4 Incredible Image Hacks to Improve Your Facebook Ad Campaigns | Social

Five years ago, a colleague of mine began promoting her e-commerce business on Facebook. After spending two years promoting it on AdWords, she believed that split-testing ad copy was the path to building successful Facebook campaigns. After a year of struggling, she started testing images instead. She soon discovered that testing images was the key to success. Today, she is one of the most successful Facebook e-commerce marketers I know. She told me that applying several image hacks increased her average ROI by over 400%!

Facebook Image Hacks Can Boost Your ROI by 400% or Higher

Facebook is the second most popular advertising platform after Google. Around 93% of marketers use Facebook to reach their audience, because it has such a vast base of users. While Facebook is a powerful advertising medium, it takes a tremendous amount of testing and a dedicated strategy to reach your target customers effectively.

My colleague, Jacob Erdei told me that Facebook advertising campaigns will go much more smoothly when you prioritize the right variables for your testing. He tells new Facebook marketers that 80% of the performance of a Facebook ad is attributed to its image.

Unfortunately, choosing the right image is easier said than done. Any campaign requires extensive testing to find the right marketing creative. However, there are a number of great image hacks that increase the probability of success and minimize the resources that you need to allocate to testing images. Here are some great image hacks to test with your Facebook ads.

Segment by age and find images that help users reminisce about their youth

Gabriel Ciordias, the CEO of BannerSnack, says that the biggest mistake that new Facebook advertisers make is testing the same images for every target segmented audience. This drastically limits the likelihood that you will find images that appeal to any of your target users. It takes a large budget and a lot of time to test more than four ads at a time. It is better to choose unique images that are likely to appeal to every segmented demographic.

One effective way to do this is by finding images that bring people back to their youth. In my own campaigns, I have found that people have a strange subconscious fixation with colors and themes that relate to the period of their life when they were in middle school to college.

For example, if you are promoting an offer to baby boomers, you may want to consider using the same colors from the most popular Beatles albums of that era.

Don't rule out testing darker background colors

A surprising Number of marketers insist that you need flashy images with bright colors to run a successful campaign on any advertising platform. These guidelines don't align with split tests conducted by Nadya Khoja.

Khoja found that images with darker backgrounds had a 136% higher click-through rate and 18% lower CPC. The conversion rate on this campaign was 87%.

What is the reason for this shocking difference in performance between images with brighter and darker colors? Khoja believes it is because darker colors demonstrate more power and authority.

Of course, this doesn't mean that images with darker background colors will necessarily perform better for your specific campaign. However, it does show that it is definitely worth a test.

Use avatars that relate to your target audience

In the blog post that he shared with me, Jacob states that using avatars that appeal to your target audience is a great way to boost the performance of your campaigns.

“Really it's all a matter of testing and segmenting out your groups by interests, age, and any other factors you can think of.  You need to uncover and create multiple customer Avatars.  From there you will be able to select images that closely align with the target group,” Jacob writes.

While this is good advice, I feel it is necessary to qualify it by saying that you should do more research about your target audience before choosing an avatar. The best performing avatar may not be someone that matches their exact demographic. For example, my own tests show that men between the ages of 35 and 48 tend to respond best to images of females that are 5 to 8 years younger than they are.

Try Using Instagram-like Filters

Instagram has changed the expectations of users on all social media sites. Facebook is no exception.

Using Instagram-like filters can be a good way to make your images more engaging. However, there is a caveat – you need to make sure they don't come across as offensive or too bizarre. Otherwise, they may not get approved by the editorial team.

Try testing different filters and see what works. The simplest and most effective is to simply add a solid, red border to the outside of your image. Luke Kling did a case study on using these effects on PoF ads and found this can increase your click-through-rate by 600%. The same results wouldn't be surprising on Facebook, especially with the right targeting.

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