Set Up Design Groups

Turn on adaptive designs for a Meta channel, read your design groups, add a second creative concept with its own image and optional video template, point an individual design at a different template, and publish — step by step.

Updated August 27, 2026

This is the practical walkthrough for adaptive designs: naming your Meta channel's designs so ads can pin them by name instead of by position, and adding a second creative concept you can switch ads to.

You'll need a Meta channel with at least one image field. Everything here edits the channel's draft — nothing reaches your live feed until you publish.

1. Turn on the Adaptive designs use#

On the channel's Settings tab, find the Used for section and turn on the Adaptive designs chip on the Meta row. That declares the capability — it doesn't change your feed yet — and it's what enables the dialog in the next step.

2. Open the Adaptive designs dialog#

Go to your channel's Fields tab and click Adaptive designs in the toolbar.

The button appears on a channel that's declared for Meta, and enables once the Adaptive designs chip is on (or when the channel already carries design blocks). If it's greyed out, its tooltip points you back to the Used for section.

You can also get here from the Renable Options panel in Meta Ads Manager: on a channel that still picks designs by position, the panel shows an Enable adaptive designs link that opens this exact dialog.

3. Turn it on#

The dialog explains what's about to happen and asks for one thing: a design group name. It starts as default, which is a perfectly good answer — this first group is your base group, the designs your ads show when nothing is pinned.

The helper text under the box tells you how many designs will be created from your current image fields. Your main image becomes the first design and each additional image the next, in order.

Read anything the dialog flags before continuing:

  • Fallback values won't carry into a design. A design carries one value, not a chain of alternatives, so if one of your image fields has fallbacks, the dialog names it and keeps the main value. Renable tells you rather than quietly picking one for you.
  • Rules that reference a converted image field are listed by name, because those parts of them stop doing anything once the field becomes a design.

Then click Turn on adaptive designs. If the Adaptive designs add-on isn't declared on the channel yet, Renable declares it for you at the same time — adding the Meta destination too, if the channel doesn't have one. That part applies immediately, like every Used for change; the design blocks themselves are draft edits waiting on Publish.

4. Read your groups#

The dialog now shows one card per group, with the short explanation of what adaptive designs are for still at the top — it stays there after conversion, so you can re-read it whenever you come back.

Each card leads with a strip of tiles: one per design in the group, drawn at the shape it actually is, with the design's name in the feed underneath it. That's the fastest read on a group — one square tile, one taller, one taller still, and you know what shapes it covers.

  • The tile is the shape. Square is 1:1, Portrait 4:5, Story 9:16.
  • Video designs sit in the same strip, marked with a small play badge. They aren't a separate list, because a video is another facet of the same creative concept rather than a different thing.
  • A dashed tile is a shape this group doesn't have but your base group does — see the note below.
  • Above the strip the card says where the group came from: "Prefilled from your template", and ", video from your video template" when the group carries video designs.

The base group is tinted and carries the Default designs badge and the line "What your ads show when no group is pinned". It can't be deleted — turning adaptive designs off is the way back. Any group holding video designs — the base group included — also carries a Carries video badge beside its name, so you can see at a glance which concepts have a video facet.

A product photo as your base group's main design is completely legitimate — not every design has to be a Studio template. It gets a plain square tile labelled Main, showing no render, because only designs rendered from a template have a render to show.

Cover the shapes you care about#

Where a group lacks a shape the base group has, that shape shows as a dashed tile in the strip and the card explains underneath what it means: an ad pinned to that group uses another of the group's designs instead, which can show letterboxed. The fix is to add that size to the group's template in Studio and re-add the group, to point one of the group's designs at a template that does have the shape (step 6), or to accept the gap deliberately.

5. Add a second design group#

This is the point of the whole feature: a second creative concept you can switch ads to, without changing the image any running ad shows.

Add a design group is a dashed row at the end of the list, carrying one line — "Never changes a running ad." Click it and the dialog switches to the add-group view: the list of groups is replaced by the form, and the dialog's own buttons become ← All design groups and Add group. Fill in three things:

  1. Group name — black-friday, summer-sale. Lowercase letters, numbers and dashes; the box rewrites what you type as you type it, because the name is literally what ads will pin.
  2. Image template — the Studio template this group's designs are prefilled from. Renable creates one design per size the template has, so a template with square, portrait and story sizes gives you a group covering all three shapes in one click. The panel on the right lists exactly the designs it will create — each with its tile at its true shape, its shape name, the name it will be given and its pixel size — in the same order the group card will show them once it exists. So you can see what you're about to get before you commit to it. Before you've picked a template that panel is already there, headed What you'll get with three faint outline tiles and the line "Pick an image template and this lists the designs it creates, one per size" — so choosing a template fills a space that's waiting rather than growing the form under your cursor.
  3. Video template (optional) — a template that renders video. It creates a video design per size, sitting alongside the image designs in the same group. Note it reaches further than the image designs do — see the paragraph below.

Click Add group. A new group's image designs only ever appear on ads you pin to it, so no running ad changes the image it shows. Its video designs are the exception — they're the product's videos, so any ad with Dynamic Media on can draw on them whether it's pinned or not. Add the video template when you're ready for that, not months ahead. See Run different designs for different campaigns or seasons.

That panel signs off with the thing most people don't expect: each design it creates can be pointed at a different template afterwards, by hovering its tile on the group card. That's the next step.

You can add video designs to an existing group later, and take them out again when the season ends — both live in the group's … menu (see Managing a group below).

6. Point one design at a different template#

A design group is a set of designs prefilled from one template — not welded to it. Any one design in a group can render from a different Studio template, independently of the rest.

Hover a tile on the group's card and a pencil appears on it. Click the pencil and a picker opens, listing the templates you could use for that one format.

Things about the picker worth knowing:

  • It only offers sizes of the same shape as the tile you clicked. A square size can't go in the Story position: that wouldn't give you a differently-sourced Story design, it would leave the group with two Squares and no Story at all. The picker says so in a line rather than letting you find out from the coverage note afterwards.
  • The template and size the design uses right now is marked In use, with a checkmark, so you can see where you're starting from.
  • Templates with no size of that shape aren't listed as dead rows. They're counted in one line at the bottom instead — "N other templates have no Story size. Add one in Studio to use them here."
  • If no template has that shape at all, the picker says so outright — "No template has a Story size yet." — instead of showing you an empty list. Adding the size in Studio is the fix.
  • A design Renable can't resolve isn't offered a list. If the design's bound template or size can't be resolved — an archived template, a size that was deleted — the picker explains rather than listing candidates: "Renable can't resolve this design's template or size — open the design in Studio to check it." That's deliberate. Such a design looks shape-less while still carrying the shape marker its old size earned, so repointing it could leave the design and its marker contradicting each other. Sort it out in Studio first.
  • Only that one design changes. Picking a candidate rewrites that design's template and size, and nothing else in the group.

The design's name stays exactly as it was. The name is the string an ad pins, so Renable never changes it as a side effect of changing what the design renders from — that would un-pin every ad pinned to it. Renaming a design is still possible, but it's a separate, deliberate action (click the name under its tile), and it carries that cost.

That has an honest consequence worth planning for: an overridden design keeps its original name for good, so a name that described where the design came from stops describing what it now shows — in your feed, and anywhere you read that name back later. On screen you can always see the truth, because a design whose template differs from the group's prefill source carries a quiet grey "from template" caption under its tile; without it, the card's "Prefilled from" line would quietly become false. Renaming is not the fix — it un-pins every ad pinned to that design.

Video tiles have the same pencil, with the picker limited to templates that can render video.

7. Publish#

Close the dialog and press Publish on the channel. That's what deploys the design blocks to your live feed. Until Meta fetches the updated feed, the designs aren't in Meta's copy of your catalog yet — the Renable Options panel marks a design in that state, and shows you when Meta last fetched.

8. Pin an ad to a group#

Open a catalog ad in Meta Ads Manager with the Renable Options extension installed. The panel lists your design groups under Other design groups, each shown as a strip of its designs at their true shapes. Click Use on the group you want and confirm.

For Meta to adapt the shape to each surface — the thing pinning by name preserves — Adapt to placement needs to be switched on in the ad's Advantage+ settings. The panel says so on every name-pinned ad, because Renable can't see that setting reliably enough to tell you it's already on.

Managing a group#

Everything you can do to a group lives behind the … menu on its card — rename, add video designs, remove video designs, delete.

  • Rename a group by clicking its name on the card and typing — the … menu opens the same edit. Renable confirms before the rename goes through, because ads pinned to the old name fall back to your default designs until they're pinned again.
  • Rename a design the same way: click its name under its tile and type. It asks for the same confirmation, for the same reason — ads pinned to the old design name fall back to your default designs. (Don't confuse this with the pencil that appears on a tile: that one changes which template the design renders from, and never touches its name. See step 6.)
  • Add video designs puts a video template's designs into an existing group.
  • Remove video designs takes just that group's videos out of the feed on the next publish, keeping its image designs. Renable confirms first, listing the video designs by name.
  • Delete a group. Its designs leave the feed on the next publish and ads pinned to it fall back to your default designs. The base group has no delete — turning the feature off is the way back.
  • Turn off adaptive designs sits in the dialog's footer, to the left of Done. It converts your image designs back to plain image fields in their current order, keeping their values. Video designs have no plain field to convert back to, so they are removed — the confirmation lists them by name first. Note it flattens every group, so three groups of three shapes come back as nine image fields, not the two you started with. To drop one concept, delete that group instead.

Troubleshooting#

The dialog says adaptive designs isn't switched on for Meta.

Your channel carries design blocks but the Adaptive designs add-on isn't declared, so those blocks won't be recognised as designs. The banner has a Turn on button that fixes it in one click.

The panel still shows a flat list of designs, not groups.

The panel reads your published channel. Publish the channel, and give Meta time to fetch the feed — the panel's freshness line tells you when it last did.

An ad I switched still shows the old design.

Two normal causes. Ads Manager's own preview doesn't refresh by itself — reload the page (the switch dialog offers a one-click reload). And if Meta hasn't fetched your updated feed yet, the ad keeps running its default display until it does, then starts showing the group on its own.

Where to go next#