Adaptive Designs

Adaptive designs is a Meta feed capability that gives your designs names. Instead of an ad picking "the second image in the feed", it pins a design group by name — and because the name doesn't say anything about shape, Meta can still choose the square, portrait, or story version of that same design for wherever the ad is running.

It's a Meta-only capability, set up on a Meta channel's Fields tab, and it's opt-in — a channel you don't turn it on for keeps working exactly as it does today.

The two decisions behind every catalog ad#

A Meta catalog ad answers two separate questions each time it's shown, and it's worth keeping them apart:

• Which design? Your Black Friday layout, or the evergreen one. That's your decision, and it's what adaptive designs controls.
• Which shape? A square for the feed, a tall one for Stories. That's Meta's decision, made per surface from the images your feed supplies.

The two used to fight each other. When an ad pins a design by position — "always show image number 2" — that pin is absolute: Meta shows exactly that image everywhere, so a square design gets letterboxed into a tall placement and a tall one gets cropped into a feed. Pinning by name doesn't have that problem, because a name can belong to several images of different shapes, and Meta is free to pick among them.

Meta is also moving away from position selection on its own. In its own words, "legacy image selections, such as by index, are discouraged and will be eventually removed." Adaptive designs is how a Renable channel stops depending on it.

Design groups and designs#

A design group is a named creative concept — black-friday, evergreen, summer-sale. Inside a group sits one design per shape:

A group doesn't have to carry all three, and a design's shape comes from the template size it renders — a 1080 × 1080 size is a Square design, a 1080 × 1920 one is a Story design. A size that matches none of the three is listed by its pixel dimensions instead of being given a shape name it doesn't have.

A design's name is the name — there is no separate label. Group and design names are lowercase letters, numbers, and dashes, and the name you type is literally the string an ad pins. That's why the name boxes rewrite what you type as you type it: "Black Friday" becomes black-friday on screen, because that is what will be in your feed.

The grid: one row per group, one column per shape#

The Adaptive designs dialog shows your groups as a grid. Columns are shapes — Square, Portrait and Story are always there, plus a column for any other shape one of your designs uses. Rows are groups, and each group is two rows: its image designs, then its video designs. You can tell them apart at a glance — a video design's tile carries a play badge, and its caption ends with how long the video runs.

Every cell in a row is either a design or an empty cell:

• A design cell shows the design at its true shape, with the template it renders underneath it.
• An empty cell is a shape this group doesn't cover. Click it to add a design in that shape; Renable offers the templates that have a size of it.
• The video row stays collapsed to a single Add video link until a group has its first video design. Once one exists it becomes a row of cells like the image row above it.
• The last column is for a shape that isn't in the grid yet. Whatever size you pick there becomes a new column.

When you create a group you give it one Studio template, and Renable prefills the group with one design per size that template has. That's a starting point, not a permanent binding: each design in a group can be pointed at a different template on its own, so a group can render its Story from one template and its Square from another.

Hover a design and click the pencil to open its picker. The picker is also where that design's own details live:

• It only offers sizes of the column's shape. Putting a square size in the Story column wouldn't give you a differently-sourced Story design — it would leave the group with two Squares and no Story at all, so it isn't offered. Templates carrying no size of that shape aren't listed as unusable rows either; they're counted in a line at the bottom that tells you to add the size in Studio if you want to use them here.
• It shows the name ads pin this design as, and lets you change it. Renaming un-pins every ad pinned to that design, so the dialog confirms first. Renable never renames a design as a side effect of anything else: pointing a design at a different template keeps its name exactly as it was, which does mean the name can stop describing what the design shows.
• Remove design takes that one design out of the feed. Ads pinned to it fall back to the group's other designs. The base group's first design isn't offered it at all — that one is the design your ads fall back to when nothing else matches, and its picker says so in place of the link.

Video designs work the same way, offered against templates that can render video, and constrained to the column's shape exactly as image designs are.

Instagram, Stories and Reels#

A shape only gets you so far. Two of Meta's surfaces are both 9:16 and still want different artwork, and Instagram is not Facebook. So an image design in the Default designs group can also be marked preferred for a surface, in the Preferred for row of that design's picker:

In Meta's own words, "there are 2 different tags for 9:16 placements because the safe zone for Stories and Reels is different" — the parts of the frame that stay clear of Meta's own interface aren't in the same place, so one 9:16 design can't be right for both. That's what these are for: make two 9:16 sizes in Studio, point one design at each, and mark one Stories and the other Reels. Instagram is a different question — it's about the platform, not the shape, so any default image design can carry it.

The marks live on your default designs, and they apply to every ad

The Preferred for row is only offered on the Default designs group. That isn't a restriction we invented to keep things tidy — it's what the marks turn out to do.

In our testing, a design carrying one of these marks wins its surface for every ad on the channel, whether the ad is pinned to a group or not. A mark is therefore a claim on a placement for the whole channel rather than a preference belonging to one group: putting a Reels mark on black-friday would take Reels away from every other ad too, including ads pinned to a different group entirely. Meta documents none of this and we've confirmed it in ad previews rather than in live delivery, so treat it as our reading rather than a promise — but it's the reading the product is built on.

Two consequences follow, and the dialog says both out loud:

• A pinned group can't have its own Stories or Reels design. An ad pinned to black-friday still shows the default group's Story design on Stories. If you want a different Story design, change the default group's — that changes it for everyone.
• A mark left on another group is the reverse problem: it reaches too far. It doesn't stay with the group that carries it — ads pinned to any other group can show that design too. If one is there from an earlier setup, that group's row shows a warning saying so, and the design's picker keeps the chip clickable so you can turn it off.

Three more things worth knowing:

• Stories and Reels need a Story-shaped design. Meta only selects a marked image if it really is 9:16, so those two chips are disabled on any other shape and the dialog says why. Instagram is offered on every image design in the default group.
• They apply to images only. Meta documents no video equivalent, so a video design's picker has no Preferred for row at all — Meta matches a video's shape from the file. (If a video design somehow carries one of these marks, the row appears on that design so you can take it off.)
• Adapt to placement still has to be on. These preferences are read during the same shape adaptation everything else on this page depends on. With that setting off, Meta shows one design everywhere and nothing here changes that.

Marked designs show their chips on the cell, so you can read your coverage without opening anything. When two designs of one shape are marked differently, they sit side by side in the same cell — a Stories one and a Reels one in the Story column — because they are two answers to one shape. Two designs of a shape marked the same way (or not marked at all) don't stack: nothing tells them apart, so the second one moves to Also in this group below the row.

You'll also see a dashed 4:5 auto or 9:16 auto chip on some of the default designs. That one isn't a choice — it's Meta's shape marker, added from the design's own size. See below.

When the default designs have a gap

The Default designs row carries its own warning when it's missing a shape another group covers, or a surface mark another group carries. It names what's missing, what an ad that isn't pinned to a group has to fall back on, and what to do — add the missing design, or mark the one already in that cell. The cell to work in is right above the warning.

This matters because nothing pins the default designs: an ad with no group pin is matched against all of your product images, so wherever the defaults have nothing to offer, Meta reaches for some other image in your feed. Which one it picks isn't documented anywhere.

The base group holds your defaults#

The first group — the one created when you turn adaptive designs on — is the base group, marked Default designs in the dialog. It's what every ad shows unless it's pinned to another group, and it's the only group that carries Meta's own reserved markers — the dashed 4:5 auto and 9:16 auto shape chips, and the Instagram, Stories and Reels marks above — so its designs need no per-ad tagging for Meta to match a design to a surface. The shape chips are added from each design's own size and aren't something you set; the surface marks are yours to choose. That's the feed side only — on the ad side, shape adaptation still depends on Adapt to placement being switched on, base group or not, as it does for every group. When you pin a group from the Renable Options extension, Renable switches that setting on for the version of the ad it creates, so you don't have to.

Adding a group never changes which image a running ad shows. A group's image designs only ever appear on ads you deliberately pin to it — that's what keeping every reserved marker on the base group alone buys you, and it's why a new creative concept is safe to build while your campaigns run.

If an older group still carries a surface mark from before, its row says so and the design's picker lets you take it off. Until you do, that mark is deciding a surface for every ad on the channel.

Video is broader, and that's Meta's design rather than ours. A group's video designs are the product's videos like any other, so any ad with Dynamic Media on can draw on them whether or not it is pinned to that group — and if your base group carries no video, a new group's video becomes the product's default one. Add image designs freely; add a video to a group when you're ready for Meta to be able to use it. See Get video into your catalog ads.

Turning it on: what happens to your feed#

Turning adaptive designs on converts your channel's flat image fields into design blocks. Your main image becomes the group's first design and each additional image the next one, in the same order, keeping their bindings exactly as they were.

Two consequences are worth knowing before you do it:

• image_link and additional_image_link stop being columns. That is correct, not a missing field: Meta ignores a plain main image when a product carries image blocks, so keeping both would mean shipping a column Meta discards. Renable's field checks know this — those rows report that the design groups cover them rather than flagging them as missing.
• Ads already pinned by position keep working, untouched. The conversion is order-stable: the design that was image number 2 is still in position 2. Renable never rewrites a running ad as a side effect — an ad moves to a name only when someone switches it.

A design group's images are all still in one feed, so nothing about this creates a second catalog or a parallel feed.

On the Fields tab#

Design blocks are ordinary fields, so a converted channel could carry a dozen of them — all named image or video, each with its own sub-fields underneath. The Fields tab collapses them into one Adaptive designs row in the Media group rather than listing them:

• It counts what you have: how many design groups, and how many image and video designs across them.
• It shows the main design — its sample image and its fill percentage — because that's the design your ads show when no group is pinned.
• When adaptive designs is on for the destination, it says which columns the design blocks cover, so image_link and additional_image_link being absent from the feed reads as correct rather than as something missing.
• Open Adaptive designs opens the dialog, exactly as the toolbar button does.

Only designs Renable built are collected there. A nested block you added by hand stays an ordinary field in its own group — it's your field, and the row never takes one over.

Show raw fields expands the design blocks as ordinary field rows you can edit like any other, each back in its own place in the field list, so the order you read is the order your feed sends. Each one is captioned with the group and shape its design is, which is how you tell a dozen fields named image apart. One quiet line above them says the thing worth knowing first: the tag values are what ads pin, so changing one un-pins the ads on it. The dialog is the safer path — the rows are there for when you need them.

On a Meta channel you haven't converted yet, the Media group ends with an invitation to set adaptive designs up. It appears only when your image fields render Studio templates, because naming a design is what buys you something, and a column bound straight to the merchant's product photo isn't one.

Video designs#

A group can hold video designs alongside its image designs. They're two facets of the same creative concept rather than two things to choose between — Meta decides per impression whether to show a product's image or its video, through its Dynamic Media feature.

A few things about video that are worth stating plainly:

• Dynamic Media is on by default for catalog ads. Meta may already be showing videos on your catalog ads today, whether or not you supplied any.
• Meta can add product videos to your catalog by itself. Where a product has no video, Meta may scan your product pages, videos you've uploaded to Ads Manager, your Facebook Page and Instagram profile, other products in the same catalog, and your other catalogs, and add what it finds. Those are videos you didn't make and don't control. The structural fix is to supply your own: a video you add to a product yourself takes priority over all automatically added videos, which makes them disappear from the catalog. A video-carrying design group is what does that for you.
• Every product still needs an image, even one you only plan to advertise with video. Meta requires it, and video designs are added beside your image designs, never instead of them.
• Video shape is intrinsic. In Meta's words, "if a video matches the aspect ratio for the ad placement, that video is returned" — Meta doesn't say how it determines the match. So video designs carry no shape markers at all: you supply the ratios you want, and Meta matches them.

When you pin an ad to a group that carries video, Renable turns Dynamic Media on for that ad's new creative — that switch is what lets a catalog video serve at all. For an image-only group it turns Dynamic Media off instead, so Meta shows exactly the design you chose.

If your channel already sends a plain product-video column, the Adaptive designs dialog says so and leaves it alone: it stays your ads' default video, and video designs are added beside it.

Pinning an ad to a design group#

Pinning happens in Meta Ads Manager, through the Renable Options browser extension. On a channel with adaptive designs on, the panel lists your design groups rather than a flat list of images — each one shown as a strip of its designs at their true shapes, image and video together — and Use switches the ad to that group. The group the ad is currently running also lists each design's name, size and coverage under its strip; the groups you could switch to show their shapes only.

The panel also tells you which mechanism the open ad is using. An ad that still picks its design by position says so, and switching it to a group is what moves it over.

What Renable promises, and what it doesn't#

Renable's side of this is exact: it writes the design blocks into your feed and writes the name-based pin onto the ad's creative. What happens after that is Meta's, and the copy in the product is careful about the line:

• "Adapt to placement" has to be switched on in the ad's Advantage+ settings for Meta to do the shape adaptation that pinning-by-name preserves. This one isn't a nicety: in our own testing, the same ad with the setting off showed a single design on every surface — it still looked right, it just stopped adapting. So when you pin a group from the extension, Renable switches the setting on for the version of the ad it creates, and the panel warns you if an ad has it explicitly turned off.
• Meta decides what actually renders. Renable never claims a particular shape or medium will be shown on a particular surface.
• A pin that matches nothing doesn't break the ad. In our own testing, an ad pinned to a design Meta hadn't fetched kept showing the feed's default designs — no blank, no error — and started showing the pinned group once Meta's copy of the catalog caught up. So pinning a group before the fetch is safe: the pin heals itself, which is why the extension warns about a design Meta hasn't ingested yet instead of blocking the switch. (Meta doesn't document this fallback; that's Renable's own finding, from testing against real ads.)

Cover the shapes you care about#

Where a group is missing a shape, an ad pinned to it uses another of that group's designs — which can show letterboxed. Meta documents this for carousels specifically: if none of the products have a 9:16 image the default display is used, but if some do, "the rest of the image is filled with the image background color." The Adaptive designs dialog nudges you when a group is missing a shape the base group has: the missing shape is an empty cell in the group's row, with a warning just beneath it explaining what an ad pinned to that group will show instead. The warning carries no link of its own — clicking the empty cell above it is the fix.

Turning it off#

Turn off adaptive designs, in the dialog's footer, converts the image designs back to plain image fields in their current order — the first design becomes the main image, the rest become additional images, keeping their values. Group and design names are dropped.

It flattens every group, not just the base one, so you may end up with more image fields than you started with: three groups of three shapes come back as nine image fields — one main image and eight additional ones — because there's nowhere else for those designs to go. If you only wanted to drop one concept, delete that group instead of turning the feature off.

Video designs have no plain field to convert back to, so they're removed, and the dialog lists them by name in the confirmation before anything happens.

Like every other change on the channel page, all of this edits a draft — publishing the channel is what deploys it to your live feed.

FAQ#

Do I have to use this?

No. A Meta channel that never turns it on keeps working exactly as it does now, and Renable will not migrate one for you. Position selection still works today — Meta calls it legacy but has given no removal date.

Will turning it on break ads that are already running?

No. The conversion keeps design order, so an ad pinned to a position keeps showing the same design. Adding further groups can't change the image an existing ad shows either, because their image designs only appear on ads pinned to them by name. Two things do reach unpinned ads: video — a group's videos are the product's videos, and Dynamic Media lets any ad draw on them — and a leftover surface mark on another group's design, which is a marked image in your feed like any other. The group's own row warns you about the second one and the design's picker lets you remove it.

Can a group have a different design per placement?

Not per placement, no, and that's a Meta limit rather than a Renable one — an ad pins one design group, and Meta chooses what to show per surface. Different designs for different placements means separate ad sets.

What a group can do is give each shape its own template — see The grid: one row per group, one column per shape. Instagram, Stories and Reels are marked on the default designs and apply to every ad, so they aren't a per-group answer either. Both are Meta matching a design to a surface on its own, not you assigning one; you're describing your designs and Meta still decides what runs where.

Why does my group name look different from what I typed?

Because the name is what your feed sends and what an ad pins, so the box shows you the real thing rather than a prettier version of it.

One group's designs are missing from the feed for some products. Why?

A design can only produce an image if the template it points at can build one for that product, or — for a design that uses the product's own photo rather than a template — if the product has a photo at all. When something the design needs is missing for a product, a picture it places or a piece of copy it writes in, Renable can't produce the image.

That design is then left out of the feed for those products entirely. Renable doesn't send a half-finished design: an image with no picture behind it is worse than no image, so the whole design is skipped for that product and your other designs are sent as normal. The product is reported as content missing, the same warning you get for any other field Renable can't fill, and the product's name is in the event so you can open it and see which piece of content is short.

A product with content missing is treated like any other product with content missing. On a Meta channel the rule that ships with the channel sets the product's status to archived, which takes it out of your active catalog so it stops running as an ad until the design can be built. That's deliberate, and it isn't special to designs — the same rule does the same thing for a missing price or a missing title. Check your channel's rules if you want it handled differently.

The same thing happens, briefly, while a design is still rendering. The first time a design is used Renable has to produce an image for every product, which takes a while; until that finishes the design is simply absent from the feed and then appears on its own. Nothing is reported, because nothing is wrong, and Renable waits for the renders before it publishes the feed rather than sending products whose images are still on their way — your live feed keeps its previous contents in the meantime. A design reported as missing content will never fill in on its own — something has to change about the product's content or about the template.

Renable waits up to an hour, then publishes. If renders are still finishing after that, the feed goes out with what is ready rather than leaving your live feed unchanged for longer — and the products whose designs aren't finished go out archived (or out of stock, depending on the channel's rules) for that one update, exactly as they would if you pressed Regenerate. They come back on the next update, once their designs are made. You'll see a warning on the channel saying it happened and how many images were still being made. On a normal catalog the renders land long before the hour is up; it takes an unusually large catalog, a template that renders slowly, or running out of credits to reach it.

One button skips that wait on purpose: Regenerate. It exists to publish the feed with whatever is ready right now, so if you press it while a new design is still rendering, the products whose image isn't finished go out as archived and come back on the next update. Publish doesn't do this — it starts the rendering immediately but still waits for it before the feed goes live.

One thing to know if you pin ads by position rather than by design group: in an XML or JSON feed, a design that is absent for a product shifts the positions of that product's later designs. A CSV or TSV feed keeps every design in its own columns, so nothing moves there. Pinning by group name, which is what the Renable Options panel does, isn't affected either way.

What happens if I rename a group or a design?

Ads pinned to the old name fall back to your default designs until they're pinned again — the dialog confirms this before letting a rename through. Names are meant to be set once and left alone.

Where to go next#

• Set up design groups — the step-by-step.
• Adaptive designs and design groups — the two terms, defined.
• Test two designs against each other — running a fair head-to-head between two groups.
• Run different designs for different campaigns or seasons — living with several groups over a year.
• Get video into your catalog ads — video designs, Dynamic Media, and the videos Meta adds by itself.
• The Renable Options browser extension — where pinning happens.
• Channel fields and placeholders — nested blocks, the field shape design groups are built from.