5 simple tips to speed-up display ad creation

Creating a display ad can be frustrating as it takes time and money. If you are looking for ways to speed it up, this content is for you!  These tips can work for every kind of market audience, and or product, as they will give you our best practices to create any kind of ad.

#1 Choose what kind of ads works best for you

Choosing what kind of ads you want to create is the first step and is very important because it will impact the design of your visual, the size of the file, or its images. But also just because if you don’t do it first, you risk wasting some time hesitating, changing things, or completely redoing your display ad creation from the start. Here, we are on a quest of saving time folks, so this is completely the opposite of what we want! In order to best choose your type of display ads, here is a kind reminder of the different types :

• Traditional display ads are classical display ads with static content that contains of course an image, short text, and a CTA in a landscape or square format for example. The format and the structure is quite classic but the design can be creative, original, and impactful

• Responsive display ads are really useful and time-saving as it allows you to create multiple ads at the same time. Indeed, you can write several descriptions and headlines and the algorithm will rotate them in order to find which one performs the best for your audience. This way you can see within your multiple texts & headline the ones you can keep and the ones you should improve.

• Social display ads are the ads that appear on social media (Linkedin, Facebook, …). As users, we are also very familiar with them. They also contain a multiple text option where you can test different headlines and descriptions in order to find out your best ones and optimize your campaign.

• Retargeting display ads. These ads target the visitors that have already shown interest in your product or services, as they are displayed by an algorithm that looks at their browsing history. If a user has already visited your website or landing pages this system will offer him personalized ads. On google display ads, Retargeting campaigns usually have the best performance from all display networks campaigns available.
• Native displays ads: Here the design and the format adapt to the graphic chart of the website on which they are displayed. They are not aggressive since they are intended to blend in with the rest and look like the main content as much as possible.

• Discovery display ads: As the name suggests appears on Google Discovery. But not only! They also appear on Youtube and Gmail Social for example. They are, just like native ads, changing their format depending on the website they are on. But in this case, it is machine learning that defines their format in order to always choose the most appropriate for the user.

Now that you know better about the kind of display ads you can create, keep in mind that all display ads types that include multiple text headlines are really time savers! Also, retargeting ads can perform really well if your campaign goal is mainly to increase conversion.

#2 Preparation is everything

No need to say it but, preparation is everything. Being prepared is always better and saves time, as it avoids you from having to make unplanned choices or being blocked during your process. Also, it is a great way to benchmark different techniques and choose the one that works best for you. Preparation is a big word, and can regroup a lot of things, but here are some selected examples of tasks you can do to best prepare your display ads creation:

Think global and make it a part of your marketing campaign. You first have to remember the goals of your marketing campaign in order to know why you are doing this. Also, it will help you make decisions faster if you have in mind all the constraints and objectives of your strategy.

Get to know your audience: In the same spirit, remembering the characteristics of your audience also allows you to keep these aspects in mind and is a valuable decision aid when it comes to thinking about the design, the copy, the CTA, or even the headline that will make them read the rest of your ad.

Learn about display ad creation: If you are a beginner, or are not at ease with display ads creation and advertising in general, this should maybe be your first step. Again if you start this without knowing where you go it’s going to be difficult. Learn more about How does modern display advertising actually works, but also about the advertising networks and their key differences. This will give you the basis to start and save you from mistakes and misunderstandings.

Draw a step-by-step process in order to have a global overview of your task and to plan it better. Sometimes we don’t even know where to start, but the internet is full of very useful information. Research on how to plan and define your advertising strategy. If you are thorough you can also break down and prioritize the display ads creation task itself into several steps. This will include: defining your advertising strategy and creating multiple ads formats, defining a clear value-proposition, choosing a good CTA and a clear design, choosing your fonts, framing your images…

Identify your potential blocking points: Once your process is defined, you may discover some future blocking points. But don’t worry, that’s normal and that’s the whole point of drawing a step-by-step process. If you identify them this early in your display ads creation process, you can work on a solution more quickly.

So far it may seem that all these preparation steps are time-consuming and take us away from our initial goal of speeding up the display ads creation, but be sure that they are often necessary and will save you time for the rest of the process.

Knowing that many of these steps are only necessary will most importantly help you get faster for your other campaigns since you will have already done all this work beforehand. You’ll get much more efficient as time goes on.

#3 Save time designing

On the contrary, the design process may seem like an incompressible time, and you might just be right about that! It will of course take time at first as it is such a crucial element to draw user attention and trigger clicks. It draws its effectiveness from concepts such as color psychology, online consumer behaviors, and many other things. But with some tips and best practices, you can really save time in the long run.

First, remember the basics :

Keep it simple: that will save you time for sure! Don’t forget that it's often the simple designs that are the most efficient. There's no point in overwhelming your prospect with too much information that he will find anyway if he ends up clicking on your ad. The same goes for the aesthetic part of the design: simple is impactful.

Mind the hierarchy: Of course, you heard that everywhere, but here, it’s even more true. According to a Hubspot report,  Instagram users spend on average 53 minutes a day on social media and let’s be honest, it is not to watch your ads in the first place. The hierarchy of a visual and of an ad, in particular, is very important as it structures the reading of your message and draws the eye of your reader towards the most important information.

Then, try to save time :

Use display ad design software: this will help you reduce the number of repetitive tasks you do. Display ads design software are excellent tools to create several visuals at the same time. You can use them to duplicate the same ad in different and multiple formats, for Instagram, or even LinkedIn. Lots of them also offer you the possibility to generate multiple visuals from a CSV file.

Use dynamic display ads: This tip is particularly relevant for e-commerce websites, as it is really useful if you have multiple products. To use it, you first have to create a product feed (if you don’t have one yet) and connect your Google Merchant center with Google display ads. This allows Google to use all your product images to automatically create numerous display ads from it.

#4 Simplify text creation

If you really want to save time during the copywriting part of your display ad creation, the easiest way to go is :

Choosing the responsive or social ads type. As it will allow you to create multiple text headlines & descriptions for the same ad, it is efficient to speed up your task. Plus, it is also a great way of testing what performs well.

Use dynamic keywords insertion for your headlines as it is quite the game-changer. If you have multiple keywords possible for your ads and relevant for your headline, the system will analyze the search queries and determine which one to include in the ad. For example, if you have 12 keywords for your headline, it can create 12 different headlines for several different search queries. Finally, for all the number geeks among our readers,  it is important to remind you that this will greatly improve your CTR!

#5 Avoid time-consuming errors

Pay attention to your file size :
Of course, you might know that some networks won’t take your file if it is over 150 KB, these kinds of little mistakes can really make you lose time and get frustrating. Always pay attention to the size of your file. But also to the format of your ads as it is determined by the channel or the network they will be on!

Take time for testing:
Thinking that A/B Testing is a waste of time and not always necessary can be an error! Not testing and being able to identify what works for you and what doesn’t is much more time-consuming in the long run as it encourages you to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Testing is optimizing. And with all the great tools we have right now it has become really intuitive and convenient to test several options, images, headlines, texts, placements … and find which one performs best but most importantly which ones don’t perform well at all and are eating all your budget! Intuitive, efficient, money saver, and time saver, now it’s become really hard to come up with an excuse for not testing your ads!

Make placement & content exclusions: Using placement & content exclusion in your display ads creation settings can be really beneficial. Not using them is putting you at risk of getting a lot of unqualified clicks, or even worse, no clicks at all because your ads have appeared in all the wrong places. These exclusions give you the possibility to remove topics, contents, or placements that are not relevant to your ads.