This is a new reality: social media is the place to meet your customers. As of today, over 4.4 billion people, which is about 56.8 percent of the global human population, use social media worldwide. Hence, over 65 percent of marketers turn to social media advertising to reach prospective customers.
Social media advertisement is a major upgrade to older forms of promotions. With a single campaign, businesses can reach out to billions of customers. It also helps to provide more targeted and personalized advert placements than you can’t get with regular print or TV ads. Another impressive feature is that you do not even have to go searching; the ads bring the products to you, on your sofa.
No surprise, the rewards are tremendous. Social media advertising helps businesses attain significant growth in lesser time: more leads, brand awareness, engagements, and sales.
Of all the social media platforms we have, Facebook is the most popular with about 2.8 billion active users. It is also quite effective for marketing: it accounts for over 80 percent of US' social referral to e-commerce sites.
To get the best advertising experience, it provides several formats for businesses and individuals to run their promotions - image and video ads, collection, carousel, and poll adverts, among several others. Marketers often choose between the several options to run a campaign that best fits their audience.
In this post, you will get to know everything on how Facebook Carousel ads can help increase your ad conversions rate. So, keep reading!
Table of Content
- What Are Facebook Carousel Ads & How To Create Them?
- Features Of Facebook Carousel Ads
- Recommended Specifications For A Typical Facebook Carousel Ad
- How Facebook Carousel Ads Help To Improve Your Business?
- Five Strategies To Increase ROI On Facebook Carousel Ads Spend
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
What Are Facebook Carousel Ads & How To Create Them?
A carousel ad is a type of advertising format on social media that maximizes an advert space by combining multiple images or videos into a single ad. Think of it as a slider containing several slides that display images and video information.
More specifically, Facebook Carousel ads are a type of advert feature that Facebook offers. It allows you to display a mix of images and videos in a single ad. On each advert post, users may add a headline, description, unique link to a landing page, and a call to action.
To create a Facebook Carousel ads campaign, you may access the feature from your Facebook page or through your ads manager account. Follow the steps below to create a carousel advert campaign from your Facebook page.
Step 1: From your Facebook page, click the “Promote” button in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page.
Step 2: Select “Get More Website Visitors.”
Step 3: Choose “Create New Ad.”
Step 4: Fill out the accurate information in the appropriate fields.
Step 5: Write a description for your ad.
Step 6: Click “Select Media.”
Step 7: Click “Upload” to add a new image from your computer. Then, click on “Select.”
Step 8: Click the Save button in the top right corner of the Ad Creative section.
Step 9: Input a Headline, CTA, and Link to each of the cards
Step 10: Select a target audience. To do that, click on “Create New” under the “Audience” section. Then, choose “Save Audience.”
Step 11: Click Promote.
Features Of Facebook Carousel Ads
The carousel format is one of many other Facebook advert formats. There are the image and video types, plus, it provides the instant experience and collection formats. Each type, uniquely, has its features and unique application. Here are some of the features of the Facebook Carousel ads format.
Multiple Cards For Displaying Ads
Like every carousel ads format, Facebook Carousel ads allow you to display two to ten advert posts in a single slideshow. Your audience then slides from one side to the other to navigate through the advertisement cards.
To get the best out of this feature, you should arrange the posts from the most engaging - which should appear first - to the least engaging ad.
Combine Text, Image, & Video Posts
The Facebook Carousel ads format provides two to ten slots for users to insert their advertisement materials. In other words, you may create engaging videos and images and apply them in whatever mix that brings the best out of your advert campaign.
For each of the cards, you may also include a headline, a caption, a call-to-action, and a link to a unique landing page.
CTA & Caption For Each Card
Image Source: Instapage
The call-to-action is an important section of any advert placement. It leads people from the advertisement to the business hosting the ads campaign.
The feature also allows a unique headline for each advert card. Usually, the caption appears at the top of the advert material while the link and CTA stay just below the card.
Unique Links To Different Landing Pages
The ability to include a unique link to each card on your slide is another significant feature of Facebook's Carousel ads format.
Having this advert format makes the carousel format suitable for promoting several products of a manufacturer or multiple features of an item or service.
Recommended Specifications For A Typical Facebook Carousel Ad
Generally, carousel ads have a special orientation depending on the platform. For Facebook, images or videos must meet specific conditions to be suited for Facebook Carousel ads. Failure to adhere to the requirements may result in poor engagements, or worse, you may not be allowed to make the post.
Facebook recommends that your advert items meet the following specifications:
Image
- Size: at least 1080 × 1080 pixels
- Recommended Aspect ratio: 1:1
- Image file size: Maximum of 30MB
- Recommended format: JPG and PNG
Text
- Text: 125 characters
- Headline: 40 characters
- Link description: 20 characters
Video
- Recommended Resolution: 1080 × 1080
- Aspect Ratio: 1:1
- Video file size: 4G
- Video length: Maximum of 240 minutes
- Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
How Facebook Carousel Ads Help To Improve Your Business?
Facebook Carousel ad format can help you improve your business in several ways. Its unique features - like the multiple pictures, CTAs, and headlines, among others - help provide customers with more detail about the product, service, or the business generally. Below are other advantages that they provide.
Showcase More In-depth Product Or Service Review
Businesses can use the carousel ads format to explore several possibilities with a single campaign. They can use videos or images to tell a story about their brand and what they stand for.
Also, they can provide a more in-depth review of their products or services by displaying necessary info on several cards. That also means that users can display up to ten different products or services, each with a description that reveals the specifications of that item. It could also be that you can display several product variants or run a comparison between two or more products.
Altogether, it gives you a better chance to optimize your promotion to your customers’ needs.
Efficiently Maximize Ads Space
Since Facebook’s carousel displays up to ten cards in one advert space, you can simply showcase multiple posts in one campaign. That is more space-sensitive compared to running ten separate ads with the image or video advertisement formats. In other words, you can run campaigns without compromising between providing comprehensive detail and space requirements.
Also, this format helps you to be more creative; you can do a variety of things with your cards. You can build social proof, sharing how other people are using your brand. You may also use the space to explain a process, share your blog content, or create a split panoramic image, among several other possibilities.
Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the extent to which your people are familiar with your product or service. It builds a lasting impression of a business in the customers’ minds. That, in turn, can increase the retention rate and overall sales.
Like in the image above, the carousel video and image formats, you can effectively provide compelling and comprehensive content that attracts customers to your business. For example, using high-resolution images, Sheraton displayed its knack for providing luxury hospitality services and its presence in several locations across the country. That ability to make catchy presentations also helps customers get a good hold of what you stand for as a business.
Get Higher Conversions
As much as the carousel format of advertising helps to improve brand awareness, it is also a competent strategy for increasing the leads conversion rate on your campaigns. According to Cisco’s predictions, 82 percent of the global internet traffic will come from videos by 2022. Likewise, image posts on Facebook get up to 2.3 times more engagements than those with text alone.
As carousel ads uniquely allow you to combine several multimedia, you can almost be certain of reasonable returns on ads spent. Even so, you can get better results by targeting a specific audience, those to whom your product or service is most relevant.
Better Returns On Ads Spends
According to reports from Statista, global spending on ads is expected to increase by 12 percent by the end of 2021, from $578 billion in 2020. Using the carousel format helps to make every dollar count.
It ensures that the businesses have lesser ad click spends since they can host several videos and images at a time, creating more effective, compelling content. That is in sharp contrast to the video-only or image-only promotions. Also, the strategy provides higher revenue per amount spent on promotions as it improves the advert conversion rate.
Five Strategies To Increase ROI On Facebook Carousel Ads Spend
Although the Facebook Carousel ads format may be an effective advertisement strategy, it requires adequate skill and planning to get the best results. The general rule is to think of the audience first, know your user selling proposition, and create content that feeds their curiosity.
Building on that foundation, this block provides tips that ensure you get the best out of your Facebook Carousel ads campaign.
Use Compelling Images & Videos
Research shows that humans now have a shorter attention span than goldfish. Over the last few years, the figures dropped from 12 percent to eight percent now. You must keep that in mind when creating content for your advert campaign.
What makes a compelling advertisement campaign? It should evoke interest, attention, and admiration in an irresistible way. To achieve that, marketers and business owners must keep the following tips in mind:
Tips For Creating Image Advertisements
- Show people your product using only high-quality images
- Avoid excessive texts on images; keep it simple
- Create different images for varying personas
- Use numbers to get your point
- Employ color psychology
Tips For Creating Compelling Video Advertisement
- Make the first few seconds count by ensuring the beginning of the video is catchy
- Sell your brand identity through your videos; express what makes your business excellent
- Keep the video short; 30 seconds or less.
- Give the audience a reason to buy that product. How will the product or service benefit them?
- Add a call-to-action at the end of the video
Arrange The Cards In Order Of Engagement
When advertising with the carousel ads format, the performance of the first card goes a long way in influencing engagements on posts. Hence, it must be catchy enough if you want to get a good number of impressions.
Usually, there is an option that allows Facebook to rearrange the card based on the level of engagement. However, the feature may not be suitable if you are trying to tell a story with your campaign.
Attach A Link To Each Card
One of the main objectives of running social media ads is to get more conversions. To achieve that, adverts should lead people to a landing page so that interested customers can make a purchase. Facebook Carousel can link up to ten landing pages with a single ad campaign.
E-commerce businesses, for example, can link viewers directly to the purchase page. That reduces the steps in the purchase process.
Tell A Story Through Your Images & Videos
Brand storytelling is a method of using a narrative to connect your business to customers. It is a structured approach to communicating your company values, services, and products. You can also use it to educate the viewers, especially when you want to provide data insights. That makes up the entire concept of data visualization.
Besides that, brand storytelling is an effective way of connecting with your customers. Rather than just highlighting facts, using stories and illustrations helps your message resonate with your audience’s experiences. More so, it helps you as a content creator to relate complex phenomena in a way that varying categories of customers can relate with.
The takeaway here is that storytelling is a creative way to get your audience’s attention, increase engagement and brand awareness, and, very likely, conversion.
Here are some tips to consider when making your creative content:
- Gather info and plan content that fits
- Confidently present your brand’s information to your audience
- Keep the illustration simple, but make it interesting
- Be consistent with your message
Include A Compelling CTA On Every Card
Most likely, you have seen phrases like “Add to Cart,” “Read More,” and “Buy Now” at the end of posts or adverts. These short instructions are called Call to Action.
A call to action is a short prompt that directs customers to take some specific action. It appeals to the viewers and invites them to respond to the advert.
Using compelling CTAs is a unique strategy to drive engagement on your posts. In most cases, people embed a link that takes customers to a landing page.
To create an excellent CTA for your post, you should consider the following tips:
- They must be recognizable and easy to spot. Using catchy color schemes and icons can help you achieve that.
- Make the calls to action short. Keep it a simple sentence or a phrase.
- The CTA should be compelling and give clear instructions.
- They should contain a link to a unique landing page.
Wrapping Up
According to the 2020 fourth-quarter Facebook Inc. report, over 200 million businesses employ the social network for their daily business operations. More interestingly, about 74 percent of people use Facebook platforms to discover brands or products online.
Hair Gallery is one of many other businesses that used Facebook Carousel ads [alongside other advert types]. In 2019, it ran a campaign to build awareness and lead generation, culminating in major sales. At the end of the one-week-long promotion, Hair Gallery recorded three times return on ad spend and 78 percent in orders.
Generally, statistics show that Facebook has the audience you need. Hair Gallery's story also shows that you can beat your sales target, close more sales, and reduce your ad spend with the right strategy.
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