The importance of matching ads to their placement

Have you ever seen one of those really awkward Instagram Stories where it’s just a square image with some poorly formatted text underneath?

That’s the worst-case scenario of not matching your ads to their placement. It looks messy, it doesn’t provide a good user experience, and they often don’t convert well – costing you money.

Now I hear you asking, what placements am I supposed to use then? Or I don’t have the time or skills to create multiple versions of my creative. That’s what we will discuss in today’s blog.

Simplify your placements

The easiest solution to this, simplify your ad placements.

Facebook by default selects every placement, they claim that this is so you get the best possible placements in the auction, however, from all the testing we’ve done – the best performers for most campaigns are still your Facebook News Feed and Instagram feed – bar a few exceptions.

So, if you don’t have the technical skills (or let’s be real) the time to edit custom graphics for each placement. Simply select all the placements that will happily use the image you have – AND look good in that placement. And deselect all the other options.

Create custom graphics

If you don’t have the ability to create custom visuals for Instagram stories, I wouldn’t bother using them. If you can, amazing, they work so well, but I’d rather you spend your time and money on well-presented feed ads than waste money on crappy-looking story ads because you heard they work well.

This simply means instead of using the same 1200×1200 square image for everything, your story placements will be custom designed. And really the should be. You want to utilize and highlight the swipe-up function, and you also don’t have ad copy to rely on, so your image or video needs to tell more of a story.

Make sure your text matches placements

It’s also important to consider the text you’re using across placements. Be careful with the length of text with certain placements, the right-hand side option for instance will only show a few words, so if you’ve got really long lengthy ad copy – go ahead and deselect that baby – no ones going to be able to read it anyway, and you’ll save yourself some money in the process.

In summary

Make sure you’re creating content specific to each placement, and if you don’t have the time or resources to do so – stick with the simple “standard size” placements and you’ll save money and keep your brand looking great.

Have any questions or need someone to help create graphics and videos? Did you know we have a team of ad specialist designers? Check out our social video design work to get an idea of what we do or book in a free ad account audit to see how we can help!