– Use user-generated content (UGC) sparingly and opt for stop motion gifs instead of adding people to the ad.
– Show the product immediately in the ad to capture attention quickly.
– Keep the background clean and uncluttered to maintain focus on the product.Simplify your ad creative by focusing on a strong product image, a singular text overlay with one strong message, and a clear call-to-action to achieve a high click-through rate.I think a lot of e-commerce DTC brands do ads wrong.
1. UGC Ads
People have become really good at spotting UGC ads these days. If your product doesn’t require multiple people using it to show how it works, then you can usually skip this part. A stop motion gif works better than adding people into the mix, who are usually distracting from the product.
2. Put the product in the ad from the first screen
Show the product immediately. We ingest information so quickly these days. If someone is interested in your product or products like it, you have a super slim amount of time to get their attention. Don’t waste it by not showing the product.
3. Clean background
The focus is on the product, not the background. If your background is textured, busy, or causes me to focus on something other than the product, you’ve lowered my attention span.
4. One message or thought per ad
I see so many ads with multiple benefits trying to throw the kitchen sink at things, and I hate this. There’s always going to be one benefit that outperforms the others, and you lose the strength of your messaging when you use multiple benefits. Most of the time, I’m more swayed by a strong statement instead.
5. Too much overlay text
Continuing from number 4, I see a lot of ads that have too much text on an image. The common ad has 4 different arrows pointing to benefits. The brain can’t process all that information in a limited amount of time. When you do this, you’re adding to the confusion.
I know this sounds basic, but in nearly 99% of the cases, there really is no need to reinvent the wheel. Strong product image/images, a singular text overlay with one strong message, and a clear CTA is all you need for a top-performing ad. And by top-performing, I mean an ad that gets a high CTR. The rest is up to your landing page, your product page, and the current point in the customer journey that your visitor is in. You can control two of those.
The goal isn’t to be perfect, the goal isn’t to make money on every ad, the goal is to get a high enough click-through rate that appeals to that third category of people that is most likely to purchase. It’s weird, right? We judge how good an ad is simply based on whether it made us money and we’re quick to change creative and think that’s making it happen disregarding the full customer journey. It doesn’t work that way.That’s not the goal of an ad though, the goal of an ad is to achieve a memorable experience that causes someone to become curious enough to click through. You need to look at other data points to determine if that audience is quality and shows intent. Strong CTR with low intent across the rest of the journey means gaps in the journey or your ad is attracting the wrong audience. Keep creative simple, collect intent data, and focus on the entire customer journey.#marketing #ecommerce #strategyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco