If you create UGC ads for your campaigns, then what I’m going to share with you in this post could net you up to 400% more results from just one UGC vertical ad you get made by one creator!
I use this strategy with every new ad we get back from a UGC creator to see where the ad performs best.
Let’s get started.
It Starts with Facebook Vertical
Once we get our ad back, we usually put captions on it with Descript or similar app, and we’ll get started by posting the ad to Facebook and Instagram.
These types of UGC selfie videos do very well in the Instagram Reels and both the Facebook and Instagram Stories placements.
You can try these in other placements, but it can be more hit and miss.
Scale it to TikTok and YouTube Shorts
Without missing a beat we take that same ad and we’ll run it on TikTok and YouTube Shorts as well.
So long as your ad is under 60 seconds long then both TikTok and YouTube Shorts can produce results!
It’s important to check in on these ads frequently, as the same ad could get amazing results on TikTok but crash on YouTube Shorts, or maybe stellar results on Instagram but crickets on TikTok.
While we always test on YouTube shorts, of all the places we test ads, the Shorts traffic tends to be the most fickle.
One day an ad can do VERY well, but then it’s in the gutter.
For this reason, we don’t ONLY want to rely on the Shorts feed to produce our results from YouTube.
We use This final hack turns our vertical UGC ad into a landscape horizontal Youtube video, we can run in all placements in a conversion campaign.
UGC Side By Side Video for the WIN!
I give props to Donna on our team for coming up with this idea.
I can’t recall exactly where she saw it, but one Monday morning she shared the idea of a side-by-side ad with a person talking on one side and text on the other.
Initially the idea was to mix up our ad layouts, and get more mileage from our regular spokesperson ads, and it worked!
When we dug deep into using UGC, it made perfect sense to test this format too.
So, what is a side-by-side ad.
It’s where we have video footage on one side, and something static (not moving) on the other, and we swap it back and fourth ever few seconds to continue the visual interruption on screen.
Here’s an example shot of the same UGC footage, formatted for a horizontal YouTube video.
I am not ever going to win video editor of the year, but the simple setup here is:
1.) I resize the UGC footage to take up half the screen
2.) I create canva images that are half the width of the screen, with overlay text.
3.) I change the location of the text and UGC footage every line of the script or so (see example belowC
There are a few reasons why this format works so well.
It’s an interrupt to what people are used to seeing, but it’s not straight up UGC either.. so there’s a bit more trust to it.
I’ve found that straight up horizontal UGC videos don’t often work as vertical format UGC videos on YouTube.
This format also lets us highlight the key points of our script, without needed to use full captions.
This format also makes for a great thumbnail that gets clicks from the in-feed placement that our responsive YouTube ads often end up on.
So that’s it!
If you test your UGC ads on Facebook and Instagram Stories and Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and then create a side-by-side variant for other YouTube placements, you can easily get up to 400% more results, than by just running your ad on one network.
If you’d like to see some more awesome UGC ad action, check out my recent case study on how I made two ads in 10-minutes from my Driveway that netted us $28,000 in profit in just 60-days.
This video is eye opening to a lot of marketers who have been worrying about creating “perfect” ads rather that focussing on what works and gets results.
Click below to check that case study out now!