Celtra for Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) is a powerful way to drive performance with help from beautiful, on-brand creatives. In fact, over the past few years, we have seen a push towards performance-marketing tactics, and we can expect CMOs to allocate more budget to brand building in 2023.
If you’ve been running out-of-the-box catalog-based dynamic product ads, getting started with full-funnel creativity is much faster than you think. In addition to branding benefits, the performance gains of well-crafted product ads are unparalleled. In this article, we’ll take you through the basic planning process, how creative automation can help you efficiently create branded performance ads, and share template ideas from our expert designers from Celtra’s Creative Services team.
What is Celtra for DPA?
In essence, Celtra for Dynamic Product Ads is a workflow where you create design templates that connect to your product feed and generate the creatives based on the rules you set and customize. For example, you can pull pricing or product name info from the feed, descriptions, images, and so on.
This new solution from Celtra allows marketers to leverage brand equity across the funnel and extend their carefully curated brand identity into dynamic product ads on social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Doing so allows you to finally have creative and brand consistency across marketing efforts to drive performance and revenue. In time, you’ll be able to extend your shopping ad strategy to test a variety of templates to find a winning combination of messaging, design, and products to stand out against the competition and motivate sales.
Product ads are generated from a product feed, so you’ll need an online .csv feed to house the product assets you want to enhance with creative DPA templates. When you’re starting to plan the designs for your DPA campaigns, consider how your product images are displayed in the feed and what backgrounds they have (transparent, white, gradient, etc.).
Once you’ve generated the creatives, you can QA and review them in bulk to ensure that different product shots work nicely with the template you’ve designed. When you’re ready to launch, you’ll copy and paste the feed URL into the media buying platform and go live. The feed updates each hour to ensure that out-of-stock items aren’t pulled into live campaigns.
Watch Celtra for DPAs in action:
Template Ideas to Boost Performance
Celtra Creative Services—our in-house production team—works with some of the largest CPG, apparel, and consumer brands in the world. With our designers taking charge of planning and producing templates for dynamic product ads, we sat down with our production and design team to discuss best practices and ideas that help you get started with lower-funnel branding.
Build brand equity and trust with design templates for shopping ads
A simple way to get started with lower-funnel branding is by creating a streamlined template that includes your brand’s logo and a background matched to your design guidelines. With Celtra, you can also set rules that match the background color with a certain product to harmonize the design. Extending your brand guidelines is a simple way to build brand equity across paid social channels. It helps drive brand recall and builds trust that drives purchase decisions.
Launch full-funnel branded campaigns across all digital activities
Chances are that you’re already running a digital campaign with branded assets for upper-funnel activities. Why not extend the campaign look-feel to your DPA creatives, too? Not only are you making the most of the large investment you’ve made into producing your main digital communications platform, but you’re also drawing a connection between your brand story and your product ads. This typically has a positive impact on performance and ROAS across the board.
Price-discount design templates for Facebook dynamic ads
Are you running a sale or a special discount for certain products? Bring that message to the forefront by dynamically pulling the full price vs. sale price into the design. Highlight the cost difference or the percentage discount in the design. Sale promotions are all about creating a sense of urgency, and featuring the discount can help accelerate the decision to buy the product.
Premium e-commerce ad design templates for lifestyle brands
Combine your products with lifestyle graphics or photography that correspond to your brand or complement the product’s unique attributes. By placing your product in a more aspirational context, you’ll convey a more premium experience that will help you differentiate from competitors running product shots on a white background.
Audience-based design templates for personalized ads
Mirror your paid social audience strategy to your DPA templates by creating unique designs for each of your audiences. For example, you could run a Mother’s Day gift promotion targeting an audience who is on the market for presents. With plain product ads, it’s tough to capture any kind of audience-specific preference which means that your next customer could just keep scrolling by. Templates help incorporate messaging and visuals that resonate with your audience’s interests, making them more likely to notice you.
Product category design templates to drive purchases
A popular DPA use case is also creating unique templates for your most popular product categories to further drive purchases for in-demand products. You already have data on what products drive the bulk of your sales or spearhead customer acquisition. By extending branding into those bestsellers, you’ll be able to drive even better performance.
Message-based design templates that create a sense of urgency
Another efficient way to drive performance is to test out messaging that encourages shoppers to act now and not later. You can tap into a sense of urgency by communicating how many days are left of a certain promotion or trying out incentives like a free gift with purchase, warranty, or free delivery. People rarely read ad post copy in formats that place it above the product shot, but if it is incorporated in the actual design in a visually impactful way, chances are it will be noticed, too.
Collage design templates that showcase multiple product angles
Venture beyond the single packshot to mix and match multiple product images in a single template to really make the product the hero of your design. For certain categories, it is important to show the product in use from different angles or points of view for either aesthetic or even functional purposes. For example, you could show your new denim line worn by various models of different body shapes and sizes, helping the audience imagine how they could look wearing them.
Getting started with Dynamic Product Ads
We often get asked how many templates you should get started with. While there isn’t a magic number, a good rule of thumb is to start with aligning your most important paid social campaigns with DPA templates. Once your foundation is established, you can venture into testing and experimentation and scale from there. For example, one of our large CPG customers is running over 20 template variations tweaked to match different product categories and audiences.
Want to learn more about Celtra for Dynamic Product Ads? Visit our DPA website and get in touch if you’re ready to bring your brand’s power to performance ads.