Brave New Look is a direct-to-consumer brand specializing in print-on-demand clothing & accessories. Since 2014, the business has been sustained predominantly with customers acquired through targeted Facebook ads.
In that time, I set the design direction for all sponsored posts used to drive traffic to the landing pages of the array of product types in the store catalog.
Designing ads at scale was a challenge, considering a catalog of nearly 50,000 products across more than 100 different product types. To enable the production team to scale output as our catalog grew, I created smart-object driven templates that our lone production artist could use to scale his output.
When I learned that a staggering 78% of our conversions came from customers on a mobile device, I knew we had to make changes to our design process.
Enter the 4:5 Ratio. This is the maximum vertical aspect ratio allowed on the Instagram feed, and coincidentally, on Facebook’s newsfeed as well. The 4:5 ratio effectively dominates the users newsfeed on both desktop and mobile devices, allowing our ads to have more stopping power as users scrolled on their phones.
I directed our production team to convert all ad templates to change our posts from 1200x1200 squares to 1200x1500 vertical rectangles.
Most recently I’ve refocused our creative efforts on product catalog canvas ads. The ad format dynamically serves up products that would be most relevant to the user viewing the ad.
For our ads to be successful, I create unique product sets grouping SKUs together by product type (a Leggings set, a Jewelry set, a Scrub Tops set, etc.), audience type (Guardian Angels, Police Officers, Dogs, etc.) or even a combination of both (Guardian Angel Jewelry).
For each product set, we continue to use the 4:5 Ratio to grab the user as they’re scrolling — click here to check out the leggings experience on your facebook newsfeed.
Since we began running facebook ads in 2014. the desktop placement of the square photo post long reigned supreme as our top converting ad placement format.
Facebook’s recommended placement format was the Link Post format, with a recommended pixel dimension of 1200x628—a short rectangle. By comparison, the 1200x1200 photo post occupied nearly twice the vertical real estate in the newsfeed.