Should I edit the creative in active Facebook ads? This is such a tough question to answer! It’s such a situational answer that even the other day I had to reach out to a colleague and ask, “Do you think we should add this new video from the client to the campaign or just leave it?” because I couldn’t make up my own mind! (*Skip to the end if you want to hear what we decided and if it was a good decision!)
The conventional wisdom answer is:
“You should always duplicate a campaign and relaunch it with the different creative when you want to make a change to a campaign that is performing well. That way you won’t break your strong campaign and you’ll have it to go back to if your new campaign doesn’t work.”
But, I don’t always follow that advice.😳 Here are my basic rules for whether to edit the creative in an active campaign. It has a lot to do with how well the campaign is performing as a whole and how willing I am to risk “breaking” the campaign with my edits. If I am feeling risk averse, I follow conventional wisdom. But know right up front that I sometimes break my own rules too. 😂
- I rarely edit an existing ad. If I want different images or copy, I usually will make an entirely new ad to add to a campaign.
- I don’t usually fix typos. I either start fresh with a new ad or let the typos run. Typos are great at generating comments. Comments give an ad more “mojo” even if they are bad comments. Sometimes you can have fun in the comments and say, “Yeah! I see the typo! We’re trying to see how many people catch it!”
- Also, if an ad has a lot of really good comments on it, like, “I love this product.” or “So & so client is amazing and the best!” we call that social proof. I try not to edit ads that have good social proof because it really helps ad performance. Ads will often lose their social proof if you edit the copy or the image.
- If a campaign is doing really, really well and it’s been live for a few days, I am more willing to add a new ad into the mix. Campaigns that are doing well usually continue to do really well. They are harder to break, especially with new creative.
- On the flip side, if the campaign is doing poorly, if I want to mess with the creative, I usually duplicate the entire campaign and relaunch it because it’s usually more than the creative that needs help.
- If a campaign is doing OK and I think Facebook latched on to a good audience and I think better creative will perform better with the audience that Facebook has already found, I will sometimes add a new ad to an existing campaign.
*We did add the video. It’s done NOTHING for the campaign so far. Results did improve, but none of the improved results came from the new video. Which is why the question is always so hard to answer! 😂 Because at this point, we can’t really tell whether the new video made a difference at all!