In this tutorial, Shaun Whynacht of Blue Cow Marketing walks viewers through the end‑to‑end workflow for creating, previewing, and publishing Facebook and Instagram ad mockups using the Creative Hub tool inside Facebook Business Manager. He begins by selecting the appropriate ad account, then demonstrates how to name a mockup, add static images and videos, and resize assets for the three primary placements (square 1080×1080, vertical 1080×1920, horizontal 1200×628) using Canva. Shaun highlights common quirks—such as automatic cropping bugs—and shows how to replace assets to keep each placement correct. He explains the importance of primary text, headline, description, display link, and CTA selection, and how to generate shareable preview links with configurable expiration. For efficiency, he teaches how to duplicate an existing mockup, swap creatives, and keep URLs and other settings intact. Finally, he shows how to push the approved mockups into Ads Manager to build campaigns, emphasizing time‑saving tips for agencies handling multiple client creatives. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to engage with the channel.
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If you're like me and you are constantly making ads not only for yourself but maybe for your clients, if you're a marketing agency and you need to mock them up for Facebook and Instagram, you may have found it challenging if you're just using Facebook Ads Manager. And that's what we're going to cover in today's video. Before we get started, I want to ask you to like and subscribe to this video and get more great videos along the way. So I'm Shaun with Blue Cow Marketing, and let's dive right in. So if you're not familiar with all the extra tools that are part of the Business Manager suite for Facebook, you may not be aware that on the left-hand side, if you scroll down, there's this great little option here called Creative Hub. And in this video, I'm gonna actually mock up an ad for one of our clients because it's something that I need to do. And I thought, hey, you know what, let's make a video out of it so that you guys can get some added value. Now, if you get access to multiple accounts, when you go into Creative Hub that are under your Business Manager, on the top right-hand side, you can actually pick those ad accounts from the list here. So I'm going to go ahead and choose the ad account for the client that I'm working with, and it's going to bring up their Creative Hub here. What I love about this is you get to actually not only create the mockup of the ad, but you actually get to then make it available in Ads Manager so that once it's approved, you don't have to go and redo it again, which is one of the headaches with using a third-party mockup system. Now I'm going to go ahead and click on Create Mockup in the top right-hand side. And it's going to bring us into this view right here. I like to work on the top left and work my way down, just like you would be building any ads. So let's give it a name, and naming conventions are extremely important for me. So we're going to call this one here, um, After the Storm Webinar Ad 1. We're going to pick the page that we're going to work with, and it's going to automatically choose the Instagram account. Now in this case, we're just using a static image, so we're going to go ahead and click Add Image. Now I already uploaded the main image here because I started this video before and then the phone rang and I had to redo it. So, you know, that happens to us from time to time. I'm going to click on this, and this is a square image, 1080 by 1080. Now in this view, if you haven't done ads in a while, you may not have seen this. So this is where it looks at the other placements for Stories and Reels, or right column searches and instant articles. The 1080 by 1080 fits perfect in the middle for feed and in-stream videos, but it doesn't work so well here. Now, if you don't have your creative designed in these other formats, you could choose original, and what it will do is it'll actually crop it and make it fit in there. But that's not always the best way. We use Canva. It makes it really easy to build the initial ad and then say resize, and then pick 1080 by 1920, which is this vertical format, or a 1200 by 628, which is this horizontal format. And then we just move the elements around, and I did that. So let's go ahead, and click replace. And I'm gonna go ahead and upload. So we're looking for the 1080 by 1920. We wanna make sure which one it is. It's not that one. It says that one there. So we're gonna click quickly and click upload. I'm gonna put negative little asterisk here. It says about, it's not the right, something's not right with it, but it is always right. It always works. It always fits. So, uh, Facebook, I think you're just crazy. So we're gonna replace, do the exact same thing for the horizontal one. And it's the 1200 by 628, and I think it's number 1, and it is. Now I'm not going to build out all 3 of the ads in here. Now here's something that I want to bring to your attention. This happens from time to time. I put them all in there, now you see they're all out of whack, right? It made that horizontal one for everyone that was here, um, and that's kind of an annoyance. So what you have to do— and it doesn't always do that, it's a little bit of a bug—, is you just have to go replace. They're already uploaded, so they're there. And now you got all 3. We're gonna click done. And now they're all placed in those placements. Now the primary text, extremely important. I already pre-wrote this, so I'm going to just copy and paste my primary text in here. I'm gonna grab the URL, copy. Now the difference with this is when you were actually building out like some of the different ad sets for different objectives like conversions and things like that, you don't have to worry about that type of ad. Just putting in really the base creative for this. Now we're going to go ahead and put in the headline. So I'm going to call this webinar after— actually, we're going to call it— I'm going to take a part of it. We want your headline to be kind of, you know, catchy, right? Top 3 Secrets of Successful Investing. That's perfect. And put in the description here, which will be extra. That adds in there. I don't get too much, um, out of the description side. It doesn't show up too many places. Um, but we'll put it in there as well. Website, that's fine. Display link, learn more. Um, I'm going to actually choose, I think there's a sign up. Now if you're like me, I would think that there should be an option or be awesome as an option for custom and you can actually write in what that CTA is. Because it's a webinar and we're going to do most of the selling in the ad, we're going to do sign up versus learn more. So that's that part of it. Now, if I want to make this available in Ads Manager, I could then click this over and slide it over, or if we're going to make it available. So what I look to do with this is if I'm doing, let's say, a bunch of variety creative and I'm giving it to a client that says, here's like 5 different versions, and they say, okay, like version 2, then I come in later and turn on version 2. But in this case, I, I built most of the creative, so I'm just gonna turn that on anyway. I could always turn it off later. Now how do you get that preview? So what you do is you click on the 3 dots here, you click share link, turn the link sharing on, choose your options. So 30 days or 60 days, that's the length of which that is, uh, available. Uh, and then what we can do here is here's the URL. We can simply copy that and then use that for the preview, uh, which was what I'll do. Here's another little time-saving tip for you. If you need to make multiples of this and you're just changing up the creative, which is what I'm doing in this case, I don't go and click create mockup again. Simply go and duplicate that ad. It's always gonna be the first one. We can go back in, change this to ad 2. Doesn't put the copy of like you do get in Ads Manager., and then you just come down here, hit delete. We're gonna hit the add the image and we're gonna upload the second version. Now in this case, I could go and reverse the order of which all this stuff is. Doesn't matter. I don't have to put the square one in first. See, it'll go there and then I can just replace them this way. And we're gonna pick this one here. Nope, it's gonna be this one here. So as you can see, I'm just reversing the order. Let's see if it does the whole, um, wacky thing. And it did do that wacky thing again, um, but I'm just going to replace and upload. And we're going to choose that one there. All right, now I may need to go fix them all. Yeah, that's— we did. And for some reason, I don't understand, um, why it does that. It's like you have to upload them all and then they'll show up that way. And because I've done that, I'm keeping all the other creative in place, URLs, everything like that. I don't have to really do anything else, um, aside but beside from coming and generating that new link that's there. And we might as well do the last one because this one's going to be a video. Exact same process. We're going to go 3, we're going to delete, but in this case, instead of an image, we are going to upload our favorite creative, which is a video. So let's go here, After the Storm video ad. And all we did, we used Canva for generating this. It uploads, the previews won't show up until the upload is done. Uh, there's no audio to it. It's basically just a static, um, ad, but it's got motion to it because we are using one called After the Storm. We put some images of moving hyperlapse clouds, uh, in behind. And that's what I like to do when testing out different creative. See, you can see that one happening there is instead of making it full motion video, just add some kind of motion to the ad to catch the, the attention, uh, during the scroll. So very easy to do. Now all I'm going to do is I'm going to go in here, I'm going to generate all of the links for all 3 ads, fire them over to the client for approval, and then be able to go into Ads Manager build the ad campaign, the ad sets, and then just boom, load them from the Creative Hub. So that's how you do it. A great way to manage all your creatives using Facebook's Creative Hub and save you a lot of time, headache, and frustration. So again, thank you for watching this video. Like I mentioned, if you like this, you're finding value in this, you got a question, comment below the video. I'll answer those questions. Please like, subscribe to our channel. Love putting this out there for you. Thanks for watching.
