This guide will help you familiarize yourself with eight high-performance ad formats; five that are tried and true, three that are trending upwards. The goal is to help you reduce time-to-production for your ads by helping you choose the right formats.
I work at Motion, a creative analytics platform used by top performance teams at True Classic, WPromote, Vuori, and more. We process $14B in paid media spend every year, giving us tons of data that we can use to zoom out and take a high-level look at what’s working.
In the last six months, we’ve seen our best customers adapting their creative playbooks to be much more visual and persona-driven, in response to Meta’s Andromeda update.
I asked our research team what the five most commonly used visual formats are on Meta, and they analyzed 474,560 ads to find the answers. These formats are staples of paid social advertising, especially for DTC/ecommerce brands.
Let's look at what's trending, plus some underrated formats the best teams are starting to adopt.
We see these formats in nearly every ad account we look at. They’re popular for good reason: they work. If you’re not testing these formats already, start here.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that this is the most-used format for Meta ads since it’s such a popular UGC format. Testimonial ads feature a real person sharing their experience with genuine reactions, like they’re your friend telling you a story.
The key to a good testimonial is using social proof language; a problem they had, a solution they tried, and what happened when they tried your product. Customer reviews are a great place to start if you need to find this kind of language.
Combine all those elements and you’ve got a strong script. Here’s a great example from Buoy:
Watch a few ads in this swipe file and you should be able to get an idea of the typical script format for testimonial ads:
Demo is short for demonstration, a.k.a. demonstrating what your product does, how it works, or how to set it up. Demo ads work because seeing is believing. If you’re selling cookware, show someone cooking with it!
You can also get creative and try to build excitement instead. For example, use a taste test to get people interested in your soda. Then you’re not showing how the product works, you’re showing what the experience is like:
There are always ways to demonstrate your product, even if they’re not obvious. Check out the swipe file to see some different takes.