Imagine you’re hosting a dinner party for your family and friends.
Your best friend is allergic to nuts, your cousin won’t touch gluten with a 10-foot pole, and your sibling has recently turned vegan.
You have to cater to a wide variety of tastes. Wouldn’t it be nice if the ingredients could re-arrange themselves to form the perfect meal?
Paid Social is a lot like that. Except, advertisers don’t know for sure what their audience truly wants. And that’s where Meta’s dynamic creative comes in.
It takes media and ad components and combines them to form an ad that’s more likely to resonate with your audience. You can automatically create personalized variations of the creative for each person who views the ad — something that’s impossible to do manually.
If you’ve been around the block, this isn’t exactly news to you. Dynamic creative has been a staple for top brands for a while now.
What can set you apart is your optimization strategy.
So we’ve taken our collective expertise from running 120 million automated ads and turned it into actionable advice to help you create a successful dynamic creative optimization strategy for Facebook and Instagram.
New to Dynamic Creative? Read this first 👇
If you’re new to dynamic creative, we want to clear a few things up before you continue reading.
Dynamic creative is an ad unit on Meta that combines up to 30 ad assets that can be swapped and assembled on the fly.
But which 30 ad assets should you use for your campaign?
The answer to that is to have a robust personalization strategy that uses first or third-party data like location intelligence, audience interest, language, or weather data.
This process is known as dynamic creative optimization (DCO).
The difference between Dynamic Creative and Dynamic Creative Optimization
These terms are often used interchangeably, and for practical intents and purposes, they mean the same thing.
Even though you can’t pair dynamic creative ads with dynamic language optimization or asset customization, you can use dynamic creative on Meta to set up multiple ad campaigns where you create campaigns for different audiences, locations, or interests.
This approach can be quite cumbersome since you’d have to create and manage multiple campaigns to test out different variables.
Meta’s dynamic creative is perfect for advertisers looking to use automation to save time and usually wasted ad dollars. It also appeals to smaller businesses without a dedicated team for performance marketing or enough resources to churn out multiple ad variants.
But if you want to have even more granular control, Meta’s dynamic creative may not be enough.
And that is where dynamic creative optimization platforms come in — they allow you to automate the entire process of creating dynamic creative ads and make managing these campaigns on Meta much easier.
As a Meta Business Partner, Hunch has helped hundreds agencies and brands successfully launch their dynamic creative ads.
Note: Dynamic Ads are different from dynamic creative. Dynamic Ads or Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) help you promote your product to customers who have shown some intent on your website or app.
DCO strategy for Meta: Best practices & expert tips
Planning your first dynamic creative ad? Take a look at our DCO best practices article first.
Here’s a quick summary of what you should do and what to avoid:
- Zero in on the right creative assets: Prioritize quality, not quantity — creative is the biggest lever you can pull to unlock growth.
- Try multiple call-to-action(CTA) buttons: You don’t know yet what your audience wants — give them more than one option so you can test your hypotheses.
- Create succinct ad copy: Facebook and Instagram users are geared to like short-form content so you want to create scroll stopping copy.
- Grab attention with your visuals: Make sure your creative isn’t busy and has a single point of focus. P.S. With Hunch’s Creative Studio, you can use readymade templates to create stunning image and video ads.
- Incorporate movement: Add movement to your image ads with time-lapse, loop and animation.
- Get rid of text in ad images: Unless absolutely necessary, avoid text in the images since they can make the image feel busy or get lost due to contrast issues.
- Optimize for the first few seconds: Video ads perform better on Facebook and Instagram when the first few seconds draw the user in.
- Don’t forget your branding: You’d be surprised at how easy it is to increase brand recall just by adding your brand name and logo at the end of the video.
- Design videos for audio-less moments: Don’t rely on sound to sell your product. When users consume content in public spaces, the audio is usually off by default. Add closed captioning to your videos to tell your story instead.
- Go with the vertical aspect ratio: Most people hold their phones vertically, so using a horizontal aspect ratio wastes screen space.
If you’ve already been using dynamic creative ads for a while, check out our article on challenges with DCO that can help you overcome some common pitfalls.
And if you want to learn how to actually make those winning ads for Facebook and Instagram, the Hunch Creative Studio is your perfect starting point.
Below, you’ll find the three most important tips you’ll want to use to create a dynamic creative optimization strategy.
Bear in mind, this is by no means an exhaustive list and we can always create a customized solution for your client's brand.
DCO Tip #1: Try more than 1 data point to personalize ads
You know that personalization can help you deliver more relevant ads, improve your CTR and ROAS. But is one data point enough?
Sure, there have been ads that use language localization or weather intelligence to set them apart but for true personalization to occur, you have to get more granular.
And that’s exactly what we did with FEEDB<CK, a Spanish creative production agency, for their client Ametller — a fresh food retailer.
With our help, the agency created over 100 active products in dynamic videos for the high-end grocery business.
These ads were localized for Spanish and Catalan speaking people and personalized for different audience segments — singles, families, and lookalike customers. We also created a schedule for these dynamic creative ads to appear on weekends and defined days during the week. And then, we went one step further to personalize the creative for certain postal codes where the Ametller wanted to offer express delivery.
Delivering high-converting video ads with FEEDBACK - Hunch Voice | Heroes
We created nearly 2000 personalized ads so audiences always received relevant and updated offers. The result? 58% ROAS uplift, 30% decrease in CPA and much better conversion rates. The campaign also drove a massive number of purchases.
DCO Tip #2: Lean into automation so you can focus more on strategy
Fjuz, a Norwegian full-stack advertising agency had a problem to solve for their client C-Optikk. With over 100 stores that needed to be advertised, creating personalized ads manually was impossible.
Fjuz & C-optikk - Hunch Success Story
With Hunch’s automated ads solution, Fjuz could advertise from every store’s Facebook page. And the image, font, ad headline, text, and description were dynamically personalized based on the location.
Another thing they were able to achieve with Hunch’s automation was the ability to create one campaign and one ad set for each location and allocate different budgets for each ad set. Something that again can be done on Meta’s Ads Manager but is tedious and takes away from strategic work.
And with a DCO platform like Hunch, all it takes is a product feed - a spreadsheet with all the inventory details and data sets plugged in - and you’re good to go. You don't have to lose time over tedious editing of campaigns to make them personalized. With Hunch, tackle creative production challenges and take control over your performance.
Automation helped Fjuz achieve great results for their client — lower CPM, lower CPC, and better CTR.
DCO Tip #3: Switch to automated creative production to keep ads fresh
Dynamic creative ads are a wonderful idea to test how your audience responds to your offers. You can even pair them with split A/B testing to avoid ad fatigue on Meta’s platform.
But experimentation is a never-ending process. You want to keep tweaking your ad assets till you have a winning combination, and that poses a huge problem — how do you quickly scale creative production while making sure the creatives are on-brand?
The cost of manual production is too high and can eat into your ad budget.
Roma, a US-based jewelry brand, had this exact issue. For their extremely lean team, getting branding right and using the right offers, creatives, and emotional triggers for Facebook ads was an arduous task…until they tried Hunch.
Hunch standardized and templatized the creative process with its automated ads solution. That meant Roma could put creative production on auto-pilot while being on-brand.
Once Roma paired their new automated creative production with dynamic creative templates, it became easy for them to succeed on Paid Social. Their initial bottom-of-the-funnel retargeting increased their ROAS by 120%.
Not a solo flight: dynamic creative Ads for Facebook and Instagram
Meta’s Ads Manager is an excellent starting point for businesses that want to start experimenting with dynamic creative ads.
But it’s not a tool you should use in a vacuum. Dynamic creative ads are best paired with other Meta ad products (as clearly evidenced by their case studies). And you should combine first and third-party data to personalize your ads that Meta Business Partners like Hunch can help you with.
The secret to succeeding with dynamic creative ads on Facebook and Instagram ads is simple — have a solid DCO strategy in place, personalize using multiple data points, and automate your production and management.
Hunch works with agencies like yours to create customized DCO strategies for Facebook and Instagram. Want to get on a free strategy call? Book yours here!
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there any DCO examples for Facebook and Instagram?
We’ve compiled a list of 20 dynamic creative examples you can use for your next campaign. These campaigns include using weather intelligence (temperature, rain, cold, snow) to trigger ads, multi-language localization to appeal to locals, location intelligence (personalization based on postal codes), and time-triggered ads. And if you need more inspiration for DPAs, check out Hunch’s creative examples across different product categories.
What are DCO ads used for?
DCO enables advertisers to test which ad performs best by dynamically delivering different combinations of creatives to the target audience. You can use a combination of 10 images or videos, 5 titles, 5 text variations, 5 descriptions, and 5 CTA buttons.
How does Instagram/Facebook DCO work in real-time?
Meta’s dynamic creative feature uses the assets you upload and treats them as individual components to create multiple ad variants and test them across different audience segments.
According to Meta, “When it comes to the creative, it is never one size fits all. Great creative finds the perfect match between your ad and your audience.”
You offer up a range of 30 components, specify who you want to reach, and your budget and Meta takes care of the rest. It saves time, money, and effort.
Could you run the same test manually?
Yes!
But, it will require heaps of effort and will cost you ad dollars that you can save with Meta’s dynamic creative.
So, what can you test?
You can have:
- 10 Images or 10 Videos
- 5 Text Descriptions
- 5 News Feed Link Descriptions
- 5 CTA Buttons
- 5 Headlines/Titles
- 1 Website URL
- 1 Display URL
Meta determines different ad combos based on the ad performance but also takes into account user fatigue and ad frequency.
