Killer Creative: How to Test Photos for Facebook Ads That Convert Like Crazy

Mateo , I got this ad; like seriously, it is not doing anything. Like I put this thing up, I'm putting money behind it. I've got it targeted properly. But like the picture sucks. Like what's working for you right now?

Well, what's working for me is–.

It is like bloody torn hands? Are they working for you at all? Cause that's not helping me at all.

That would not work for me either.

Vomit? How 'about vomit?

Sweat angels; probably don't want that. Probably don't want anyone deadlifting over 300 pounds.

These are all my best ideas.

Nope. You probably don't want that. You probably don't want—you don't want torn hands.

So no blood, no vomit, no sweat. Like this doesn't sound very fitness to me, but I'll go with—.

anything that resembles Pukie the clown, you definitely don't want.

OK, well hold on. How about this—let's just do a podcast. I feel like this is probably good info, a lot of people want to hear about creative. Let's just hold off and do a podcast . You in?

I'm in, Mike.

OK, we'll pick up this marketing mentor call in a sec. Instead we're just going to do a podcast. This is Two-Brain Radio. Regular host Mateo Lopez is actually going to be our guest. I'm Mike Warkentin of Two-Brain Media. This week I'm talking to Mateo about ads that slay and ads that suck, and apparently vomit, sweat and blood are not in 2019. Here's how to know the difference between good ads and bad ads .

Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. We make gyms profitable. We're going to bring you the very best tips, tactics interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com. We’d like to thank one of our amazing partners, Driven Nutrition. Have you ever been asked by your members or your staff what supplements to take, when to take them and where you should get them?

All right , we are back. Mateo , we're talking ads that slay and ads that suck. Do you know offhand right now the best ad you've ever run and the picture in mind? Do you know what it is?

I do.

You do. And I think a lot of people know that because it's kind of like your , it's like your golden child, is it not?

It is.

So we want to tell people—we're gonna start talking to people about how they can find these golden shots. I'm going to ask you, because you've tested tons and tons of these things, like just tons. Are there just some ads that just for some reason, like some pictures, we'll talk pictures. Are there some pictures that just instantly seem to have a connection that no one can figure out and they just do better than everything else?

Yes.

Why is that? What is it?

I mean, there are some general kinds of , I guess like best practices that get touted, but you're gonna find some things that just go against the grain, you know, or that go against what you thought should work or what people are telling you are going to work.

I have so many questions already.

Well, so I mean like best practices is like, you want smiling people, you want attractive people, you want people having a good time, you want people like, yeah. So you want those things.

Do they have to look fit?

No, they don't.

So just smiley and attractive.

Smiley , sometimes not even that attractive in the conventional sense. But that was kind of one of those things that go against the grain ideas I was talking about. But yeah, so the things that you hear about are like smiling people, looking at the camera, looking at the viewer. Then you've got something that is a little bit on the flashier sides that, you know, we call it like, I think the jargon is a pattern interrupt, right.

And that's a dancing astronaut, what is that going around.

But then one time I tried that, I tried a smiling, attractive person with a bright yellow background and it didn't do that much for me. So the other kind of best practice is a video, you know, you gotta have, you know, video ads. I think I saw some statistic in the next like three to five years, 70% of the content or traffic that's going to be viewed on Facebook and on Instagram will be video only, right? So it's just like the majority of things that people are looking at are going to be video.

So what are some video best practices, to interrupt you there for a sec? What are some video best practices, are they the same kind of thing?

Pretty much the same thing I just said. And then I tried that one time and it didn't work so well. So , it kind of goes back to what we were talking about in that episode that we did previously where we're talking about kind of the difference between direct response and kind of the branding-type stuff.

So let me ask you this and we're going to get into, I want to hear about the against the grain stuff, but first I want to say, so you're saying that things did work well or didn't work well. You're obviously tracking, right? Like you're obviously evaluating the results of your creative. You're not just throwing up a thing and hoping to God that it works forever. You're actually tracking this stuff.

Correct.

Yeah. So what are you doing there? Are you just—how often do you review this stuff and how do you know, like, do you know within the first day or two that something is bad, you know, how long does it take for you to get a sense that a picture or a video is doing really well? And what are the metrics that you're looking for specifically?

Well, it also depends on, you know , how much you're spending, how much your , you know, what kind of your goals are for the campaign. For me, you know, I like to look at if I launch something, I'll look at it every day for three days and then I don't really make any changes before the three-day mark.

How come?

Well, it needs some time to get some eyeballs on it. It needs some time to—now if you're spending a lot of money in those three days, you spend 100 bucks a day, you probably have some data where you can make a decision, but you know, I'm not spending that much typically. At least for the gyms, I should say.

And we're going to talk well landing pages in another episode. We're going to hit that in specific detail because that is an important one. So that's a good one that you bring up now.

So, but those are kind of the two pieces, right? Is you know, looking at if people are stopping and clicking , and then if people are seeing it. So that's where impressions comes in. And then if people are yes or no, are people then going into the next phase and taking the next action on the landing page.

OK. So the takeaway from that really is for our listeners is you have to be evaluating your creative. It's not enough to just, you know, come up with a concept, execute, throw the thing out and just let her roll. You have to evaluate and you might find that you have to kill your darlings, right? Like some of your best ideas maybe aren't the ones that are going to go.

Yeah. And you also don't want to test too much all at once. Especially if you're spending 10, 15, $20 a day. If you have eight pieces of ad creative on there, that's not enough of a budget to spread across all those equally. Right. So you have to be mindful of that too. And you don't want to test like eight completely different pieces of creative at one point.

OK. And so gyms that are running, let's say, you know, 10, 15, 20 bucks a day kind of thing, you're advising to test like a maximum of like two or three, four images. Not eight, though.

Yeah, something like that in that range, not eight. Facebook also has this thing called dynamic creative where you can put in five pieces of copy, you can put in five images or five videos or whatever it is, and then they will do the combining for you. They'll mix it up and do the combining for you and spit out the winners. It's pretty cool. I don't teach it to gym owners right away, especially because people aren't spending a ton of money.

But to do that, you would need five different pictures.

Yeah. You gotta be a copywriting machine. You gotta be a media master where you're taking pictures and video nonstop . So you have to have a library and you have to have a system where you're creating that content out on a regular basis. That's the other piece too . And another reason why I don't teach it straight out to the gym owner .

Yeah. So that's an advanced technique. But , it's something that, you know, if you are one of those media monsters that's out there and you have a budget, you've got Facebook marketing dialed in and you've got all this stuff and you want to start going high end , you can start playing with that stuff. At a lower level, you know, so you're talking gyms that are smaller, spending 10, 15 bucks, whatever. We're going to test in two or three, four things.

Yeah, I mean the easiest way—yeah, start with pictures. And I guess a good—I do a little bit of a mix of like photos from my gym and then stock photos. So there's a little bit of a mix.

How good do the photos have to be, like if someone's out there and like , man, I don't have a big DSLR and a $2,000 lens, like, can they get away with cell-phone stuff?

They can, especially with video stuff too, because there's some schools of thought and this definitely does work, like if it kind of matches what people are used to seeing on the Facebook feed, right? So people are used to seeing grainy selfie photos or selfie videos because that's what people post normally. So if your ad kind of resembles that aesthetic, you might get better traction because people are already used to seeing that and they're saying, oh, is this a video of someone I know?

All my friends take crappy pictures. Therefore I will post some general fuzzy stuff and see what happens.

Yeah. That kind of works for video a little bit better. OK. Crappy photos not as much, but I think for video for sure. There's some science, there's some data there.

OK. So you can get by, like again, you can certainly, you can use a high-end DSLR camera and you can make that picture look like, you know, a selfie kind of thing. There's ways to play with that. But if people don't have that, they are not SOL. They can actually just use a cell phone and start creating some creative for themselves.

Yeah. Or the stock images that Facebook gives you.

How robust is that collection? And is there a lot of stuff that people like in there?

It's very robust and most gym owners don't like what's in there, but they work well. They work well. You know, I had this beautiful photo of this guy from one of our strength competitions we had at the gym, and he was like deadlifting and he was like screaming and it was beautifully lit and it was just, it looks so awesome.

How often? Is it like 50/50 that the stock or the original stuff goes? Do you have a percentage on that?

That I don't, and it varies. It kind of varies for gym to gym too. So that's why you have to mix it up, right? You have to mix it up and see what's gonna work for you and in your area.

OK. So we've got that in place. We're going to test stuff. We can use stock images or we can use our own creative, whether it's a cell phone or DSLR. From there, testing. Like how are we going to test this stuff?

Well, yeah, so you decide what you want to do, right? You want to test the pictures, you want to test the creative, you know , the written creative. And so you pick which one you want to do first. You throw up three or four combinations and then you let it ride.

And these are in ad sets or what's the Facebook term for that? Or how does this roll?

Yeah. You're doing four creatives, ads themselves. For ad sets, you really don't need to do too many different combinations, especially because we're local businesses, right? We're small local businesses. You really, you're already dealing with an audience that's so small. You're not really doing too much fancy stuff with different ad sets because that's where you're going to do the targeting.

Sean: – “How to Add 10,000 of Revenue”? “How to Sell Your Gym”? “What to Do After the Open”?—Holy $hit, Cooper’s written a ton of help guides.

C’mon Sean. Just read the ad.

Did you know he gives this stuff away? Like for free?

Yup. That’s his thing.

I’d buy this stuff.

You don’t have to.

But I would. What kind of business expert gives everything away?

Chris gives it away so owners can fix their gyms and earn enough to pay for mentoring.

Oh, that’s actually pretty clever. Should we do the ad?

Never mind. Just tell them where to get the Free Help Kit.

Get your Free Help Kit at twobrainbusiness.com/free-tools. Click the link in the show notes.

Now do the thing from the competition. Come on Sean.

Come on, man.

Just do it!

Are you not entertained?

And we’re done here.

That is a little bit, that's more art than science for sure. I'm just taking a look and seeing, you know, what's doing well. I'll maybe turn off one or two of the low performers and let the other two go. You know, sometimes I'll just let the whole thing keep going because Facebook's going to move that money where it wants to move it better than you could.

So it does make changes for you.

So let's say I'll leave four on, and I'll have the one that does really badly for that month, and next month I'll look, Facebook's starting to push more money towards the one that was losing that whole time. Cause now that one's starting to win. So you know, it's gonna move the money, especially if you don't have like a ton of creative, if you you only have three or four, it's going to move the money to the right one where you don't really need to stress about killing it too often.

So Facebook actually does some of the work for you where it'll take a look at which ads are doing well and it will put more money behind them?

Yeah. As the platform gets a little bit more robust and as they keep working on it, they're making changes all the time. So yeah, in the past I would be more active in killing certain ads or whatever like that, but now, you know, their algorithm , they're doing a lot of that work for you these days.

Wow. So that takes a little bit out of it. But you still obviously can get rid of stuff that you know is just badly, badly underperforming. Correct. Have you ever seen like Jon Snow rise from the dead kind of thing where it's just terrible piece of creative one month, all of a sudden it's just the king of the hill the other time?

Well, that was the story I was trying to allude to. That's why, you know , sometimes I won't kill any of them because you'll see one month, exactly what you just described, the loser from the previous month will all of a sudden be the winner.

That's crazy. So you, you probably, I'm going to guess that you probably shouldn't write off anything. You probably want to keep testing and evaluating and always seeing what's happening because what's hot in fall might not be hot in spring and vice versa.

Yeah, definitely. For sure.

OK. Let's circle back to something you talked about earlier, some of the stuff that you've said you've gone against the grain of like so-called best practices, things that are, you know, advertisers might say, do this, this is the thing you have to do. Talk to me about some of the against the grain stuff you've done that has really worked well.

We kind of talked about a little bit just using some of the stock photos, you know, that stuff that, you know, some of them especially there's one that works well. You know, I mentioned the best practice, someone's smiling, looking up, bright background, one of the pictures that's done the best for not just me, but a lot of the gyms in the Two-Brain family is a really fit woman. She's looking down and the background is totally black. So that's what I'm saying. So that's what I'm saying.

Do you have another example of something weird that you just completely didn't expect all of a sudden like, wow, this is a cool photo and it's working?

Well, not, not so much of that, but like that same photo, in certain cities or certain small towns, I'll have a gym owner use it and it does work really well in terms of the cost per lead and the conversion metrics, but it brings in, you know, maybe not the right clientele and then they switch up the image, all of a sudden the leads that they're getting are a little bit different. So age range, different kind of attitudes coming in, different expectations about the program.

So creative can really qualify your leads in some ways.

In some ways. Yeah. In some ways. Now for me, I'm like, great, you do whatever you want. I'm going to keep using this image. It's making me money. But, there are stories about just that same image where you know, it can attract different people.

Yeah , there's some things on Facebook that just some images we'll talk specifically images rather than videos. Are there some images that just don't go, meaning like that Facebook will not allow or won't let you roll with?

Oh, tons.

I know it's always changing. But what are some things people should look out for and not waste their time on?

Well there's a list, of you just Google the policies, there's a whole list of what they allow and don't allow and they'll have like examples for you too that you can look up. But yeah, before and after pictures are really tough.

It's tough for us because that's our bread and butter.

Yeah, it's tough. I did see a gym in the UK do this for a while and I don't know if Facebook got hip to it or not, but they would post a before and after picture in their ad, but they would blur out the after side. So like everyone knew it was a before and after picture, but it wasn't technically a before and after cause the after was blurred. So it had like the same effect. And if anything it like made someone curious like, oh, I want to see the after picture .

You'll never believe what he looks like now!

Yeah. So, I don't know if that still works. I did a video on it for some of our Two-Brainers on how to do it. I don't know if it still works, but I did see that. So there were some little, you know, there's some funny hacks you can do. I saw one, so like another thing is if you do a video ad, I know you wanted to ask about image. If you did a video ad right, and you say like ready to lose like 20 pounds in six weeks, come join our program, like they'll flag that right away.

That's a bleep. Someone heard you, they're bleeping profit with a foghorn.

The bleep was a black box that went over their mouth and then the box said profit on it. So they're writing it in and just not saying it. So, I don't know if anyone out there wants to experiment with lose 10 pounds, but yeah, so you can do some funny things to try and get around the censors, but yeah, you're not going to get away with before and after pictures. You're not going to get away with anything too scandalous. So like people who are you know, too shirtless, I guess, if that makes sense.

So what I'm hearing there is, you know, you can experiment with some stuff. You can use best practices. You can also try just something completely different to see if you're that special snowflake that does stand out, which seems to happen more regularly than it doesn't. And then you can kind of ride the lightning with Facebook too and kind of play some games and see, you know, see what you can do to stand out from the crowd.

And I want to say one more thing, you know, once you find that winning creative, you can ride that vein for a minute. Like once you find a , you know, a vein, you can ride it and milk it for a good while.

How long do you think, like months, year?

It depends on the market. Depends on the size of your town. But yeah, I mean there's certain ads I haven't turned off in three months.

So that comes back to tracking.

Yeah, it comes back to tracking but yeah, the lead cost is like, you know, you said it yourself, you can spend up to 50 so if you start at eight and it creeps up to 25 and over the course of three months you're still winning.

Yeah. And this is, we're talking cost per lead again, right? So it might cost me eight bucks to get a lead and I'm still making money at 50 cause I'm using your tracking sheets and systems. I can let stuff creep up. And when I see my best ad used to be $2 and now it's $40, maybe it's time to get rid of that.

Right. But how long did it take for that to happen? Probably took a little while, right?

And it got me some revenue.

And it got you a lot of revenue. So that's where, you know, you spend some time experimenting in the beginning and once you find something, let that thing ride out.

So for a gym, let's say, and I'm gonna put you on the spot here again, but a gym right now is like maybe think about starting advertising and doesn't have a clue what to do. Would you recommend that that gym takes a picture of best practices, smiling member looking at the camera, whatever, or would you recommend that that gym heads into the stock thing and just like pick something that's already there?

Well, Mike, at Two-Brain Marketing, in my course we have a repository of ad creative and imagery that can save you some time. If you want to learn more about it, book a call with a mentor and find out how you can get started with Two-Brain today.

Well yeah, that's exactly what's there. I mean what I found is like I went through your course and I was able to skip some steps, right? Because I didn't have to do some of this stuff when you told me, hey man, this copy works. I've tested it, it will work. That's valuable. Right. And it saved me a ton of time just spewing stuff that I thought might work that might have or might not have.

Yeah. I mean here's the other thing too though, like Facebook makes it so easy for you to see what other people are doing. With the transparency tab and the ad library, you can see what other gyms in your area or what other gyms that you know across the country are doing for their ads. Right? So if you know someone that's like a rock star, you can spy on them pretty easily.

So for gym owners, and again, we're talking about people who maybe are on a budget right now , would you recommend that they, cause there's always this temptation and sometimes it works, maybe sometimes it doesn't. Would you recommend that gyms say, hey, I need to get a professional photographer come and get a photo shoot marketing consultation, blah, blah, blah. Or would you advise them to kind of just start, you know, start playing, what would your call be?

Yeah, no. You do not need to go get a photographer for your ads for sure. You don't need to do that. Now if you're doing any kind of video sales letter or if you're doing any kind of video work for either your ad or your landing page, that might be something where you want to call in a professional, but for photos you don't need that.

So the distinction there is really like you can get by at the beginning by yourself and eventually when you start getting into some of—we'll talk landing pages in another episode and where you start getting into websites and the stuff where people come in and they need to see you stuff that looks good, that's where you probably want to call the guy with the big lens, correct? Or the girl.

A hundred percent. We talk about that thing before where like, hey, if your ads kind of are a little bit on the amateur side and they look and match the aesthetic of everything else that's on the Facebook feed or the Instagram feed, people doing selfies or whatever. That's one thing. Once they land on your website though, you want them to come to a professional looking, you know, asset really. So yeah, there's definitely a distinction there.

So again, what it all comes back to, and we've heard this in every show that we've done so far is you're tracking things and you're experimenting. And the cool part about digital marketing, we said this in the very first show in the series, it's not like you have to commit to one billboard that you paste up 50 feet above the street and then hope to God you made the right decision.

Yeah. I mean that's what's great about it . You can be super nimble and adapt very, very quickly.

And that's the key for small businesses really, because we don't have a ton of money to waste. I can't spend 10 grand on a billboard and miss, I can't swing and miss on that.

Exactly. 100%

All right. I think that's about all we want to do. We're going to get back on future topics. Mateo was alluding to landing pages. So when you get an ad that works and someone clicks through to your landing page, what needs to be on there? What's going to help people get through to either, you know, give you their contact information. We covered that in show two, if you want to know more about what to do with contact information, go back in our archives and listen to that .

Thank you for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Make sure to subscribe to receive the most up-to-date episodes wherever you get your podcasts from. To find out how we can help create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.