If you’ve been around the Facebook ad world for even, like, 5 minutes… you know the term “ad creative.” Basically, you hear it again and again — because these images, captions, videos, and graphics form the visual cornerstone of all things ads.

Plus, if you test your creative the right way, you’ve unlocked a gold mine.

But, guess what? There’s a lot more to creative than just, well, creative. Typical, huh?

Enter: dynamic creative.

What’s dynamic creative?

Dynamic creative is a newer Facebook feature that automatically mixes up your ad creative to serve different audiences. This was built to avoid the same audience seeing the same creative mix time and time again in your ads — and designed to help you continually test which creative mixes work the best with your unique audience.

When you have dynamic creative turned on in the Ads Manager, Facebook will continue to adjust your ads and create different variations — while all the time learning from the different variations, impressions, and performances. It can be immensely helpful for testing, and it also typically leads to a better cost per lead.

Here’s the thing, though: dynamic creative has its pros, but it also has its cons. Often, the optimizations end up not making a ton of sense — so sometimes, you’ll get cut off text or cropped images. This is because we typically run square images (1080px by 1080px) and story images (1080px by 1920px), and good ol’ Facebook might swap these on someone’s feed.

Should I use dynamic creative in my ads?

So, here’s the thing: dynamic creative is definitely worth trying, and Facebook will encourage you to use it. It can lead to a significantly lower cost per lead, and it can help you test. However, we’ve seen just as much success from breaking out ads the traditional way with Facebook — AKA, testing our separate versions of ad creative on our own.

Also, it is a personal choice. For obvious reasons, some of our clients care about their image and how they show up on your feed. Depending on how FB wants to crop an image, it might cut off some all-important text, and the ad isn’t as compelling, or just doesn’t make sense. On the flip side, some of our clients don’t mind. They’d rather have the lower cost per lead and let FB do its thing. The FB algorithm picks up on the winning combination fairly quickly, which will help optimize the campaign.

To decide which you’d like to use, I’d recommend, well… TESTING (my favorite word!) both of these in your own ads. Try out dynamic creative, but keep an eye on things like image text and variations — because it might get a little funky, which you (and your clients) probably won’t love. Alternatively, try testing different versions of your creative (our go-to practice over here at System Envy).

Want to give dynamic creative a try?

Go for it! Just proceed with caution if you’re particular about your creative. 😉 To try it out, go to the ad set tab right above the budget section and toggle the switch to on! You’ll then be prompted in the ads tab to upload all of your image versions, copy and headline versions into ONE ad. And FB will do the rest!

Looking for more ad tips and insights? Stay plugged into the System Envy blog — my team and I will be diving into all things ads over here, as usual.