Make your Facebook Ads Count: 3 Ways to Use Carousel Ads to Encourage Action
With Facebook’s constantly evolving suite of ad products, advertisers have to fight to keep up with the trends and shifts on the platform — and now, they have to consider all of the different ways they can use their creative in those ads as well. It’s not enough to repurpose a PSA and slap on some closed captioning, or to hope your text-heavy photo won’t get caught by Facebook’s 20 percent overlay rule.
In the age of low organic reach, Facebook has adapted to advertisers’ needs and expanded its valuable newsfeed real estate to include ads that drive off site. Linked ads in newsfeeds allow you to drive traffic to websites at a lower cost, and make it easier than ever to get creative… with your creative. For some reason, though, many advertisers haven’t embraced Facebook’s newest offering: the carousel ad.
Carousel ads support three to five clickable images (or videos!), each with their own heading, description, and destination URL.The fluid strip of creative benefits both the advertisers and audience members, giving advertisers the ability to display more, and viewers the chance to explore more.
I’m not alone in preaching the impact of the carousel ad; Facebook has shared that on average, they drive 20–30 percent lower cost-per-click than single-image link ads, so advertisers are paying less for more traffic.
As a digital marketer, I’ve identified three creative objectives that take advantage of all that carousel ads have to offer.
1. Instruct
With step-by-step images, show your audience exactly how to use your product, or how to complete a conversion on your site, such as a donation or install.
2. Entertain
Tell a story! In 2015, the Ad Council worked with AARP and Facebook to create a first-of-its-kind photonovela series. With a 10 episode arc, the campaign reached millions of Hispanic women, with the goal of educating and supporting them as caregivers. Check out the first episode.
If you don’t have a story to tell (or the production dollars to create one), you can still tie your images together in a creative way. For our TEACH.org campaign, we created an ad to encourage college students to become teachers. Both the copy overlay and continuous graphics tell a story to keep users swiping back and forth.
3. Inform
If you’re asking for donations or even an email signup, show your audience where that conversion leads. Give them access to their impact like Pencils of Promise did with a sponsored post that helps illustrate the importance of education.
Bonus: You can do a little splicing and dicing to keep your users swiping and therefore, engaged. Build on the continuity of the ad product by publishing images that connect or extend into the next frame.
Just make sure that when your images or videos go in sequential order, that you don’t let Facebook “optimize” toward the image with the most clicks. Otherwise, the image receiving the most clicks will be shown first.
The bottom line is: don’t shy away from this ad product. It’s inexpensive, efficient, and you get at least 3 times the real estate as with static ads.
Enjoy hijacking the model to create the most impact for YOUR campaigns.
Questions? Leave them in the comments! Good luck!
This post originally appeared on AdLibbing.org.
Mar 7 By: Hannah Roos
