Lol, flat nonsense. You are on the battlefield, my friend. You’ll never know if certain creative materials will give you a sky-high ROI or a severe ban by Facebook moderators. Right now there is only one way to check up your creative materials –  to TEST them.

Basically, your testing strategy should look like this:
STEP 1: Create 15-20 unique creative materials. Use different combinations of images and headlines for that is the best way to find the winning combo.
STEP 2: Run these creative materials for a couple of days to see which of them has/have highest CTR.
STEP 3: Finally select 1 or 2 creative materials with the highest click rate and it is basically done.

DISCLAIMER:
We are surely aware that using spy tools will be faster in most cases. However, we are not seeking any shortcuts since we want all tips for your attention to be backed with knowledge. Plus a good spy tool is rarely free, and we spare your expenses.

Some tips for making a good creative material.
To begin with, you should have some basic Photoshop skills. Otherwise, I would strongly recommend you to watch a couple of videos on youtube to understand what layers are and how to edit them.

As it was said above, unfortunately, there is no ultimate formula for making a good creative material. But in most cases it should be:

• Bright and interesting. Therefore, animated banners usually win over static banners. But don’t push too hard. You don’t want a banner to be flashing like a Christmas tree.

• Contrast. Quieter colours in the background and brighter coloured fonts with the call to action buttons are preferred.

• Informative. If images contain text, remember that a short clear message works better than long complicated sentences in small hardly readable characters.

• Inviting. Call to action buttons will definitely be a huge plus.

• Positive. As it’s known, banners with a positive message and overall positive attitude usually have higher CTR.

• No misleading. If you will promise a fortune to everyone who clicked on your banner, it may produce a better CTR but your final conversion rate would be low as hell.

• Credible. Appeal to an authority that people trust. For example, like: «Rated number one by pediatrics association».

Some banner examples:

Before/ after teasers

Works pretty good since there is a simple logic behind this: now I am fat and ugly like the person on the left. Then I will eat that diet chocolate bar and magically I am young and beautiful like the person on the right.
We also recommend using real people images rather than models. Because it can increase trust: If she was able to do it, then I also can.

WTF banners

The main objective here is to trigger people into asking a question and thus clicking on the image. The rule is the more incomprehensible picture, the better.

Where to look for images?
Here Google Images can be of great help, and you sure know that. So, below are some other sources for image hunting.

Alternatives to Google Images

http://bing.com/images/

https://pixabay.com/

http://www.everystockphoto.com/

https://morguefile.com/

http://2leep.com/

Weird and funny pictures that can be used for teasers

http://www.freakingnews.com/galleries.asp

WARNING! Links to nudity and sexual content are below.

If you are promoting ADULT offers, you can use:

http://ratemyexgf.com/ and http://hotgirlswithiphones.com/

!! gay shit !! -> http://guyswithiphones.com

+1 LIFEHACK

Situation: You found a great picture for your creative material but it has watermarks on it. How to get rid of those watermarks?

Answer: Upload your picture with watermarks to the Google Images and hit the Search button. There is a good chance that in search results you’ll find the same pictures but with no watermarks.

Juan’s bonus case study

Juan lives in a Spanish coastal town called San Sebastian. During the summer and tourist season he works as a lifeguard, but in the winter apart from drinking there is nothing much to do. And since he recently dropped out of a college he had a lot of spare time but a little shortage of money. So, once he heard this magical phrase  – «CPA marketing» and his life changed. Sounds familiar? Yeah, we’ve all been there 🙂 He began eagerly exploring the topic and as a result – surprise, surprise – he ended up registered with AdCombo.
What next? He decided to run his first campaign on Facebook. A bit foolish from my point of view. Anyway, he chose Adcombo’s most recent offer at the time – Diet Star (completely whitehat btw) with Spain as a GEO to run in. I think you guessed why Spain. Reason number 1, this is Juan’s home country and he thought he understood the market pretty well. Reason number 2 – there is the highest payout for that offer – 18$. Ha-ha classic! Typical newbie’s mistakes.
And what his creative materials looked like? Now, have a look:

* written in Spanish: fat-free

30 seconds into the campaign and BOOM! His account is banned! Why?
Look closer. Closer… Still nothing? Facebook moderators didn’t like the word «grasas» which in Spanish means fat. Such bans are common practice on Facebook and mature fellows know that. Usually after a few days of writing to Facebook Support your account will be eventually unbanned. Yet, this is not a nice way to start your CPA journey.
At the same time, you’ll be able to come across stories from CPA legends who managed to run a campaign on Facebook with dick pics as their creative materials. Basically, they are good at cloaking and their accounts usually have a high trust rate. But this is another story…
To conclude, my word of advice is – be really careful with your creatives materials, especially if you are a newbie in CPA marketing. And bear in mind, all technics that we discussed above remains just a theory. You should go out into the battlefield and TEST. This is the only way to verify if your creative materials are good or not.

Always yours,
AdCombo