If you have an active personal Facebook account, you may have seen an increase of Facebook carousel and product ads in November and December. As Christmas gets ever closer, businesses are leveraging carousel ads to tempt you into buying gifts and to take advantage of their promotions.
In today’s article I’ll go over what Facebook carousel ads are and how you should be using them this holiday season and moving forward into 2016.
What are carousel ads?
As the name suggests, carousel ads are a series of Facebook ads complied into one. Carousel ads lets you serve between 3-5 different ad images and allows prospects to scroll through them. They can be used to serve products or tell a story.
Here’s an example of what a carousel ad looks like:
Source: Facebook
Benefits of using carousel ads
Carousel ads are not suitable for every business type. If you offer services or a single product, it becomes a lot more difficult to use such ads unless you get really creative (I’ll talk about this later).
If you’re an ecommerce store or a bricks and mortar business that sells a vast number of products, then they’ll be right up your street. You can setup carousel ads to show similar product ranges at different pricing points, showcase several products in larger ad units and if done right, generate more sales.
How does a business do carousel ads right? By following these 4 tips.
- Products should be related
Keep in mind that a carousel ad is a single ad unit even though you can serve up to 5 different items. The best carousel ads stick to a single theme, take Mini as an example, their ad below focuses only the Mini Hardtop 4 iDoor model only:
Their ad message would get a little confusing if they served an ad with 5 different cars, especially since each carousel has a limited amount of space for text and images.
If you sell laptops (or insert product name here), ensure the items in your carousel ad are in the same category and of a similar price. For example, only show notebooks with a 13.3″ screen that are priced between $499-$599. Don’t show a single laptop, a desk chair, desktop computer and then some anti-virus software, the message is not sharp enough and if you’re a targeting a custom audience, you should really focus on a single product range.
- Creativity gets clicks
As Facebook ads and display marketing evolves almost daily, businesses are getting creative and using carousel ads as a way tell a story instead of direct-response advertising, this is ideal if you sell a single product or service.
Here’s a carousel ad from Love Found who decided to get creative and tell a mini-story with a clever call-to-action at the end:
Prospects are more likely to engage with adverts that tell a story with the secondarily goal of getting you to spend money, over direct-response.
- Understand that you don’t have a lot of room
While larger in size than normal adverts, the typical carousel ad segment will only give you 90 characters of text and each picture is 600×600 pixels in size, that’s not a lot of room for fancy marketing copy. You should avoid jargon as much as possible, limit each sub-carousel image to 25 characters of text with each description having a limit of 30 characters.
Don’t over do it with words as prospects will have to press the ‘see more’ of your ad hindering its message.
- Products should be relevant to audience needs
Like all other ad units, you can only target a single audience with Facebook carousel ads. Don’t mix men’s and women’s clothing in a single carousel ad, nor should you cross promote categories unless the audience you’re targeting has shown that they are interested in both.
Base your carousel ads around your custom audiences. Setup a unique custom audience around each product range, and serve that audience the products they’ve viewed in the past.
Do carousel ads cost more money?
When setting up your first carousel ad on Facebook, you can select the follow bidding models:
- Pay per click
- Per conversion
- Per 1,000 impressions
Facebook carousel ads do not cost more money to run than other ads, the price you pay is completely dependant on the audience you target and how optimized your carousel ads are.
Summary
Carousel ads will be a great addition to any Facebook marketing strategy especially over Christmas. They do require a bit more creativity than your typical Facebook ad, so I suggest creating a few and running short tests to see which images and messages work best.
If you’re unsure on how to get started with carousel ads, stay tuned as in the next few weeks I’ll show you how to setup them up using Facebook.
Nick Bridges
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