CARE’s Top-Performing Creative Assets
Ideally, the campaign being created can connect back to a conversion. For example, the call to action in a vaccination campaign might be to ask the viewer to click a link to a site where they can book a vaccination appointment. In this example, the top-performing ad would be the ad that drove the most vaccination appointments at the lowest cost per appointment (conversions/advertising spend).
With SBCC campaigns, it can be challenging to garner clear, online conversion. Oftentimes, conversion occurs on a website or an app that you don’t own and therefore you don’t have access to the backend analytics, leaving you unable to fully track conversion and ultimately identify the top-performing ad. If this is the case, you may have to approximate the top-performing ad by looking at which ads drove the most “click-throughs” to the website or app.
Alternatively, an SBCC campaign might be designed to shift knowledge or awareness about a topic and might not include a call to action. For example, when the COVID pandemic first occurred, one awareness message that had no online action was educating people on the importance of handwashing or how to wear a mask properly. In these types of campaigns, the top-performing ad was determined by communication metrics and its performance compared with benchmark or average performance.
Some key communication metrics that CARE considers are:
- Share rate: While this percentage is often small, it is a good indicator of how helpful, interesting, or practical the information is to the audience.
- Engagement rate: This helps to indicate whether that ad is driving conversations.
- Video completion rate (VCR): This is a good indicator of how “thumb stopping” and how interesting the content is to the audience. It also provides insight into what part of the message the audience received and when they are dropping off. For example, if a significant portion of the audience stops watching the video at the 7-second mark, what occurs in that frame that is preventing people from continuing to watch? In addition, if they stop watching the content at 7 seconds, what part of the message did they receive? What part of the message did they not receive?
- Click-through rate (CTR): If there is a place for more information, this is an indicator of how many people are “converting” to learn more or take action.
- Cost per action: A cost per action metric like cost per click (CPC) or cost per engagement (CPE) can also help you determine how efficient and effective an individual ad is. The lower the cost per action, the more efficient an ad is at driving outcomes.
CARE compares these communication metric results for each campaign against previous campaign results as well as industry and internal benchmarks to better understand if a campaign is resonating with the target audience. In addition, CARE will monitor comments on the ads for social listening purposes.
Creative Beyond the Visuals
Remember that creative assets include more than the visuals. Creative components such as post copy, outbound links, and calls to action (CTAs) can also make or break an ad.
Ad Review
Ad review is an important part of the creative design process and is often where you’ll catch errors that have slipped past. This step is essential.
Once you’ve created your ads, preview them on Facebook’s Ad Manager or Creative Hub to see the whole ad (visuals alongside their captions, headlines, and links). Share these previews with your colleagues to ensure that everything is aligned and accurate. Some things to look out for include:
- Is the copy aligned with the appropriate ad?
- Are subtitles turned on for video ads?
- Are outbound links set to the proper destination?
- Are visuals optimized for different social media post dimensions?
- If copy and creative are in a language you do not know, make sure to have someone fluent in the language check them. Do the translations make sense?
