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.
Why Use Carousel Ads
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.
- Demonstrate a product line
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.
- Highlight a product (or service)
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.)
- Step-by-step guide. Carousel ads help not only to show off products but explain how to use them and what results users can get (Tyme Hair ad example below). This interactive ad format allows demonstrating step-by-step the hands-on experience with a promoted product. “How to” ads usually perform very well, particularly for newly launched products.
- Split panoramic view. This is a fantastic opportunity to keep users involved. Many travel and airline companies deploy carousel ads to advertise various destinations.
- Promote events. Inform users about major upcoming events, showing a location, participants, facilities, and key topics. Illustrate the benefits of the event. It is easier than ever with carousel ads.
- Share content. Carousel ads can help you generate more traffic to your website. You can show off your best content or attract attention to a series of articles or e-book by illustrating parts of the text. You offer a sneak peek at your premium content to generate more leads to your website through catchy images.
- Retarget customers. People visited your website, listed products but did not complete a purchase — remind them about the products they viewed in a carousel ad. Use a couple of browsed products and complete the line of images with similar or related products.
- Social proof. As you should have guessed, here you demonstrate how popular your brand is and how many people enjoy using your products (services). Obviously, this type of ad improves the credibility of your business through visual testimonials.
- Preview to experience using a product or service. Carousel ads allow getting a sneak peek into the experience of using a product. Images display what a brand offers and some unique functionality of the promoted products. The idea in this case is to create intrigue and make users curious to try the product or service.
The Best Examples of Carousel Ads
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.
BarkBox
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.
LoveFound
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.
Tyme Hair
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.
World Football Summit
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.
FoodPanda Order Food Delivery
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.
Precision Nutrition
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.
Chipotle
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.
Carousel Ads: Advantages
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:
- Cost-effectiveness. It seems that in many cases carousel ads result in better conversion rates than single-image ads.
- Creativity. You can use up to ten images with different descriptions and headlines, so you have more space to create unique stories and display products in a more advantageous way.
- Engagement. The ad format itself offers users to stop and swipe images. Thus, users are more engaged than just scrolling an ad in the news feed.
- Flexibility. Ten images, ten descriptions, and ten calls to action. Sure, you can use the same description, but the carousel ad format allows using different calls-to-action: visit a website, compare prices, select your favorite, etc. You benefit from extended customization of this ad format — users are provided with a new experience of discovering new products or learning a story you offer them.
Have you tried Carousel Ads for your ad campaigns?
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Recommended Carousel Ad Specifications
Facebook makes the ad creation process easier by providing the carousel ad specifications for better performance of your ads:
- Number of carousel slots: minimum 2 and maximum 10;
- Aspect ratio: (recommended) 1:1;
- Image file format: JPG or PNG;
- Image file size: 30 MB;
- Resolution: 1080x1080 (recommended);
- Video length: up to 240 min (recommended 15 sec);
- Video file size: maximum 4 GB;
- Text description: 125 characters;
- Link description: 25 characters;
- Headline: 40 characters.
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.
Case Study: L’Azurde Utilizes Carousel Ads on Facebook
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:
- 66% increase in online purchases compared to the previous period;
- 46% lower cost per purchase;
- 2.4x higher average purchase value during the campaign period;
- 2.7x higher return on ad spend.
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.
