COPY FOR PAID ADS

About the author:

Joe has worked in Digital Marketing for over 12 years where he has developed skills in strategy, social media marketing, insights and analysis, Google ads and SEO. Starting his career as a social media manager in an above the line agency, he engrossed himself in the world of marketing on his journey through PR, content marketing, social media agencies and on to digital marketing at Spinnaker. His client history is extensive, including Under Armour, Amazon Prime Video UK, LG electronics, Magners Cider, Spotify and UBS. In his role as Head of Digital Media at Spinnaker his clients include MGM, Equinox Kombucha and UK and Irish Mushrooms.

There’s a million resources out there detailing how many characters you are allowed in your Facebook ad copy. In fact, there’s 2,290,000,000 according to a quick Google Search. Quick tip, if you want to know how many characters or even creative sizing for any platform, go to the Meta/TikTok/Twitter/etc websites. Things change so quickly I would personally never put my trust in a third-party source. With that out of the way, we are going to focus on general recommendations for writing paid social ad copy, or how to make your ads work harder with the copy you use. These are platform agnostic, focussed more on broad user behaviour than the intricacies of each platform.

Copy on your asset:

If you have one key simple message to say, put it on your asset. A strong video or static will catch the eye much more so than a block of copy, so overlay key words on that asset. Of course, ensure it’s not too many and doesn’t detract from the visual itself, while remembering that words like “free” will stop thumbs effectively.

Align objective and CTA:

Each social ad should have one clear objective. This is the buying objective of the ad, with the CTA in the copy clearly reflecting this. Ensure that this CTA has pride of place in your ad – ideally on the asset itself or at the least in the headline where the copy is slightly bigger and bolder. Don’t try and be too clever here, be direct and get the message across quickly and succinctly.

Get creative:

Yes, you should be creative with your copy, but not to the detriment of keeping your copy snappy. Writing great copy is a skill, but writing great concise copy is an even bigger achievement. The above tips should help stop thumbs and get users looking at your ad, this is when you can show off your brand personality with some slightly longer body copy.

User knowledge of brand:

Paid ads are a great way to drive awareness of your brand with a new audience, and smart targeting should guarantee that users will have an interest in your brand. However, don’t suddenly think they are going to read a one thousand word ad about your shoe company because they like Nike on Facebook. If you are reaching out to a cold audience, cut to the chase. If you are retargeting or boosting content to an already engaged audience, you have the user’s permission (from their previous engagement) to ask a bit more of their time. But a bit more of their time. Not the complete works of Shakespeare.

Truncation:

As an example, there is no listed character limit for an Instagram feed ad, but there is a recommendation that copy is kept to under 125 single-byte characters. Anything beyond the 125 will be hidden behind a “see more” message, and that is asking a potentially cold audience to click to learn more about a brand they know nothing about. This is a clear barrier in your messaging and the audience user experience. If you must go beyond the 125 characters, top load your message to the first, non-hidden part of the ad. All of the social platforms’ websites will.

Placements, not just platforms:

When looking to write copy or brief your copywriter, don’t just consider how many characters you can use on each platform, be sure to check how many can be used on each placement. For context a Facebook feed ad gives you 125 characters, 27 for the headline and 27 for the description. Facebook Stories also has 125 characters, but then 40 for the headline with no option for a description. Just as you should use placement specific formats, you should also use placement specific copy.

AB test:

What sort of blog about ad performance would be complete without a section on AB testing? If you have the time and the space, test everything, one at a time so as not to cloud results with multiple tests running at once. Consider;

1.     Impact of headlines

2.     CTA on asset vs in copy

3.     Length of copy

4.     Different CTAs

Got any other top tips for successful paid social ad copy? Be sure to let us know on our Spinnaker socials via the icons at the top of this page.

Again, starting with point 2, this is sensible. No arguments from me. And on point 1, this is sensible. No arguments from me. I have seen the impact of machine learning/AI on social ads for a while. Previously you’d manually create 50 iterations of each ad and stick it into one of 10 ad sets testing out different audiences. You’d leave it alone for the learning phase, and then potentially begin turning things off, shifting budgets, reacting to the performance. When it was all done, you’d infer meaning from the data and plug that data back into the planning phase again.

But the slow shift has been seen with things like Dynamic Creative – where Meta will do the testing and optimising for you. You give them all your creative, be it images, video, copy, headlines, CTAs etc and they’ll figure out the best combination. With Advantage+ Shopping ads, it’s like Dynamic Creative, but letting Meta do the targeting and the bidding on top of the creative. As a feature, I will absolutely be using this. And the reason why is that Meta have more data points on user behaviour than we know about, they can react quicker to trends that we can, their AI doesn’t sleep or eat or have Thursday drinks to attend. In short, AI can absolutely distribute content better than we can as advertisers.

So what is our role in all of this as marketeers or are we surplus to requirements? Of course the answer is no (phew), we still have a massive role to play. Distribution is the strength of AI, because that is based on looking at a huge amount of data touch points, learning and reacting. However, what we plug in to Meta (the strategy and content) and using what comes out of Meta (data from which we can infer learnings to plug back into strategy) is our role. We have to feed the AI and look at the data that comes out the other end, so we know what to feed it again in future.

AI is obviously far from just a Meta thing. It took all the strength I could muster to not ask ChatGPT to write the intro to this and then spring this revelation on you at the end of this blog in an attempt to prove some sort of point. The inevitable cold emails I’ve been receiving lately have had a definite AI flavour to them. While I’m yet to be fully convinced by AI as a creative tool, it certainly can help with ads – something definitive based on data.

Overall, it was an interesting session from Meta, as much as these things can be. Yes, as a performance marketing summit I’d love to hear more on the future of targeting and tracking in an increasingly private online ecosystem. But they use these as an opportunity to sell us what they want, and in this instance I happen to agree with that. However, if they’d tried to push the Metaverse…