Facebook™ ads are very effective because they look like regular posts and users do not perceive them as disruptive. Very few of them will bother to hide your ads, unless they are too repetitive (see our article about improving your ad relevance score on Facebook™).
However, the very characteristic that makes Facebook™ ads perform well compared to other digital ads is their weak feature. They look all the same. A photo or a video with a bit of text as headline. And that’s all. For this reason, many people scroll down because they simply did not notice an ad.
Giving Advertiser the Chance to Stand Out
Facebook™ decided that the standard ad format needs a bit of sprucing up. For the beginning, they focused on dynamic ads. These are remarketing ads that target people who visited your website. Depending on the action they took (or failed to take) there, you can create dynamic ad campaigns on Facebook™ to get these people:
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To return to an abandoned cart and complete the purchase
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To sign up for your newsletter
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To download your lead magnet
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To start a free trial of your services.
You can now personalise these ads with several graphic elements:
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Price overlay
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Custom frame.
Before we move on to the custom frames, let us tell you a few things about price overlays. You can add a price to your Facebook™ ads with several custom characteristics:
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Price type: exact price, strikethrough (for the old price), percentage off;
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Shape of the price box: rectangle, triangle pill, circle;
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Opacity: solid colour or transparent shape;
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Colour: the full colour palette;
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Font: you can choose from 9 different fonts.
All these customisations are made within the Ad Creator platform when you set up your Facebook™ dynamic ads.
How to Create a Custom Frame for Your Facebook™ Ad
This is where you need to do a bit of extra work. Facebook™ does not provide these frames. It allows you to upload them and use them for your ads. There are two ways to go about it:
1. Create Your Own Frame
You can use any graphic design software suite, like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. You will find lots of pre-defined shapes in their menus. Pick a rectangle and set all the parameters you want: thickness, colour, opacity, etc. Don’t forget to set the background as transparent, otherwise the area inside the rectangle will show as solid white colour and cover your ad visuals.
2. Purchase Vector Frames from a Stock Photo Websites
Vector images are helpful because you can resize them anyway you want and they will not become distorted or lose image sharpness. You can usually find packs of frames grouped by type (artistic, photographic, basic rectangles, embellished, etc.)
Once you purchased these basic frames, you can customise them in a graphic design suite: pick your brand colours, set transparency, etc.
Upload Your Frames into Facebook™
Once you have the frames, you will go to Creative Tools in the Ad Creator platform. Select the Frame tool and upload the image. Attention! The only supported image formats are JPG and PNG.
Here are a few other technical details to keep in mind:
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Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels for single product ad, 1260 x 628 pixels for carousel ads (for several products);
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File size: under 1 MB;
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Recommended aspect ratio: 1:1 for single product ads, 9:16 or 16:9 for carousel ads.
Once you uploaded the frame, you can drag and resize it to fit the edges of your ad visuals perfectly. Click on Save and proceed to finishing up your ad campaign.
Helpful tip: The main shopping season is getting closer. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the US Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year are periods of massive sales. Instead of working extra to create special ad visuals for each occasion, create customised frames. This will save you some time and allow you to promote your products according to each specific occasion.