Ad mockups often undergo review processes with input from the ad agency, client, and additional teams. Yet, once these ads go live, they might look different to individuals browsing their feeds. This can cause confusion for those who initially approved the mockups. As a social media advertiser, it’s important to let others know about Meta’s Advantage+ Creative – more specifically, Standard Enhancements in Meta ads, as these are the ads that may appear slightly different in feeds!
Basically, Meta is optimizing the ad and tailoring it to each user based on their likeliness to convert. The exact definition states that:
“Standard enhancements in Meta Advantage+ creative (previously known as dynamic experiences) is for ads using a single image or video. It automatically creates multiple variations of your ad and shows a personalized variation to each person based on what they’re most likely to respond to. You can create ads with standard enhancements using the traffic, leads, engagement, sales and app promotion objectives.”
Meta’s Business Help Center
So you might be thinking, what changes in an ad? Well, Standard Enhancements in Meta ads can create variations of the ad with different text combinations, media enhancements, and compositional changes. When advertisers are in the interface building an ad, the creative is added first. After hitting the “Next” button, a screen appears with the different settings available to toggle on for Standard Enhancements.
The options on that screen are as follows:
- Adjust image brightness and contrast
- Apply artistic filters
- Vary aspect ratio
- Add templates to a feed image
- Adding labels
- Displaying relevant Facebook comments
- Text combinations
- Adding business metadata
Meta highly recommends and encourages the use of Standard Enhancements as it is a “boost” to performance since it can tailor the ad to how someone prefers to see it, hopefully making them more likely to convert.
The downside to these different ad optimization settings is that clients tend to get confused when they see a different ad in their feed than they were sent and saw in their ad preview link. Hopefully, this blog post can help clients and non-advertisers understand that we are not changing the ad we sent for approval but instead aiming to increase performance by improving customization. Understanding the reasoning behind why that ad appears differently and why an advertiser has chosen to toggle that setting on is essential for maximizing opportunities in advertising.
Because Meta recommends that advertisers adopt Standard Enhancements, most agencies and social media advertisers like myself also support this since we have seen ads with the settings on, and some without the settings, and have noticed that the ads with these settings on can perform better than the ones without.
We also understand that businesses may not necessarily like or appreciate that the approved ad mockup is now appearing differently in their feed, and we 100% respect and understand this! It’s important to be aware of the different settings that can alter an ad and the impact that these optimizations can have on ad performance and, ultimately, overall account performance.
