Facebook’s dynamic creative can generate up to 6,250 versions of an ad

Facebook is rolling out a way for brands to automatically create thousands of different versions of an ad that will vary in content based on who they are shown to and where they appear.

Facebook’s new dynamic creative tool enables brands to input multiple options for each of the elements that make up an ad — photo, headline, call to action and so on — and have Facebook automatically piece together various versions of the ad on the fly to appeal to different audiences and accommodate different placements. Think of it like being a chef laying out ingredients for a meal and a computer coming up with lots of different dishes with those ingredients

Dynamic creative is available in Facebook Ads Manager and Power Editor. The supported campaign objectives are conversions, app installs and traffic.

Once an advertiser clicks on the dynamic creative option, they can add up to 30 assets: five titles or headlines, 10 images or videos, five text entries that will typically serve as the ad’s caption, five descriptions of an ad’s link or video and five calls to action. As a result, a single ad could spawn up to 6,250 unique combinations of title, image/video, text, description and call to action. However Facebook will only serve a fraction of those combinations because its system is designed to pick which combinations are likely to have the most success, said a Facebook spokesperson who declined to say how many combinations Facebook would actually run as ads.

Dynamic creative is only available for ads featuring a single image or video, not carousel ads. Advertisers cannot mix images and videos for their ads but instead must choose one format or the other. It can be used across six placement types: News Feed; the right rail on desktop; Instagram’s main feed; Audience Network’s native, banner and interstitial placements; Audience Network’s pre-roll and mid-roll placements; and Audience Network’s rewarded video placement.

Advertisers can analyze results in Power Editor or Ads Manager by asset type and compare, say, the cost per result among five images or the click-through rate across three calls to action. Additionally, advertisers can break down the ads’ performance by audiences’ age and gender to see how the different variations appealed to different demographic segments.

It’s unclear what kind of visibility users will have into dynamic ad variations when Facebook rolls out the “View Ads” tab on Pages in the US next summer. The new tab is part of Facebook’s efforts to improve ad transparency after finding Russian accounts were using ads on Facebook to try to influence the US presidential election. A Facebook spokesperson said that the company is unable to show certain types of ads, including some dynamic ads, at this time.

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About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.