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GIFs, videos, slideshows gather pace, and the advertising industry is not an exception. Ad platforms compete to offer a continuously expanding array of ad formats to advertisers. Being a flagship advertising platform, Facebook offers multiple ad formats, including videos, canvas, and carousel ads. Ok, users want something dynamic. They want something that moves. They want variability. Welcome to Carousel Ads.
Carousel Ads remind of catalogs or PowerPoint slides with up to 10 ad slots for images or videos. No need to select a single ad copy that will highlight all the benefits of your business, product, service, or special offer. Now you can use several (from two to ten) images to tell potential customers about your business. In fact, 10 available slots for a slideshow may contain both images and videos.
Note that you can let Facebook optimize the order of images based on their performance. This option is great for ads that display an array of products. But when you tell a story or illustrate a process step-by-step (see the examples from BarkBox and LoveFound below), do not use this feature to keep the specified order of images.
Interactive and dynamic carousel ads help to grab attention, arouse curiosity, and keep users engaged. How is it possible? The slideshow of images and ads can promote your business, products, and services in several ways. You can tell potential customers a success story, demonstrate a product line, highlight a specific product, or inform them about an upcoming event.
A user scrolls the carousel and discovers a story image-by-image. Curiosity is in our human nature, we want to know how the story develops and ends. This ad format is just perfect for telling stories, including love stories (for the dating niche), success stories (education, finance, and gambling niches), happy customer stories (e-commerce, app installs, etc).
Stories illustrate the transformation process and demonstrate how a product or service improves the situation. In fact, a common practice of showing “before and after” pictures frequently deployed by businesses in Nutra and Sports niches can be perfectly represented via carousel ads.
Carousel ads help e-commerce brands to show off the variety of products in a digital catalog. You have up to ten image (or video) slots to create a mini-brochure to advertise your business. Every image can be accomplished with a unique headline, description, and even link.
When a brand is well-known, carousel ads represent a mighty tool to introduce a new product or to highlight a specific product and its features. This is an eye-catching way to attract attention to features and benefits of the product (for instance, lower price, better quality, high-tech materials, or innovative technology in manufacturing, etc.)
Below you will find some of the best examples of how businesses can benefit from carousel ad format: showcasing a variety of products, telling stories, illustrating results of using a product, and so on.
Humor always grabs attention and helps to increase engagement on ads. BarkBox found a hilarious way to increase the performance of ads. Timely and funny promotion of products for dogs that cannot be scrolled unnoticed.
This is another great example of utilizing carousel ads. The dating service tells a love story through a panel of images. A high engagement rate is explained by interactive pictures — users want to know how the story ends and scroll till the happy end.
A great example of taking advantage of carousel ad format to show how to use a product. The company visualized a step-by-step guide to illustrate how the promoted hair curling iron works every step with corresponding pictures.
Here the carousel ad format is used to promote an event. Actually, you can highlight location, topic, speakers, etc. The World Football Summit used carousel ads to display a panel of speakers.
A very bright ad example: interactive carousel ads with high-quality images of various food types available for ordering. The panel of food pictures should arouse appetite and makes users click on the link to order delivery.
The primary goal of the Facebook ad campaign was to increase brand awareness. The company used carousel ads to promote and share its articles on workout nutrition. In this ad, the company showcased articles on healthy eating for those who care about fitness and a healthy lifestyle.
As a result, the website got 6 000 new newsletter signups. Besides, carousel ads had a 50% lower cost-per-lead than standard link ads and a 50% higher click-through rate than standard link ads.
The brand leveraged the power of carousel ads on Facebook to introduce and promote the ‘Friend or Faux’ campaign. The company used carousel slots to compare Chipotle food with other kinds of fast food through a slogan in a form of a question "Friend or Faux?". A great idea that worked pretty well.
Showing more in a single ad might be a slogan for Facebook Carousel Ads. In fact, you benefit much more from this ad type. Some of the major advantages include:
Facebook makes the ad creation process easier by providing the carousel ad specifications for better performance of your ads:
Note that the image should not include more than 20% text.
Use the headline space under every image slot for a call-to-action, price, special offer, or a specific benefit.
Now you know the recommended ad specifications and can increase the performance of your ads.
L’Azurde is one of the leaders in jewelry design, manufacturing, and distribution in the Middle East. Its brand Miss L’ has been specifically designed for the young generation.
To promote its new exclusive collection, the company cooperated with digital agency Merkle. It was decided on showcasing products from the collection using carousel ads. Every carousel slot contained an image and pricing information. Besides, every ad was linked to the collection landing page so that customers could buy a chosen item in a couple of clicks.
The results of the campaign were so impressive that the Facebook Business page published it as an example of the successful carousel ad format implementation:
The premium jewelry brand achieved:
May Kanounji, the Chief Digital and Customer Officer, noted that:
"With Facebook carousel ads, we were able to leverage Saudi National Day to promote exclusive pieces and offers in a campaign specifically designed for the Saudi customer. This resulted in significantly increased sales, achieved cost-efficiently."
Summary
Engaging and dynamic, carousel ads really generate more traffic. They require more work too as you create not one, but up to ten creatives seasoned with unique descriptions and headlines. Facebook IQ research showed that dynamic ads (sliding images and videos) retain attention five times longer than static ad content. That is why businesses tend to deploy interactive ads for product promotion. Carousel ads make the process seamless and easy because they allow grouping images and videos related to the promoted product in a single ad.
