The Power of AI vs. Human-Generated Ads in a $7 Million Experiment

AI-generated ads versus human-generated ads: which converts better? We ran ads on Facebook for 28 different businesses for this experiment. For all 28 businesses, we had multiple ad sets. Between all of the businesses, we spent $7,049,204.24 over 30 days. Keep in mind the businesses had different conversion touchpoints. Some were email addresses, some were purchases, and some were even leads. For the creatives, we used both humans and AI. We were able to produce 1709 variations by humans. With AI we had 4041 variations. Just like with any ads, you remove the bottom-performing variations and you keep adding more creatives in the mix. The end result, human-generated creatives outperform AI-generated creatives 68.3% of the time. And the conversion rate from human-generated ads was also higher. But here is where it gets interesting… we didn’t stop there. We took the winning variations created by humans and had AI create multiple variations of them. With the new campaigns, we took the winning human version versus modified AI variations, and we found that AI won 75.7% of the time. There was a small lift in conversions as well. The moral of the story, AI and humans can produce creatives that convert. A human may be more creative (at least for now), but if you have AI assistance, you will see your performance go up.