Facebook recently launched a new (Newsfeed Only) ad type called “Carousel Ads" (previously known as, "Multi-Product Ads”). As the name suggests, these ads allow you to promote up to 5 products or services with unique destination URLs in one ad.
Although their intended purpose is to showcase different products or services, who’s to say that we can’t get creative with their use? As long as your campaign objective is set as “Clicks to Website” or “Website Conversions”, you can use the additional images and URLs in a variety of ways. Below are just a few that we are excited to start testing.
1. Show Multiple Images For The Same Product
Rather than displaying a single image of several product, why not show multiple images of the same product?
If you’re selling a clothing item -- let’s say a tie -- you could show: a medium-range shot of the tie, a close-up shot of the tie’s pattern or design, and 2-3 images of someone actually wearing the tie. By the time they’ve scrolled through your ad, a potential customer has a very clear picture of what this tie is all about.
While clothing is a logical place to start, this same concept applies to countless products. Whether you’re selling cars, sofas, hotel rooms, food, or virtually any other product, you now have five times as much real estate to show it off.
2. Use Them Like Sitelinks for Facebook
If you’re familiar with Google ad extensions, you’ll understand the value of Sitelink extensions. Just like Google’s Sitelink extensions, Facebook Carousel ads are a great way to show more details about your product, service or company, and provide direct links to that information on your site.
For example, if you are promoting an event, you could use a Carousel ad to provide relevant details about the event in order to remove friction from the buying process. Think of all the information that a potential customer would need before making a decision about whether or not to attend: ticket prices, event schedule, travel information, etc. (see example below). If you were to use the standard, single image ad, you would have to either rely on the customer to find these details on your site, or run separate ads for each topic and hope that they reach the right person at the right time. Now, you can create separate images and URLs for each topic and run them all in one ad, removing barriers and frustration.
The same applies for virtually any business: Think about what information your potential customers need before they can take your desired action, and provide them with links to all of those details in one ad.
3. Advertise Your Multiple Locations
If you’re a restaurant, retail store, car dealership, or any business looking to generate foot traffic in multiple locations, this can be a very powerful tool.
As an example, let’s say you’re a restaurant owner looking to increase lunchtime sales at each of your 3 locations. You can use the ad text to quickly highlight your offer (“Joe’s Has 10 Lunch Specials Under $8! Visit Our 3 Convenient Locations!), and use your images to show off your locations.
Each image could include a photo of the outside of your restaurant, with the supporting text sharing info on the location (Downtown, Main Street, East Side, etc.). You could schedule these ads to run only during the morning, to plant the lunchtime seed with people in your target market.
Regardless of what you use these Carousel ads for, they should provide solid hypotheses to test in your copy, creative and strategies across all networks. For example, if you’re selling pizzas and you see an image of a delicious pizza in the oven is clicked on more than when it’s shown on the dinner table or mid-bite, perhaps that says that your audience is looking for “hot, fresh out of the oven pizza”. Test that copy in your next ad test! Great, now I’m hungry.
