through familiar imagery, videos or ad copy specific to cities or even events.
You can also create local promotions depending on where the viewer is right down to the district of a city or the exact micro-location of an event. This is particularly helpful if you have physical stores that you want to draw people to.
Although Facebook gives you the option to create dynamic ads, it isn’t designed for in-house teams or agencies looking to improve their performance through the right creative.
There are paid social automation platforms (like Hunch) on the market that let you produce as many location-based ad variations as you need. All without the need to manually produce ad combinations for Facebook.
3. Demographic data targeting
Demographic campaigns are a perfect use case for Dynamic Creative.
Dynamic creative makes it easy to plan and render individual messages. It means you can take the same product and offer, and produce social ads that target an individual demographic.
Take users thinking about a trip to London for instance.
Images of Big Ben and the Tower Bridge are less likely to inspire some prospects while copy that mentions things to do in London or exotic forms of entertainment may put off some people.
Dynamic creative helps you serve the best ad, to the right audience.
4. Location and weather data
Picture this: You’ve just woken up and reach for your phone and start scrolling through social media before you even get out of bed like 71% of Americans.
You see an ad for breakfast at a restaurant.
Now, this could go one of two ways.
The ad for the restaurant is completely irrelevant because it is too far away or you see an ad for a local restaurant that is nearby.
The ad that features the local restaurant also seems to know that it’s cold out and prompts you to try their hot beverages.
That is the power of DCO.
Through location and weather data, that ad becomes contextually relevant and is going to have more conversions compared to a generic ad.
Look at this example from an athletic brand. Depending on the weather and location, you can either display a pair of shoes against a sunny backdrop or a winter jacket to fight off the cold.
Another example of how to use weather data is this adventure brand selling the same product with a background that depicts different weather conditions based on the user’s location and weather data.
You can use weather data from third-party feeds to customize your creative by weather conditions outside.
Rather than offering one-size-fits-all ads, you use dynamic creative data to optimize a user’s ad experience.
5. Facebook automotive dynamic ads
As the automotive industry adapts to the new normal, brands and dealerships are facing a massive problem. They can’t show off available cars virtually.
Enter Facebook automotive dynamic ads.
They are swiftly becoming the best solution to reach car buyers.
Car dealerships and car manufacturers can now reel in more test drives, and easily convert those into actual sales.
How?
The answer is simple: through personalization and high-impact ads.
Facebook automotive dynamic ads help improve engagement, unlock quality leads, and better ways to promote car offers. In addition, they are an effective method of promoting new car models and reaching more buyers via dynamic localization ads.
Car manufacturers can also easily and effectively align their brand message with the needs of car buyers through DCO.
6. Facebook Ads for betting and gambling
Why do betting and gambling ads fail?
Well, one of the challenges of betting and gambling ads on Facebook is compliance with various licenses and laws (depending on the region you are advertising in).
Another challenge is the nature of the industry, which forces you to change your campaigns daily.
This results in generic ads.
Thankfully, Facebook’s stance on advertising online gambling services is more flexible now.
The main goal is to transform paid social for gambling into a performance marketing channel.
Take the image shown above. You can create high-impact ad formats at scale and solve workflow automation issues with dynamic creative ads and paid social media automation platforms.
This allows you to create multiple campaigns with relevant offers in seconds.
You can easily improve audience retention, and maximize acquisition without needing to add more bench strength to your team.
7. Multi-language ads on Facebook
If you’re trying to drum up interest for your agency or brand, you want to be seen.
But even more important than that, you want your value proposition to be understood especially when running Facebook ads.
Facebook campaigns can be personalized for different countries and cultures. The quickest and most effective thing to do is create multi-language campaigns or rather multi-language ads.
Some companies avoid multi-language ads and are missing a tremendous opportunity for growth.
To understand why you have to first understand how these ads work.
Facebook has a feature called language localization that allows you to automate distributing the ad in local languages and dialects.
When users see a non-localized ad, they ignore it but with an ad that speaks to them in their native tongue, the CTR doubles.
Uncover more about Facebook language localization, and find out how this component can become pivotal to your campaigns.
8. Facebook Dynamic Ads for travel
To improve the online sales funnel, travel brands and OATs must adopt a more granular approach.
In an industry where consumers are fatigued by the same type of travel ad, advertisers are required to optimize customer journeys for potential flyers in order to capture more online bookings with dynamic ads for travel.
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Travelers are looking for highly tailored experiences with the right details in a landscape that is constantly evolving. Deliver them relevant and personalized offers with dynamic ads for travel.
Through high-impact data-driven ads, users are served with unique offers, localized to their intent, location or language.
Also, Facebook collection ads are a great way to reach people when they want to browse rather than search.
Collection ads are designed for e-commerce advertisers who offer a wide variety of products and want to target high-value customers with customized demand generation campaigns.
DCO advertising: How to set it up with Hunch
We’ve already established that you need creative ads that are tailored to your customers’ unique experiences.
But as more data insights stream in, it puts serious pressure on your design team.
As designers struggle to keep up, you end up launching generic boring campaigns.
No one is happy - including your customers.
This is why you need a platform like Hunch.
With Hunch’s feed-based creative feature, you work with your designers to automate ad production by producing dynamic templates that are populated with variable details specific to your customers.
And the insights you gain from the analytics tools and data will help you decide which creative to put in front of your customers.
At Hunch, you can produce thousands of videos for ads in less than an hour. Using Dynamic Creative, you pay 500% less for creative production.
Let’s say: You have 500 products, 2 CTA, and 3 color patterns = 3000 ads
Hunch’s robust platform generates 3K automated social image/video Ads at scale.
It’s also easy to send it to Facebook or Instagram. Especially, if you have access to Hunch Studio and Hunch Dynamic Creative solutions.
The #1 Dynamic Creative Optimization vendor: Hunch
Dynamic Creative Optimization is the missing piece of the puzzle.
DCO combines social ad creation with analytics: selecting, and optimizing dynamic creatives. DCO’s goal is all about making social ads even more relevant to viewers.
Imagine being able to target users at every stage of their interaction with your brand. That is what DCO helps you achieve.
User-journey campaigns show viewers dynamic creatives tailored to each layer of the sales funnel. From the top to the bottom of the funnel. You only show users ad variants with the message that is right for them.
With Dynamic Optimization, you can improve creatives by tearing into historical data and key learnings to enhance creativity in your dynamic templates.
When you start using the Hunch Creative Management platform, leveraging DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization) to your campaigns is easy.
With one dynamic template, you can produce all the variations you need.
Everything from choosing the color of a button in a video asset or the ad copy used is influenced by cold, hard data. With Google Analytics integration, you can optimize and test the campaign against goals in GA.
Campaigns are built to hit the right audience at the right time, with the right context – in real-time.
Many businesses have joined the bandwagon with top brands when it comes to using Dynamic Creative for the types of campaigns described in this article.
Some are still experimenting, while others are leveraging Dynamic Creative Optimization to its full potential.
What is common between these businesses is a collective realization.
Mass-personalization of social advertising isn’t feasible via the old production model. It’s impossible to manually produce so many sizes and variants at scale and maintain low costs!
With that in mind, let’s talk about the future of personalized advertising.
As you may know, Apple recently rolled out their ATT update which is a huge blow for advertisers.
Increased costs and inefficient user targeting have made it challenging to track attribution on paid social media ads that were previously so lucrative in terms of ROI.
That’s where a Dynamic Creative management platform comes into play. Hunch allows you to create the amount of advertising you need to use Dynamic Creative on social at scale.
Creative has quickly become the trigger for the best financial performance.
All this change doesn’t mean the fundamentals have changed. To design successful social creative, you must still be people-oriented, communicate real benefits and use a brand-focused perspective.
We have been helping several clients leverage Dynamic Creative and we’ve been able to gather power insights into what types of creative resonate with the audience.
How easily can you switch your static designs to Dynamic Creative with Hunch?
24 hours!
If you would like to find out more about how Hunch can help your team set up DCO, then please get in touch for a personalized demo.
Frequently Asked Questions about DCO
1. Is dynamic creative good?
Dynamic creative helps you create a tailored and customized ad for every member of your audience. Creative flexibility gives you the opportunity to deliver thousands of ad variations in real-time and enter endless creative possibilities.
2. What results can I get from using DCO?
Dynamic Creative opens doors for new prospecting which is using tons of creative dynamic ads.
3. What is DCO advertising?
Dynamic Creative helps improve your publishing efficiency by cutting down the time required to produce multiple creative iterations and will yield improvements in campaign performance.
You should build more creative variants to achieve more distinct results that will allow you to take advantage of the best-performing creative themes, colors, and imagery.
You can spend more time with analysts to identify top performers and the reasons why they are rising to the top. With creative winners likely to rise to the top quickly, be ready to review outcomes and use these insights to modify the creative for the current campaign and future ones in the next stage of the funnel for even greater results.