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:
| Shape | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Square | Feed-style surfaces, and the fallback when nothing more specific fits |
| Portrait | 4:5 surfaces |
| Story | 9:16 surfaces |
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.
A group is prefilled from a template, not welded to it#
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.
You do it on the group's card in the Adaptive designs dialog — hover the design's tile, click the pencil that appears, and pick from the templates offered for that format. Two rules make it predictable:
- The picker is limited to the shape you clicked. Putting a square size in the Story position 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.
- The design's name never changes. The name is the exact string an ad pins, so Renable won't change it as a side effect — that would un-pin every ad pinned to that design. A design pointed at a different template therefore keeps a name that no longer describes what it shows, in the feed and wherever you read that name back later. The dialog carries the difference on screen instead, with a quiet "from template" caption under any tile whose template differs from the group's prefill source. You can rename a design deliberately — click its name under its tile — but that isn't a fix for this, because it un-pins ads.
Video designs work the same way, offered against templates that can render video.
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 your ads show when no group is pinned, and it's the only group that carries Meta's own reserved shape markers, so its designs need no per-ad tagging for Meta to match a shape to a surface. 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. Its image designs only ever appear on ads you deliberately pin to it — that's what the reserved-marker split above buys you, and it's why a new creative concept is safe to build while your campaigns run.
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_linkandadditional_image_linkstop 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.
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 appears as a dashed tile in the group's strip of designs, with the explanation on the card just beneath the strip.
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. The one thing that does reach unpinned ads is video — a group's videos are the product's videos, and Dynamic Media lets any ad draw on them.
Can a group have a different design per placement?
No, and this is a Meta limit rather than a Renable one — an ad pins one design group, and Meta chooses the shape per surface. Different designs for different placements means separate ad sets. This is why everything in Renable talks about shapes and never about placements.
You can give each shape inside a group its own template — see A group is prefilled from a template, not welded to it above. That's still one design per shape, which is a different thing from one design per placement.
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.
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.