The creative decides who an ad reaches.

The creative decides the auction

On Meta and TikTok, the creative is now one of the most important levers an ad account has. The platforms increasingly handle targeting and bidding themselves, with broad audiences and automated campaign types. What stays in the company’s hands is the ad itself. It decides who stops scrolling, who clicks and who buys. That is why Dometrics treats creatives not purely as a design question but as a measurable part of performance.

For managing directors, this marks a clear shift. Putting more budget into an account with weak ads makes every conversion more expensive. A stronger creative lowers costs at every level, from impression to purchase.

Why targeting alone no longer works

Performance used to be steered through precise audiences: interests, lookalikes, demographic filters. Since privacy changes and signal loss in the browser, the algorithms work with less information about individual people. Instead, they learn from how people react to the ad. A video about grooming products for men reaches different people than one presenting the same product as a gift. The creative has taken over part of the role that targeting once played.

How Dometrics develops creatives

Data before ideas

The starting point is not a mood board session but an analysis. Dometrics evaluates existing ads by hook rate, hold rate, CTR and CPA and maps each asset to its impact. Qualitative sources come on top: customer reviews, support tickets, sales conversations and competitor ads in the Meta Ad Library and the TikTok Creative Center. This produces hypotheses, for example which objection comes up most often before a purchase and which benefit resolves it.

The creative matrix

Instead of designing individual ads, Dometrics builds a matrix. One axis holds the angles (problem, outcome, comparison, social proof, offer), the other holds personas and formats. Every cell is a variant with a clear hypothesis. After the test, it is possible to say why something worked and to carry that learning into the next round.

UGC with creators, customers and staff

User-generated content feels familiar in the feed because it looks like a recommendation, not an ad placement. Dometrics approaches suitable creators directly and often involves people who already know the product: regular customers with real experience, or employees who can answer the questions that come up in customer contact. For everyone involved, Dometrics writes scripts with several hook variants and agrees usage rights in writing before the shoot.

For delivery, the platforms offer their own formats: Spark Ads on TikTok and partnership ads on Meta, where the ad runs through the profile of the person featured. UGC is complemented by static ads, carousels and motion design from Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud and CapCut, for placements where video is not the best choice.

Built for each placement, not cropped

A 16:9 video simply cropped for Reels loses text, product and faces at the edges. Dometrics produces for each placement: 9:16 for Reels, Stories, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, 4:5 for the feed, 2:3 for Pinterest, 1:1 as a fallback and 16:9 for YouTube in-stream and LinkedIn. Captions are standard, because a large share of videos is watched with the sound off. Key content sits inside the safe zones, where app controls cannot cover it.

Video, static or carousel?

Not every goal needs a video. Static ads are quick to produce and well suited to testing messages and offers in larger numbers. Carousels show several products or explain a process step by step. Video usually creates more engagement but costs more to produce. Dometrics chooses the format by hypothesis and budget: the message is checked cheaply with statics first, then production effort goes into videos whose core message has already been confirmed.

Testing with the platforms’ own tools

In many accounts, creative testing fails because of structure. New ads land in existing ad sets, the algorithm shifts budget to the proven asset within hours, and the new variant never gets a fair chance. Dometrics therefore separates testing from scaling and uses the experiment features each platform provides.

• Meta: A/B tests in Ads Manager split the audience into separate groups and report how certain a result is.
• TikTok: split tests compare creatives under equal conditions for budget and audience.
• YouTube: experiments in Google Ads test video variants against each other, including significance reporting.
• Pinterest and LinkedIn: variants run in separate ad groups with a fixed budget so the comparison stays fair.

Testing happens in stages. The hook comes first, because anyone who does not stop in the first seconds never sees the rest. Then message and offer, and finally details such as call to action and edit. This order saves budget because weak ideas drop out early.

Measured all the way to revenue

A creative with a high CTR can still cost money without return if it attracts the wrong people. That is why evaluation at Dometrics does not stop at the click but at contribution margin. Every asset gets a naming convention that is identical across campaign data, UTM parameters and Looker Studio. This way, every conversion can be attributed to the creative that triggered it.

The basis for this is clean tracking. Without reliable conversion data, the algorithms optimise on noise and every creative decision rests on shaky ground. Dometrics therefore connects creative work with the setup from Tracking & Data Analytics, including the Meta Conversions API, the TikTok Events API and server-side tracking via Google Tag Manager.

Common mistakes in ad accounts

• Aesthetics over impact: glossy productions that look like ads in the feed and get scrolled past.
• Too little variety: ten ads with the same message deliver a single data point, not ten.
• No test design: new creatives compete with established winners and lose before they collect data.
• One format for every placement: cropped videos, covered text, missing captions.
• Unclear rights: videos of creators or employees running as ads without written clearance.
• Success measured at the click: high CTR but no revenue, because the landing page does not deliver on the promise.

Part of the Growth Engine

Creatives never work in isolation. They need the right campaign structure in Paid Advertising, a landing page that continues the ad’s message and tracking that reliably reports results back. For shops with large catalogues, Dynamic Ads complement handmade creatives with feed-based variants, and landing pages ensure message match between ad and page. How to improve the landing page itself is covered in the guide on conversion rate optimisation.

In the Growth Engine, creative testing is therefore a fixed building block: tracking delivers the data, creatives deliver reach and relevance, the landing page delivers the conversion. If the real problem lies not in the creative but, for instance, in the offer or the checkout, Dometrics says so openly and starts there.