14 Facebook ad examples from 7 years and $40m in ad spend

Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook ads on Nov. 6th 2007, and 4 years later I launched my first Facebook ad as a junior marketer at travel deals company Travelzoo.

I don’t have a screenshot but it would have looked like this:

Yes this is actually a real deal—I still use Travelzoo to this day!

I had about 18 months’ experience as a marketer at that point, working on Google ads for companies like Carphone Warehouse (owned by Best Buy), La Redoute and Capital One.

I had quit my job at Efficient Frontier to go client-side at Travelzoo, specifically for the opportunity to branch out from Google, so I was pretty excited to put this ad live.

Most people dismissed Facebook as a fad, and to be fair I couldn’t have predicted it was going to grow from a seemingly overvalued $15b startup, to a $511b advertising behemoth today.

For fun, ask people who say they saw Facebook’s potential “how much stock did you buy, and when?”

I remember the quality of the subscribers we drove from Facebook being about half as valuable as Google, but the relatively low cost meant they were 8x more profitable!

The cheap CPMs meant I could afford to test thousands of different ads, and the introduction of the image (Google search ads are text-only) made things really interesting.

And we had to test to keep up — costs surged as thousands of new advertisers piled onto the platform. Facebook’s CPM still rises ~60% every month.

Facebook’s CPM is always increasing, but they’re constantly innovating to make it worth while.

Armed with just a company credit card and a few good ideas, you could launch ads in minutes for $5 a day, make live changes and track the ROI of those changes to prove what works.

This was powerful, and it made Facebook the patron saint of ambitious junior marketers who were learning 10x faster than traditional marketers thanks to this light-speed-fast feedback loop.

We were being hired from maths, engineering and economics backgrounds and encouraged to treat marketing as a science, proving with data from split tests which ads worked better.

This cambrian explosion of data-driven marketing was a wave I’ve been lucky enough to ride my whole career, and today I’m the founder of a growth marketing agency employing 45 people.

If you’re into Facebook ads, you might want to check out a tool I just launched called Spotlight, which uses machine learning to gain detailed insights into what makes your ads perform.

>> TRY SPOTLIGHT <<

The majority of the estimated $40m in ad spend I’ve been in charge of was spent on Facebook, and it still makes up the bulk of our spend across the agency today.

So I took some time to go back through my archives and find the Facebook ads I was most proud of. Hopefully these ideas inspire you, and they perform as well for you as they did for me!

Disclaimer: I can’t share any sensitive information about past clients, just the public facing ads themselves, without performance data. Reasons ‘why it works’ are simply my own opinions and don’t constitute or represent the client’s strategy.

1) Money Dashboard: Financial Dilemma

When we took over this ad account, the creative was all stock photos of people in restaurants using card machines. Luckily we had Zag (part of BBH, itself part of Publicis Groupe) on our side to help us out on some professional creative.

Money dashboard helps people stay in control of their finances.

Why it works

• Bold background colors
• White on black background is much text easier to read (and looks cool!)
• Custom icons to make the ad more visual
• People struggle with money, and this is a relatable weekly (daily?) dilemma people face
• It’s a ‘brand new app’, and people like to be the first to try these things
• Distinctive use of alliteration on “Budget, better”

2) Money Dashboard: Be Good

As much iteration as it took to get to that first ad, it took as many tests again to get to this all time best performer, a whopping 109x better than where we started! It was even sweeter that “be good with your money” appeared on a certain competitor’s website shortly after.

This ad played off the popularity of the iPhone at the time.

Why it works

• Bold colors again
• Another financial dilemma real people face
• Short, snappy but meaningful tagline
• Playing on the popularity of the iPhone
• It’s funny!

3) SumoMe: Heatmaps

This ad still makes me laugh because of how audacious it was to submit this to Noah Kagan (himself a formidable Facebook marketer, and employee #30 at Facebook!) as my application to work at Sumo (he kindly refunded me the ad spend later).

There should be more hip hop lyrics in Facebook ads.

Why it works

• Most ads are boring because most companies are boring. This stands out
• It’s clear I worked hard to make Kelis’s lyrics relevant to heatmap analytics
• Custom emojis (♫♫) in ads: always worth testing
• Semi-clothed people in the image
• Clear call to action (Bitly link)
• “1,000,000 Heat Map Clicks” shows credibility

4) SumoMe: Multi-Screen

This was one of the most successful ads I ran while at Sumo, and even got picked up as a best practice example by Wordstream, Adespresso and others. I actually took this picture myself because design resources may be limited but ingenuity doesn’t have to be.

Showing your product works on multiple devices is a thing.

Why it works

• Free is everyone’s favorite price
• Shows the tool works on multiple devices—it’s mobile optimized
• Use of rhyme on “100% FREE”, “use SumoMe” and “always will be”
• Reassurance that it will always be free, it’s not just a trial period
• “Live on 178,222 websites”: a real up to date number that oozes credibility
• People are busy, so a 37 second installation time is very much appreciated

5) SumoMe: Sad Face

Ok this is my last Sumo example (though I have tonnes more). This was inspired by a friend of Noah’s called Neville Medhora, a marketing genius. He swore by using real pictures of your face in retargeting ads so I gave it a try, and it worked. For years people recognized me around New York as “that guy in the ads for SumoMe”.

Why is hipster Hitler so sad?

Why it works

• Faces work on The Face Book. Who knew?
• People are drawn to sadness (misery loves company)
• It’s free
• It promises the holy grail — website traffic
• There’s nothing to lose
• It asks a question
• No logo, so it’s not as annoying as some retargeting ads that follow you around the web
• At a quick glance I kind of look like a hipster Hitler, and that startles people

6) The Points Guy: Airplane Carousel

This was one of the first carousel ads I put together to test the format. I thought it was super cool at the time to cut it across multiple images (and it took me ages in Photoshop). It’s now standard practice to do this, but it really stood out and got great performance for us.

Airport carousel… get it?

Why it works

• Carousel format is a bit more interesting than single images
• Personal “my favorite cards” to a retargeting audience familiar with TPG
• Bold yellow sunset color really stands out
• Each card had a different benefit “best signup bonus”, “best points”, etc

7) Hickory Training: Forgotten

This was a great example of a B2B ad that hit home hard, and I was particularly proud to be working with a YCombinator company (as a PG superfan). This was one of those rare clients where we turned the first ads on and… it just worked, right away.

Ok technically this is a LinkedIn ad… but we ran it on Facebook too, I just couldn’t find a screenshot.

Why it works

• Killer stat: 73% of training is forgotten in 2 days!? Ouch.
• Training is a sore point for any manager, anything that makes it more efficient = 👍
• The office background makes it feel familiar, the modal overlay focuses attention
• The phone actually shows the app so you can see how it works
• Solution seems easy: ‘just a few minutes each day’

8) Children’s Museum of the Arts: Kids Paintings

I wasn’t a parent at the time, but this one really hit because everyone has a soft spot for children’s paintings. By showcasing what the art classes were all about in a highly visual way, we drove real people into the museum and helped them hit their goals for the first time in years.

Kids make the best art.

Why it works

• Bold, bright colors
• Kids’ paintings are universally loved
• Carousel ad format let us show more art
• Clear call to action
• Key benefit of filling your child’s spring break (a big issue solved!)
• Hyperlocal targeting to people within driving distance of the museum

9) CellucorGamer: Crush

This was about pivoting an existing product (a pre-gym workout energy powder) to a new audience of Gamers who want to stay awake during physically exhausting tournaments. I love this one due to fond memories of brainstorming gamer memes and seeing people in the office go loopy trying too much of the product.

Hello fellow gamers

Why it works

• 1.1bn servings sold: leveraging the credibility of the existing brand to enter a new market
• Fun gamer copy “game your system”, “crush the competition”, “level up” “big league”…
• Big arena background makes it feel epic
• The Watermelons make it feel less artificial

10) FitJoy: Free

I don’t think I’ve used the word free so many times in a single ad before or sense. Free 6-bar pack, GMO-free, gluten-free, artificial-free… and it helped that the product looked great on that deep blue background, plus it actually tasted good.

This just looks tasty!

Why it works

• The word free shows up 5 times
• It’s clear what the product is: it says protein bar in several places
• Ethical and healthy credentials, no GMOs, Gluten, etc
• Bold backgrounds really work to highlight the product
• Show natural ingredients and the actual bar, so they see you’ve got nothing to hide
• The cursive font with hand drawn arrow to the box add a touch of class
• The flavors sound tasty (who doesn’t want a french vanilla almond protein bar?)

11) Ditto Bank: Red on Black

We actually got to launch a bank in France(!), backed by the company that owns Travelex. This ad represents a particularly proud moment because we beat out a professional creative agency because the client “liked our ads better”. This was the ad that won.

This is badly translated from French by Facebook.

Why it works

• Bright colors on the product, everything else close to black and white
• The items on the table represent the type of customer they were trying to reach
• It was positioned directly at global travelers, a segment this product worked well for
• Showing the card ALWAYS works best for FinTech products… very hard to beat

12) Booking.com: Flaming Laptop

We got a lot of complaints about this ad’s negative connotations, lack of professionalism, tackiness… but it worked. It performed better than all of the other more professional, better looking ads we had run before. Sometimes the worst ad wins, and to their credit the Booking.com team let this keep running until we found a new champion.

Watch the video for the full effect. I made this with Promo, which I highly recommend.

Why it works

• Flaming laptops get attention
• Video ads are 🔥
• Text overlays on the video make it look more professional
• Businessman in an incongruent situation stands out
• It gets the user to acknowledge that business travel management software is crappy
• It’s funny!

13) Monzo Bank: Holiday

I thought of this ad while on a business trip to Poland — looking back on the transactions in my Monzo app, I was struck by the meaning behind some of them. Like how a £19.75 breakfast at the Windmill pub in Stansted Airport took me back to the last time I went on holiday. It landed so well that people enquired to customer support genuinely concerned we were creepily using their real transactions in these ads! Nope, just solid customer research sprinkled with inspiration.

Watch the video to see the holiday unfold one transaction at a time.

Why it works

• It humanizes technology, like Google’s inspiring “the web is what you make of it” campaign
• The transactions are well researched (even the prices are accurate)
• It shows how the app actually works, and why it’s useful
• Our designer took great care to use all of the right icons and fonts actually used in the app
• The prominent copy along the top speaks to a clear user benefit
• Vertical format works in the Instagram stories placement
• It’s simple
• It tells a story
• I haven’t seen anything like it from competitors

14) Ladder Spotlight: Machine Learning

This is the latest ad I launched and although it’s not much to look at, it is driving a remarkable 11.19% conversion rate right now on the landing page it leads to (5x the industry average). This is a reminder that an ad featuring good product, with a strong value proposition and a clear call to action targeting the right audience, will always win over anything flashier.

Spotlight is a creative insights tool we just launched!

Why it works

• Says what it does in clear terms
• People go nuts for machine learning
• Everyone needs more ROI
• “Learn more” buttons helped Obama raise $60m
• Custom designed illustration hints at the seriousness of the product
• Solves a real problem for marketers

Thanks for reading to the end! I hope it was useful. If you enjoyed this and are planning to launch a lot more Facebook ads tests, check out the tool featured in my last ad.

>> TRY SPOTLIGHT <<