Most stores don't want one look forever. They want an everyday design, a Black Friday design, and a summer-sale design — and they want to move ads between them without rebuilding a catalog every time.
That's what design groups are for. One channel, one catalog, several named creative concepts, and each ad pinned to whichever one it should run. This article is the operational side of adaptive designs: living with several groups over a year, not setting the first one up.
If your channel hasn't been converted to adaptive designs, the same job is still doable — you pin individual designs by position instead of groups, from the same panel; see The Renable Options browser extension.
The promise that makes this workable#
Adding a design group never changes which image an ad shows — pinned or not.
That isn't a habit or a convention, it's how the feature is built. Only your base group (the first one, marked Default designs) carries Meta's own reserved shape markers, which are what let Meta match a design to a surface with no per-ad pinning. Every group you add afterwards carries none of them, so its image designs are never selected by an ad that hasn't named the group explicitly. They're still in the feed and Meta still ingests them — the Renable Options panel checks for them there — they simply don't get picked.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: you can build next quarter's seasonal image designs in the middle of your best trading week, publish them, and no running ad changes the image it shows until you decide it does.
Video is broader, by Meta's design#
A group's video designs are the product's videos like any other, and any ad with Dynamic Media on can draw on them whether or not it's pinned to that group. Dynamic Media is Meta's default for catalog ads, including ads Renable never touched. Three consequences to know before you add a video template:
- An existing ad you never pinned to anything can start showing a video you added to a seasonal group.
- If your base group carries no video, the new group's video becomes the product's default video — the one Meta reaches for first.
- Your own video evicts the videos Meta adds to the catalog by itself, which is usually what you want. See Get video into your catalog ads.
So: add image designs whenever you like, and add a video to a seasonal group when you're ready for Meta to be able to use it — not months ahead the way you can with images.
A shape that works#
A common arrangement, and a good default:
| Group | What it is | Which ads pin it |
|---|---|---|
default (base) | Your everyday design. Also the fallback whenever a pin matches nothing | Nothing needs to pin it — it's what unpinned ads show |
black-friday | The seasonal concept, built ahead of time | Only the ads you switch, only while the season runs |
sale | A promo look you reuse | Whichever ads are promoting |
Two things follow from that table:
- The base group is the one that matters most. It's what runs when nothing is pinned, what a deleted or renamed group falls back to, and the only group whose designs Meta can shape-match without a pin. Put your best everyday work there.
- Image designs are cheap to have and free to leave alone. An unpinned group's image designs sit in the feed unselected, so there's no cost to keeping last year's Black Friday group around until you need it again. Its video designs are the exception — those stay available to any Dynamic-Media-enabled ad whether the group is pinned or not. When the season ends, use Remove video designs in the group's … menu to take just the videos out and keep the image concept for next year.
Add a group#
On the channel's Fields tab, open Adaptive designs, click the dashed Add a design group row at the end of the list — the dialog switches to the add-group view — and give the group a name plus an image template — and a video template if the concept has one, bearing in mind that a video goes live for every Dynamic-Media-enabled ad as soon as you publish, pinned or not. Renable creates one design per size the template carries, so a template with square, portrait and story sizes gives you a group covering all three shapes in one click. Then Publish the channel.
The template is a starting point rather than a fixed binding: afterwards you can point any single design in the group at a different template — hover its tile on the group's card and click the pencil — which is how you vary one shape of a seasonal concept without building a second group for it.
The full walkthrough, including what the dialog asks for and what it warns about, is in Set up design groups.
Names are set once. A group name is lowercase letters, numbers and dashes, and it is literally
the string an ad pins — which is why the box rewrites what you type as you type it. Pick names your
future self will read correctly in a list: black-friday-2026 ages better than new, and sale
ages better than sale-v2-final.
Point ads at a group#
Pinning happens per ad, in Meta Ads Manager, through the Renable Options extension. Open the ad, find the group in the panel, click Use, and confirm.
Two things about doing this at seasonal scale:
- It's one ad at a time. There's no bulk switch, so a campaign with many ads is many switches. Worth planning for on the Monday of a sale rather than discovering at 9am.
- Switching has a cost on Meta's side — a new version of the ad's creative, possible re-review, and a live ad's delivery learning may restart. Switching while the ad is paused avoids the learning cost, which is a good argument for building the seasonal ad set ahead of time, pinning it paused, and simply starting it when the season does.
Rolling back#
Re-pin. Switching an ad back to your everyday group is the same two clicks in the other direction — and it carries the same cost profile as any other switch: a new version of the ad's creative, Meta may review the ad again, and a live ad's delivery learning may restart.
There is one optimization, and it's worth knowing what it depends on. If the ad ran that design group before and the group's designs haven't changed since, Renable points the ad back at the existing version instead of creating another one. Change the group in between — add a shape, rename a design, give it its first video — and Renable creates a new version instead, because the old one pins something the group no longer is. And the first time you move an ad that was never pinned to anything back to your defaults, there's nothing to reuse, so that one always creates a version too.
Either way, re-pinning is the rollback, which is why deleting a group is rarely the right move at the end of a season: moving the ads back is enough, and it leaves the concept ready for next year.
Keeping a group versus deleting one#
Keep it by default when the group is image-only: it costs nothing, it stays out of the way, and it's there when the season comes round.
A group carrying video has a lighter fix than deleting it. Its videos stay available to every Dynamic-Media-enabled ad all year, pinned or not — so if you don't want December's video in play in March, use Remove video designs in the group's … menu. That takes just the videos out of the feed on the next publish and leaves the image designs in place: ads pinned to the group keep their images, and the concept stays ready for next season. Renable confirms first, listing the video designs by name.
Delete it only when you want the whole concept out of the feed. Deleting a group removes its designs from the feed on the next publish, and ads still pinned to it fall back to your default designs — Renable confirms that before it does anything. So: move the ads back to another group first, then delete, or accept that anything you forgot drops back to the base group.
Renaming has the same consequence, and this is the one that surprises people: ads pinned to the old name fall back to your default designs until they're pinned again. Renable confirms before letting a rename through. Treat a group name as an identifier rather than a label — if you want a different description of the concept, the honest answer is that there isn't one, because the name is what the feed sends and what an ad pins.
Do not turn the feature off to remove one concept#
Turn off adaptive designs flattens every group back into plain image fields, not just the one you're tired of. 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. Video designs have no plain field to convert back to, so they're removed entirely (the confirmation lists them by name first).
To drop one concept, delete that group. Turning the feature off is for leaving the feature, not for tidying up.
Where the base group can't help you#
One limit worth knowing before you plan a year around this: an ad pins one design group, and Meta chooses the shape. There's no way to give one ad a different design per placement — that's a Meta limit, not a Renable one. Different designs for different placements means different ad sets, which is the same mechanic as testing two designs against each other.
Where to go next#
- Set up design groups — adding a group, step by step.
- Adaptive designs — the full picture, including what conversion does to your feed.
- Adaptive designs and design groups — the two terms, defined.
- Test two designs against each other — deciding which concept wins before you roll it out.
- Get video into your catalog ads — giving a seasonal group a video facet.