Best Practices for Performance Marketing Creatives to Drive Higher Engagement and Conversions

There’s an information overload everywhere we look. From ads to newsletters, consumers are often bombarded with too much information at a time. As a result, making decisions has become more complex than ever since a major chunk of time is spent on consumption. 

But we humans are highly visual beings. We love compelling visuals that capture our attention and convey a narrative about a brand or product. 

So, it’s safe to say visuals and creatives can have a massive impact on whether or not a consumer engages with your marketing campaign. 

Whether you’re optimizing your current creative strategies or building new creative assets for your next marketing campaign, the upcoming 10 performance marketing creative best practices can help you build and optimize high-converting ad designs.

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10 performance marketing creative best practices

Here are 10 tips that can help you drive better results from your performance ad creatives and marketing campaigns:

1.  Lead with a clear call to action (CTA)

A clear and strong CTA helps your target audience realize what you have to offer and what they can do to take action. For example, shop for a product, check out the latest collection, book a demo, etc.

Below are some tips to lead with a clear CTA:

• Include distinct CTAs in your creative’s headline and description – Provide different CTAs across your ad copy - headline and description. You could highlight benefits related to your audience’s search, interests, or the landing page you’re redirecting them to.

• Make your brand name prominent – Lead your creative with your brand name so the audience quickly recognizes your brand before taking action. 

• Adjust CTAs based on your conversion goals – Suppose you’re looking to drive a product’s sales; include a CTA to purchase the product with the product name in the headline or description.

• Reiterate CTAs for video ads – If you’re using video ad creatives, reiterate your CTA throughout the video as text, animation, or a voiceover. 

CTAs serve as the catalyst that persuades the audience to take the desired action through the ad creative, thus increasing the likelihood of conversion. Experiment with its placement and copy to gauge what your audience loves the most.

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2. Experiment with personalization 

Studies show personalized ad headlines perform 1.3x better than non-personalized ones. Similarly, personalized descriptions perform 2x better for brands’ campaign goals than generic ones. 

You could start with simple personalization tricks, for example, using words like “you” in your ad text to drive engagement by connecting with your audience more authentically. 

Further, you could gather audience data, such as demographic or behavioral data, divide them into segments, and create personalized creatives for each segment to improve click-through rates.

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3. Use a variety of creative assets to connect more authentically  

Combining various assets into a creative lets you offer more relevant, relatable experiences that inspire consumers to act. 

Here’s how you could combine assets meaningfully:

• For text – Include a variety of headlines and ad descriptions that are different from each other yet make sense when combined together. You could also experiment with capitalization. For example, switching between title case and sentence case descriptions. 

• For images – Upload different types of rich images of the same product group and ensure they support your call to action.

• For videos – Create video creative variants by pairing your video ads with different CTAs and headlines to understand which variant stands out as more useful and actionable. 

Be it images or videos, ensure you’re adding real-life context by showing your product in use by one or more people. 

PS. Did you know that with AI-powered ad creatives you can double the CTR on campaigns? Try Eacel now. 

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4. Build your ad creatives for smaller screens 

More and more people are consuming content on smaller screens. This has forced marketers to focus their attention on building ad creatives with smaller screens in mind.

Compared to larger screens, small screens call for better clarity and relatability of ads at first glance due to dwindling audience attention spans.

Here are some tips to build your scroll-stopping ad creatives for smaller screens:

• For image ads – Use tight framing and bright, natural light to capture people or objects. Doing so helps consumers form an instant connection between what they see and your CTA. And use only HD assets - at least 1200 px wide and avoid blurry, distorted, or excessive filters. Also, don’t overlap logos, text, or CTAs on top of your images.

• For video ads – Apply appropriate brightness and contrast to ensure your ad is easily visible on a smaller screen. If you plan to superimpose graphics or text, ensure they are big enough and well within the frame. 

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5. Turn online traffic into online sales by displaying the most relevant products in your ads

If you’re a retailer and running Google Ads, add your products to Google Merchant Center and connect your account to the ad campaign to display the most relevant products in ads.

Use the below tips to make the most of product ads:

• Product-first visuals for images – While showcasing a single product in your ad, feature it from various angles to convey as much information as possible. For example, add close-ups in bright and high-contrast colors. 

• Introduce your brand or product within the first 5 seconds for videos – Video ads must capture attention within the first few seconds. So ensure you’re as clear and specific as possible with the ask and offer. To do this, feature your product/brand and your CTA so your audience understands the offer within the first 5 seconds.

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6. Boost qualified leads with highly visual search ads 

If you’re running lead form search ads as part of your performance marketing campaign, ensure your customers feel safe sharing their information with you.

You could build forms with fewer but high-quality questions and rich form designs for a better response rate.

Here are 3 tips to keep a note of for form-based search ads:

• Be as informative as you can with your ad text since you’re asking the audience to submit the lead form and not just click the CTA.

• Clearly communicate what value you have to offer. For example, “Get an exclusive 25% off by signing up today!”

• Don’t forget to add a clear call to action under the form that best depicts how users can follow up with you. For example, Message Us, Complete this form, etc.

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7. Opt for animations instead of static elements

Static ads are no longer effective in grabbing attention. Instead, you can opt for immersive animations or videos for your ads. 

Do something as simple as moving, scaling, fading, or rotating objects to create a compelling animation for your creative. Loop animations for banners to catch attention in a polite way without overdoing it.

PS. With a solution like Eacel, you can use AI to analyze data and learn from every click to see what elements of your creative get you the best results. Try now! 

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8. Use SEO tracking and analytical tools 

Various tools can help you track how your creative assets perform. For example, SEO tracking tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Search Console let you track creatives’ performance on your website and optimize your pages for search. 

Similarly, popular analytical tools like Google Analytics help track and analyze various performance metrics, right from users arriving on your site to them converting on a specific page.

But if you’re looking for analytics on your visuals, using solutions like Eacel comes in handy. Be it monitoring what works or generating high-quality ads in minutes, the solution helps you scale creatives based on concrete data. 

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9. Optimize ad functionalities   

Design creatives that load quickly so they don’t impact performance and cause high drop-offs. 

Here are some recommendations:

• Stick to a maximum weight (excluding multimedia) of 100kb for smartphones and 200kb for tablets.

• Optimize .png images before uploading and use high-density images for logos and elements that pop.

• Ensure video files don’t exceed 50MB for smartphones and tablets. 

• Ensure consistent navigation and layout. 

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10. Give enough time for your creatives to perform and test

Give your creatives some time to perform so you can track your creative assets’ performance and learn what ingredients resonate the most with your target audience.

As a rule of thumb, you could allow at least 3 weeks for new campaigns to gather insights and learnings before you work on optimizing results. 

During optimization, update assets or ad ingredients gradually to limit drastic performance fluctuations. For example, before you remove an image asset, ensure you have a replacement ready and wait an additional 2-3 weeks to allow the system to optimize. 

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Bonus: Use AI tools to perfect your ad creatives 

Smart AI tools like Eacel help you generate and optimize high-converting ads to improve ad performance and learn iteratively from your past cycles.

You can forget multiple iterations based on guesswork and instead focus on data-led insights AI-powered tools generate to understand what creatives resonate with your audience and what don’t. 

For example, Eacel auto-creates multiple creatives in minutes to get your performance marketing campaign up and running in no time. It also continuously monitors your creative assets’ performance to generate replacements to keep up the campaign’s dynamic. 

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Wrapping up

Performance marketing creative best practices can vary from business to business and vertical to vertical. 

What matters most is building an adaptive creative strategy capable of connecting with your target audiences and their needs.

And to avoid never-ending iterations of hits and misses, businesses leveraging pivotal tools like AI can ensure a consistently growing ROI by learning and growing with you every day. 

Tap into AI-powered ad creatives today - request a free Eacel demo!