Digital marketing opens up so many possibilities for more personalised advertising. Through targeting and segmentation, it’s within our reach to serve the right ad creatives, to the right audience, at just the right time. But how can your in-house team or your creative agency keep up with the increase in ads to produce?
This is where you want to leverage some of the smart automation tools that are out there, rather than the manual production of ad variations. This is called dynamic creative, as the creatives are updated and assembled in real-time according to a set of rules and data – they’re not painstakingly produced one by one.
In this article, I’m going to cover a few ways that we at Croud use dynamic creatives to boost performance and save time.
Using product feeds
Integrating your product feeds into your ad creatives is a very efficient way to build tailored ad creatives. Google sees up to 5x higher conversion rate when users are remarketed with dynamic product banners, compared to normal remarketing. These are available across both Paid Social (Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat) and through programmatic display.
Make your own spreadsheet
Another way to automate your ad creatives is by using a Google sheet to create a matrix with different creative elements – so this can be different messaging, imagery or colours etc. In your spreadsheet, each row represents a banner size and each column represents either a data layer or a creative element. You can have as many rows as you can manage and there are templates you can use to get started. Your spreadsheet contains all the different ad variations you can serve, and then depending on the rules that you set up, your ads will assemble in real-time according to your targeting and segmentation logic.
Here you can see a campaign we did for Canyon bicycles that promoted their E-bikes. In the spreadsheet we had different versions of the video, the copy and the bike model featured. This was a really useful way to build ad variations and to be able to test new variants by just adding new rows to the spreadsheet.
Adding a countdown
A key feature we often use in dynamic creatives is incorporating a countdown feature. By adding a date and time into your spreadsheet, we can automate what the messaging or imagery is on the banner depending on how many days or hours are left of the sale.
Once you’ve activated your countdown feature, you don’t need to keep updating them, this is done automatically which adds precision and saves the team time to work on other optimisations which can be priceless for flash sales. 
Using external data sources
The third way we incorporate automation in our ad creatives, is by plugging in external data sources. Connecting your ads to a weather feed for example, means you can incorporate a key behaviour trigger in your ads, which wouldn’t be possible with a manual build. Similarly, you can also use contextual targeting to serve ads that correspond with videos or articles that your audience is reading.
To conclude
With our creative department so well embedded with the media and data teams at Croud, we are in a unique position to deliver creative campaigns that make full use of data and that enhances client’s performance as a result.
If you would like to watch the webinar session in full and see some real-life case studies, you can watch the recording below:
To find out more about dynamic creatives, or to speak to Maria about your next campaign, get in touch.
