How to build your best ads

Maybe you’ve been making ads for so long you’ve gotten into the habit of always using the same layouts or CTAs, maybe you’re picking up additional responsibilities while teammates are sick, or maybe you’re slowly losing your sanity after your one millionth day at home and need a refresher on how to build the ads you’ve been building for months. Whatever the reason, we’re here for you! We’ll cover best practices for creating highly engaging and effective ads.

It all starts here

We have two options about how to get the overview of Campaign Manager and making ads: a PDF, or a 3-minute video.

If you need to add users or adjust their permissions, it’s quick and easy. Has your payment card expired, or needs updating? No problem!

Building your ads

When you’re ready to tackle your first ad, there are 50+ choices between mobile, desktop, and video placements. How you do you choose? Do you know interstitial ads from interscroller? Start by understanding what each placement option means!

Overwhelmed by the great choices? We’ve put together a little inspiration with some of our favorites, to help you choose. Plus, you can download those exact assets and build the ad yourself to see how easy it is!

Once you’ve chosen the ad layout, don’t forget to add a CTA — you can direct your audience to a URL, to make a call, send a text, or a map with links to your locations (or anything else you’d like to direct them to!). You can also easily add an overlay logo or CTA button that will stay on the ad, to give it a 3D look because the logo stays in place when the underlying assets move.

If you’re using ads in multiple places, it’s really helpful to use a pixel tracker so you can follow your audience’s behavior. Nexd gives you the option to add multiple pixels or a global pixel to manage this.

Ok. I’ve made the ad … now what?

Congrats! Easier than you thought, right? Pretty fast, pretty simple.

It’s important to be sure your ads are working their hardest for you. One way to do this is through A/B testing. Compare two sets of creatives, or copy, or layouts, or anything else that you want to optimize. You can run these tests through Nexd! Setting it up, you guessed it, is easy. And so is the management – they’ll be grouped together in the Creative Management dashboard, in the Analytics dashboard and, crucially, the ad tag itself.

It’s time to actually put those beautiful ads into the world! Publish the ad to get your ad tag. It’s really complicated (just kidding! It’s of course simple, I just wanted to be sure you’re still reading). You can traffic your Nexd ads on all major ad platforms. If you want to learn even more about ad tags, here’s a deep dive on the subject.

How do I know if the ads worked?

I’m so glad you asked! Data, data, data. We have a robust analytics platform to help you understand your ads’ performance. You can view everything from a quick overview to an asset-by-asset performance. Read the Analytics overview, which will give you answers to most questions you might have. Use the information you gain here to increase spend on your top performers, consider switching out any low-performing assets to make each part of your ad effective.

Are you really into data and want to do a deep dive on some metrics? Maybe you need to share a report with your leadership or clients? Export your campaign stats into an Excel, CSV, or PDF.

What else should I know?

We are often asked if Nexd is GDPR compliant. In short – yes! If you want a longer explanation, here it is.

We have made some really cool custom ads for our customers. Like, REALLY cool ones. Sometimes they even win awards. We love getting to help people take their visions and make them reality. Interested? Let’s talk. Here’s an overview what we need in order to get started!

Photo credit: Tim Mossholder via Unsplash