Do you practically live on Facebook, setting up ad budgets and tweaking targeting strategies all the time? Well, you may not need to spend nearly as much time on it soon. The reason is Facebook is beta-testing new ad automation workflows for Ad Manager that will eventually allow you to automate this critical aspect of your marketing ads. 

The workflows will eliminate the need for you to narrow down your audience parameters or manage ad spend manually—using purchase history and behavioral analytics to do the job. 

However, this is just one of multiple ad automation platforms an average marketer uses day in and out. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that ad automation is the stuff marketing funnels today are made of. 

The end goal, of course, is to drive conversions and boost reach. Each platform has an undeniable role to play in terms of driving ROAS. 

Creative Management and Optimization critical for improving conversion rates 

On average, you can expect up to 3X higher conversion and much better efficiency with automating your marketing ads compared to an old-fashioned manual setup. 

However, there is a critical area where Facebook Ad Manager (or any other platform for that matter) comes up short, and that is managing ad creatives.

Adding a creative to most automated advertising platforms is usually just a matter of uploading an image or video or adding a headline and description. 

No doubt, ad automation can be incredibly effective at choosing the best formats and placements for a given campaign objective. 

However, research proves that the ad creative does most of the legwork in terms of driving CTR or video views, leading to conversion and unless you specifically create ads for different placements and personas, you’d be wasting precious ad space. 

The impact on engagement and conversion, in particular, can be massive. 

So how exactly do you build and scale creatives so that your marketing ads achieve and even exceed the conversion and average order value goals you have in mind? Read on.

3 Ad Automation Strategies for Maximizing Conversion

If your marketing ads have a below-average conversion rate, you need to review your overall campaign set-up thoroughly. 

More often than not, you’ll find that the most significant opportunities lie in creative optimization. 

Here are the three critical areas with the most significant potential you need to focus on:

1. Creative automation

Whether you are running retargeting or product marketing ads, creative design has a critical role in conveying the value proposition in terms of price, convenience, etc. 

In addition, marketers need to tailor their offers to multiple customer journeys, especially at the bottom of the funnel. This can not only increase conversion but also reduce the time to purchase. 

Your primary focus may be building brand awareness if you own a startup. This calls for more consistent branding and personalization than an established competitor. 

The problem is you don’t have a lot of time but need a variety of high-quality creatives and be able to create custom variations for multiple cohorts and channels. 

However, before you can do that, you’ll need to validate your creative idea, which means exhaustive testing and integrating the learnings into the campaign. 

Testing is also a critical first step for defining the base creative that will form the core of a given ad group. For a marketer, creative testing is a process that never ends. 

Creative automation gives growth-focused brands the freedom to design and create personalized ads at scale – without unnecessary manual effort and with faster turnaround time. 

Using key visual templates, you can produce on-brand creatives that speak to your audience “in their language.” You can then automatically generate personalized variations from these templates in multiple sizes for different channels with creative automation.

A key reason for poor conversion (and consequently CPC) is creative fatigue. Creative automation allows brands to monitor engagement levels and refresh ads in bulk before the performance of the existing ones drops off completely. 

Thanks to built-in digital asset management capability, you can easily find and repurpose performing assets from the past to nudge customers to ‘buy now.’ 

With creative automation, you can maintain conversion performance for longer by spending less time on repetitive and redundant tasks of creating marketing ads, reducing costs, and increasing ROI.

 2. Creative intelligence

With platforms like Facebook, there is a significant lag time of up to 72 hours before you can access performance data for a given campaign. So you need to be able to analyze and respond quickly as soon as the data is available to drive engagement and conversion. 

Another common problem that is often frustrating for marketers is toggling between multiple disparate tools to drill down into the data for specific channels. 

It is a time-consuming process. You first have to export the data to a spreadsheet and format it before extracting the key insights- until now, that is! 

The latest AI-enabled ad automation tools can automatically soak up all the data across channels and provide a 360-degree view of creative performance in a single place. 

They can seamlessly interface with individual platforms and assemble the data into a comprehensive report packed with insights. As a result, it is easier to track conversions across different customer journeys and identify the key touchpoints to optimize with the data at your fingertips. 

Creative intelligence can provide suggestions to improve future campaigns (or reiterate ongoing ones) based on historical data. For example, imagine predicting the CTR of a creative based on specific attributes it might have shared with previous campaigns and get helpful optimization tips! 

Moreover, creative ad automation platforms can also double up as a gatekeeper to ensure brand compliance, ensuring that every creative meets your brand style guide’s exact color, font, logo, and format specifications. 

It can assign a score to each creative and move it to the production stage only if it matches pre-set parameters. Even if you miss a beat, the tool won’t. 

Creative intelligence leverages data to predict which elements will work best in driving conversion and helps close the sales cycle.

3. Campaign management automation

Every week, the average marketer spends several hours optimizing campaigns based on the chosen objective. They meticulously follow tried and tested routines that include tracking important metrics, identifying shortfalls, and working with designers on developing and testing new creative concepts. 

However, due to platform limitations, they cannot always tweak ad sets, adjust bids, or pause underperforming ads in ways that would matter. This effectively puts the brakes on performance and forces marketers to settle for less. After all, identifying and pausing under-performing ads allows you to spend more on the ones that are actually bringing in the sales. 

Similarly, rotating and testing ad creatives plays a critical role in keeping engagement on an even keel. 

Once you have identified the ads with potential, you can focus on creating variations and boosting them for greater visibility.

All of these are time-consuming tasks that ultimately detract marketers from their core job of finding new growth opportunities. The latest automated advertising tools overcome this barrier by automating the tedious job of optimizing ad budgets and scaling creatives with potential. 

With automated campaign management, you can be proactive about running campaigns without second-guessing yourself. 

Here’s how: You can choose among dozens of pre-defined metrics or build custom ones, depending on your niche and target audience. With these metrics acting as the operating conditions, you can build workflows for multiple tasks, depending on the campaign objective. 

Creative testing can be complicated with multiple metrics involved. You cannot scale while sacrificing efficiency or the other way around. 

Advanced ad automation tools allow you to test and compare multiple ad strategies based on metric-driven rules. Moreover, these rules can also be used to adjust budgets, optimize bidding strategy and pause or resume specific ad groups.

Final Words

If you want to outperform the competition, you need a strategic approach to creative production and campaign management. 

Automating creative production is the first step in scaling campaigns for growth. In addition, it can allow you to tackle top challenges like cart abandonment and generic product recommendations. 

With creative intelligence, you will be able to predict customer behavior rather than react to it. 

And finally, automated campaign management will enable you to optimize the right touchpoints, saving time and money. These three pillars discussed above create a solid foundation for practically any digital ad campaign, improving the odds of achieving the hoped-for ROI. 

If growth marketing is all about making small but strategic changes that deliver disproportionate results, the 3C’s described here are the roadmap!

How Can Rocketium Help You?

Our mission at Rocketium is to empower brands to harness the power of design-led growth. Our creative management platform offers the complete ecosystem for brands to build and scale their cross-channel campaigns in a responsive and cost-efficient manner. 

Having worked with top consumer brands like Meesho, BigBasket, and Urban Company, we focus on creating new possibilities for customers to drive personalized experiences and world-class team collaboration.