Have you used Facebook's Carousel Ads? The option was introduced last year and has quickly becoming one of the more popular formats on the platform - Nanigans, reporting in their Global Facebook Advertising Benchmark Report, showed that spend on Carousel Ads increased the most of any ad product offered by Facebook in Q3 2015.
A big part of that growth is, logically, audience response to the offering - Facebook reports that Carousel Ads are driving 30-50% lower cost-per-conversion, and 20-30% lower cost-per-click, than single-image link ads. Those are great performance stats and it's clear that the Facebook audience is receptive to the multiple-image style of the format - if you haven't considered Carousel Ads in your marketing, maybe it's worth factoring them in. To help with this, Facebook has today provided some examples of how brands are using Carousel Ads in different ways which might help widen your thinking on how your brand could do the same.
Multiple Options
In a new post, written by Gina Lauber, an Account Manager at Facebook, the Social Network highlights the various ways brands are showcasing their products and services through carousel ads. That's right, I deliberately noted 'services' - Lauber points out that even brands who don't sell a physical product can use Carousel Ads to showcase their business, using health coaching business Precision Nutrition as an example.
"Precision Nutrition created a carousel link ad to share three articles from their website on healthy eating for athletes. The ad led to 6,000 new newsletter signups, and compared to single-image link ads, the carousel format delivered a 50% decrease in cost per lead and a 50% increase in clickthrough rate."
This is an interesting use case, and highlights something of an untapped opportunity for Carousel Ads. For instance, let's say you publish a lot of content on your blog - you could consider using Carousel Ads to showcase your top stories of the week to promote them to a wider audience.
Lauber also highlights how brands can use the format to tell the story behind their products. Using Pura Vida Bracelets as an example, Lauber shows how the company has used lifestyle shots, highlighting life at the beach, to help promote their products.
Within two months of running these ads, Pura Vida orders increased by 4X, underlining the benefits of communicating your brand story to your consumers, and the power of those visual elements in connecting with consumers.
One Products, Various Elements
Lauber notes that a common response she gets in regards to Carousel Ads is that they're not of much use for brands who only sell one product. But then again, maybe they are - Lauber shows how shoe company Tieks has used Carousel Ads to showcase their products, with each image in the carousel highlighting a different element of their design and construction.
Along a similar line, Tyme Hair have used Carousel Ads to provide a step-by-step guide as to how their two-in-one curling iron and hair straightener works.
These are great, creative uses of the format, thinking outside the box to utilize the capacity of the carousel option in a different way. It's similar to how brands have used Instagram's functionality to run interactive games on that platform - by thinking through the way the option is built, and how that information is presented to your audience, it's possible to come up with entirely new ways of utilizing the available ad formats that are engaging and creative - and can generate a heap of attention as a result.
The Customer Impact
Another example highlighted by Lauber is Project Repat. The company transforms old t-shirts into quilts, and they've used the Carousel format to showcase the customer side of the equation - images of customers receiving and using their new products.
"The ad not only drove great results for Project Repat, but also, once people started to see they could be featured in a Project Repat ad on Facebook, the company received hundreds more photos from customers."
User-generated content can be an extremely valuable tool, connecting the brand to the lives of their customers and their applicability in their day-to-day lives and boosting the spread of brand messaging by generating shares amongst the social networks of those who are featured. This is a great way to use Carousel Ads and, again, may inspire other businesses to consider how they can create similar connections and share their brand message in new ways.
As noted, Carousel Ads are seeing great response - in some ways they can provide a similar experience to video, in that they enable brands to showcase multiple images within one ad. While Carousel Ads were originally designed to showcase multiple products in one hit, it's interesting how brands are using the format in different ways and working with the available offerings to create new brand experiences on the platform.
Even if you don't end up using them for your brand, seeing examples like this will no doubt get you thinking and re-considering their potential fit.