I spotted this ad on my wife’s Facebook page and a few thoughts flashed through my mind:
1) Boy is that photo a jumbled, hard-to-look-at mess!
2) “Secret Photo Skills”? Color me suspicious…
3) I wonder if there aren’t more examples on the landing page?
Well, it turned out there were a lot of really cool examples of this guys trick photography on the landing page. If you want to see the page “in the raw,” just click here. But if you want to see how using some of them would easily create some compellingly optimized ads for split testing, you can check out these mock-ups I made:
This image is interesting simply because it’s flipped. But this is just the sort of “trick photo” manipulation that DOES make the picture stand out. And with the new call-to-action, it does leave you interested in seeing more.
And the hands-as-a-face image is even more stunning, worthy of the “killer” in the headline. Again, this image makes you curious to see what other tricks the author might have up his sleeves.
Finally there’s the ever-effective large text image, based on this photo from the 
landing page:
As you can see, the non-photoshop aspect of it is the real eye-opener, above and beyond the photo-manipulation. So I simply took that as a claim to use in the ad. If this variant tests well, that messaging feedback could then be applied to the landing page copy itself.
Key Take-Aways:
- Don’t take your Facebook Ad Images for granted!
- Use the photos you already have from your Website, landing page, brochures, etc to test ad variants.
- Make your copy work with your photos.
- Keep your photos simple, so they can work well in the ultra-small format of Facebook Ads; cluttered images just don’t work very well.
