If you’re a performance advertiser in 2026, chances are high you’re using data and audience insights to find your prospects and speed up conversions. This, obviously, means applying that foundational data to your creative process, too. Using engaging, high-quality creative ads in this busy web landscape can make or break your efforts to find and qualify high-intent users, as well as in converting those users into sales, so it’s vital to follow these creative best practices for success.

6 Best Creative Practices for Performance Advertisers to Know in 2026

As a performance marketer developing a campaign or program, you’ve likely done a lot of planning. You’ve done the research, you’ve determined audience targeting and segmentation, and you’ve probably already spent too much time trying to tweak social or search ads for better results. You know your goals and KPIs, and you’ve researched the latest digital advertising trends. The creative work of performance advertising should be built into your planning up front, along with all these other components — everything from the copy and CTA buttons to colors, logos, videos, GIFs, and more.

These are a few broadly applicable common best practices for creative as you’re finding, qualifying, and converting your target audience in 2026:

• A/B test everything: Test colors, test images, test fonts, and test any other elements that can be changed within an image, video, or interactive asset.
• Go beyond the walled gardens: As users become fatigued and search and social channels show diminishing returns, turn to the open web to find users with real intent. 
• Know the specs: Web users will notice a badly cropped or low-quality image, or a slow-to-load video, and dismiss them quickly. Make sure you’re using the right aspect ratio, resolution, or media type for the format or platform.
• Learn and iterate quickly: This year, 39% of digital video ads are expected to be developed using AI. AI capabilities can help you quickly create and test variations of copy and creative to understand what’s working at a massive scale.

Beyond these general best practices, here’s how to effectively incorporate creative efforts into your performance marketing campaigns.

1. Choose Images Wisely

There’s both art and science involved in choosing images for your performance marketing campaigns. For example, including people in photos usually attracts more attention — specifically, photos of hands holding or pointing toward products tend to perform well. Consider what emotion the photo should be expressing, and include images that mirror your target audience members. Humanizing your product and brand can also work well for hero images on landing pages. You can include photos of users or experts, or use a powerful contextual image.

Visuals generally work best when they’re authentic and unpolished, with a clear focal point. Overly styled or complicated visuals don’t appeal to users quickly and directly. Always avoid the “uncanny valley” of AI-generated ads that seem “off” to human viewers.

Tools like Realize’s GenAI Ad Maker can generate images that appear human-generated, helping to scale quickly without losing any authenticity. GenAI AdMaker creates and optimizes creative variants aligned with platform recommendations, and is built on a proprietary framework trained with best practices, marketing objectives, advertiser categories, and network trends.

For display ads, focus on visual simplicity, without clutter, following the rule of laying out the image, then the text, then the logo, to help a reader quickly skim the ad.

2. Make the User Experience Easy to Navigate

With short attention spans, ads and related content have to be simple and straightforward. Consider both landing page and CTA optimizations to reach users.

Landing page tips:

• Keep it Short: 400-600 words per landing page is ideal, outperforming the longer, informative landing pages. Taboola trends show that even shorter lengths — around 250 words — can be successful.
• Humanize it: Who wrote the article? What is their profession? When was the article published? Include as many details as possible to engage readers.
• Top it with a strong hero image: Choose visuals of users, thought leaders, or contextual images that align with the copy.
• Make it easy to read: Incorporate bold subheads, relatively large font sizes, and use short paragraphs to ensure the reader stays on the page.
• Call to action (CTA) tips

Use all three types of CTAs in ads and other marketing content to encourage users to click further:

• CTA buttons at the top right corner and at the bottom of the page.
• Hyperlinks, which are less aggressive within body copy.
• Try gamified CTAs to catch attention.

Place links carefully to avoid the areas where a reader can click out, such as the navigation bar, social sharing, testimonials, and the home page.

3. Use Rigor in Branding

You might be running huge numbers of ads, landing pages, and more, but the work of branding has to be on point in every instance to make it effective. Make sure that ad visuals like colors, fonts, and images are consistently aligned with your company’s brand identity. This work pays off in the long run as you build recognition and trust with your desired audience — plus, it makes ads look more professional across the board.

Branding can be incorporated into any type of ad format or channel. When using rich media, make sure your overall visual identity is included as it would be in a native ad. In videos, put your company logo in the upper left corner and incorporate branding throughout the video as well. Choose colors carefully to be eye-catching but also harmonious with any recognizable brand colors.

4. Craft the Right Copy

You only have a second with ad copy to engage a user and spur them to action. Keep your copy as short and jargon-free as possible to speak authentically to your prospects, and focus on the value proposition whenever you’re speaking to users. This is especially key for display and rich media, so that users understand the benefits of your product or service and click through for more.

Based on the audience research you’ve done, tailor copy to speak directly to your prospects and their interests, demographics, traits, or other details you have in hand. A tip: Web users tend to respond well to numbered lists, while a timeliness component (e.g., a limited-time deal) adds an enticement to learn more.

Keep these best practices in mind when you’re writing ad copy:

• Be descriptive. The best headlines are engaging, honest, and specific, and prime the reader for what they’re about to experience.
• Be noteworthy. Remember the context in which your ad will appear. Make it stand out using editorial tone, expert opinions, first-person essays, or useful information.
• Address your audience. Let your audience know you see them, calling them out by their demographic, interests, or traits to generate engagement from high-intent users.
• Include dynamic keywords. Use a dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) like location or day of the week to make the ad feel tailored for your audience.

5. Include Movement Appropriately

Today’s internet is a constantly moving landscape, with pop-up videos, subtly moving ads, and animation all showing up as part of the user experience. Once your prospects have found your ad or site, movement can spur them towards conversion, but use it carefully: Think about adding animation or transitions with subtle motion that encourages interaction, so the ad doesn’t feel intrusive or spammy.

Video is also an intrinsic part of performance marketing. Follow best practices for making video actionable, including keeping them short (under 15 seconds) and focused on the message at hand. CTA buttons are also important in videos. Put your CTA in the lower right corner to spur user interaction, and time it so it shows up shortly after the video starts.

6. Experiment With Ways to Engage Users

The ultimate goal of creative work for performance advertising is to move a user toward conversion — a subscription, purchase, or whatever it may be for your business. There are more ways to educate, entertain, and engage readers than ever before, like motion ads, carousels, display ads, and vertical ads. Within rich media, there are interesting, dynamic formats to try, as well as interactive, visually appealing product demos or other storytelling options. To urge users to interact, you can incorporate swipe and hover gestures, not just clicks.

Try multi-frame carousel ads to tell a story to readers, with these best practices:

• Tell it in chapters, where each card moves the story forward.
• Make it interactive — design for exploration, not passive viewing.
• Change the visual beat: use varied imagery or angles to keep users swiping.

Key Takeaways

With search and social channels showing diminishing returns, it’s time for businesses to stand out by creating, publishing, and continually testing top-notch creative work. While the impact of creative work can seem like a guessing game, it’s completely possible to add rigor to designing, publishing, and testing all parts of creative — like the colors of the CTA button or whether the headline is capitalized — to see what engages your audience. AI-driven performance marketing tools are designed to automate this work so you can identify what’s working quickly.

Experimenting and testing creative as you build campaigns will lead to more and more refinement of what you know about your audience and what they respond to across formats — landing pages, rich media, display ads, videos, carousels, and more. What combination of images and words leads to clicks and conversion? Test, learn, and iterate to get to the right combination for your audience and business.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are examples of creative best practices?

Creative best practices are essentially about best serving your audience, and can result in more high-quality leads and conversions. These include choosing the right image or video for each platform, and considering the audience and how to attract them with a glance. Creative best practices also mean keeping copy simple, with a single ask of the user, alongside that image, video, or rich media or display ad. You can follow specific best practices for CTAs, landing pages, carousel ads, and more to use industry standards when trying to capture audience attention. Creative best practices reflect the essence of “creative”: Taking risks, trying new things within the format’s constraints, seeing what resonates, and tailoring accordingly.

What best practices should you follow when making creative?

When making creative work, these best practices are essential to get right. Make sure your message is direct and clear, with one desired action for users to take. Tell a story with your advertising and create connections with users, showing that you understand their challenges. Use professional visuals that are tailored to your audience. Always test and learn from those tests, then iterate accordingly.

What are the best practices for TikTok ad creative?

TikTok ad creative performs best when it’s made specifically for the platform. So, use an authentic, not overly polished style, include sound, orient vertically, and film at least at 720-pixel resolution. Other TikTok creative best practices include featuring people and plugging into current trending topics and memes for relevance.