What are Facebook Carousel Ads?No, they aren’t ads for carnival rides.
Almost a year after their release, we’re finally starting to see some noticeable increase in the use of Facebook’s carousel formatted ads. You may have seen these popping up in your News Feed more frequently.
Formerly called “multi-product” ads, these are some pretty nifty ad units that allow you to showcase multiple promotions, products, or events in the same ad space, and in a more dynamic way than a standard image/text ad. Of course, these ads also work beautifully on mobile, so it provides a great experience for the touch screen environment – can “swipe” to view each new message you provide. What’s most exciting about this for marketers is the fact that each of these individual messages can have their own image and URL or call to action. Although these messages can exist on their own, there are some creative ways to tie them all together and tell an amazing story with these ad units.
Do they work?
According to Facebook,when compared to single image ads, carousel ads actually drive down cost-per-conversion by up to 50% and cost-per-click by up to 30%! Of course, it’s always necessary to define your key success metrics and performance indicators before measuring your specific campaign successes, but we think those figures are pretty impressive.
When would you use them?
Arts organizations have great potential in the world of Facebook carousel ads. They can be used for both general brand awareness as well as direct response advertising, where conversions or purchases are the main goal. Here are four ways you might want to consider using these ad units:
Subscriptions: If you’re looking to acquire subscribing patrons, it’s likely that you’ll have multiple performances or events you’d like to showcase together to give your patrons a “feel” for what they can expect during your season – and – you want them to subscribe and see them all! Showcase one performance per tile in your carousel ads and tell a season story.
Multiple Performances (ex: categories by genre or series): Have a performance series coming up? Feature each of them in a themed sequence with Facebook carousel ads.
Multiple locations or dates within the same geographic location: For example, if you have multiple events happening in different (smaller) geographic areas on different dates, you can target each date and location of the showing as its own product in the carousel.
Multiple Calls to Action: This is great if your organization has different objectives for different offers. Want to combine a new patron acquisition offer with a fun piece of content that’s just for “learning more”, or maybe showcase an editorial review of your latest performance next to an ad with messaging for the performance itself? Carousel would work beautifully.
Overall, carousel ads can bring some more variety and excitement to the Facebook ads of “old” – and they’re a great way to showcase multiple products and offers,and test effective calls to action. Have you tried Facebook carousel ads yet? What did you think?