Hey everyone!
Let’s talk about how you can automate the process of designing banner ads in Photoshop.
If your ad budget Is large enough, you should go ahead and test various ad creatives. This way you’ll be able to find the most efficient ones and thus increase your ROI (ROAS, ROMI). When you advertise on Facebook, the creative you use will directly reflect in your ad efficiency.
We recommend you to use Creative Machine to automate the process of your ad creation. Our service lets you create as many banners as you want, basing itself on your data feed or local images. It’s an ideal solution for large online stores or travel services.
However, it would be very time consuming for you-as a designer or a marketer-to be creating all of these different banners in order to test them out. In this article I’ll show you a way to automate this process using Photoshop. Let’s go!
Step 1
Collect all your images inside a single folder that you’ll be working with. If you’re working with an online store, pick the best-selling products.
Step 2
Open Photoshop and select one of your images. Press Alt+F9 to open the Actions tab. Now create your new collection.
Create a new action and press “Record”.
That’s all. All of your actions will now be recorded into your Action Set. Then you need to set the right size for your creative. This would depend on the Facebook placement that you will be using for your ads. In the screenshot below I used the usual 800×800 size. This is the right size for Facebook Feed, as well as the Instagram Feed. You’ll also be able to use them in your Carousel Ads.
Press Ctrl+Alt+I to fit all of your images to this size. Then simply fill out the form and click “Okay”.
You can also cut your images; in case they are not square. Hit “C” on your keyboard and type in the 800×800 size.
Now you can add your design elements that would be applied to all of your creatives. You could add a button or text, for example.
Here’s an example:
Once your creative is ready, go to the Action tab and click “Stop”.
DO NOT save your project, just simply close it.
Step 3
Go to “File” ==> “Scripts” ==> “Image Processor…”:
Choose your image folder and then another folder that you’ll be saving your processed images into. Type in “12” in the Quality bar. Check the “Run Action” box and select the one that you have created. Click “Run”.
Aaand… magic happens. In just the few seconds Photoshop will edit all of your images and will add the right design to them.
Now you can upload them on Facebook.
Conclusion
Photoshop is the classic tool when it comes to the creation of banner ads. As you just saw, it even has the tools to automate this process. But unfortunately, not everything could be automated in Photoshop with the use of Action/Droplets. You won’t be able to combine different products into a single creative. You won’t be able to show a price for every product or use multiple currencies, etc. In short, you would only be able to use Photoshop for very basic automation processes. Use Creative Machine for everything else.