Dynamic Creative Optimization

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) is an approach to digital advertising where the ad platform — Meta, Google, or a DSP — automatically assembles and serves the version of an ad most likely to perform well for each specific viewer, in real time.

Instead of a marketer hand-crafting a single final ad creative, DCO takes a pool of ingredients — multiple headlines, body copy variants, images, videos, and CTAs — and uses machine learning to find the combination that drives the best outcome for each impression.

How DCO Works

When a user loads a page where a DCO ad is eligible to serve, the platform evaluates that user’s profile — their interests, past behavior, device, time of day, and location — and constructs the ad on the fly by selecting the optimal ingredients from the advertiser’s pool.

On Meta, DCO is enabled by toggling Dynamic Creative inside an ad set. You upload up to 10 images or videos, 5 headlines, 5 body copy options, and 5 CTA labels. Meta then automatically generates and tests all viable combinations, allocating more delivery to the ones that perform.

DCO vs. Standard Creative Testing

In standard A/B creative testing, a marketer publishes two or three fully assembled ad variants and measures which performs better across the entire audience. DCO goes further: it tests combinations at the ingredient level and personalizes delivery per user rather than per audience segment.

The key difference: A/B testing finds the best single creative for an audience. DCO finds the best creative for each individual person within that audience.

DCO in Practice: Ridge Wallet

In our Ridge Wallet teardown, we found that Ridge runs 50% of its ring ads as DCO — uploading multiple images, headlines, and body copy options and letting Meta’s algorithm assemble the best combination. This is notably different from their wallet ads, where only 9% use DCO.

The disparity is instructive: Ridge has years of data on what resonates for wallets, so they run more static, proven creatives. For rings — a newer product line — they’re still in discovery mode, and DCO lets them run broad creative experiments without manually managing dozens of ad variants.

When to Use DCO

DCO is most valuable when:

• You are entering a new product category and haven’t yet identified your best-performing message
• Your product serves meaningfully different audience segments who respond to different creative angles
• You have enough creative ingredients (at least 3–5 variations of each element) to make the combinatorics worthwhile
• You want to reduce the manual overhead of creative management at scale

It is less useful when you have a single, proven hero creative that reliably outperforms everything else — in that case, running DCO introduces noise.