Creating Facebook Carousel Ads

If you’d like to promote your business in a fun and engaging way then Facebook carousel ads are the way to do it. According to studies conducted by Digiday, Facebook carousel ads can drive up to 10 times more traffic to your website compared to static sponsored posts on Facebook.

Lovoo, a dating platform that used Facebook to advertise their business discovered that they had a 72% CTR when they used carousel ads than when they used static mobile app advertisements.

There’s no doubt that Facebook carousel ads are effective, but how can you effectively use them to promote your brand?

What Are Carousel Ads

On Facebook, the carousel format allows advertisers on both Instagram and Facebook to show up to 5 images and feature calls to action, links, and headlines. Carousel ads appear on both desktop and mobile.

How To Use Facebook Carousel Ads

What makes Facebook’s carousel ads so ideal for promoting most businesses is that they’re versatile and can be used in various ways. Most businesses use carousel ads to advertise their products however that’ not all you can do with them.

You can use them to tell a story that shows your brand’s uniqueness.

Function #1: Highlighting Products

Carousel ads can be used to highlight special aspects of a product. For instance, Tieks is a ballet shoe company that used Facebook carousel ads to showcase the various aspects of one of their shoes.

Each carousel ad focused on a particular aspect of the shoe. They also used a headline to elaborate further on the highlighted aspect of the shoe.

Function #2: Show How To Use A Product

Carousels can also be used to show your audience how they should use your products. Tyme Hair is a company that deals in hair products that used Carousel ads to show how their curling iron should be used. Each step in the curling process corresponded with a box in the carousel.

Function #3: Tell A Story

One of the most effective ways of promoting your brand is by telling a story. Unfortunately, this tactic is under-utilized. Project Repat is a company that makes quilts from old t-shirts. They used a carousel ad format to tell a story of how you can use their services to keep memories.

Function #4: Product Tour

Carousel ads are perfect for giving a product tour of an item you’re offering. In fact, that’s exactly what Deezer, a music app did. They used Facebook carousel ads to give people an in-app experience even before they had it installed on their phones.

Each carousel box expounded on the features of Deezer, so that people would know what to expect.

Function #5: Article Sharing

Finally, you can use carousel ads to promote your articles. When Precision Nutrition, an online nutrition coaching company used carousel ads to promote their articles, they received 6,000 newsletter signups.

Creating Carousel Ads

To create a carousel ad, go to your business page and click on the “Promote” button. You can find it on the top right corner of your page.

On the drop down menu, click on Promote your Website

A modal ad window will then open up.

Click on the “+” sign that’s in the images section to choose how many images you need added to your carousel. You can add up to 5 images.

Use the “headline” to give the carousel cards an eye-catching explanation. Finally, fill out the duration, audience and budget fields.

To take your carousel ad live, hit the promote field.

Note: If you feel that your images are too big and you need to crop them, you can do that directly on Facebook by clicking on the “Reposition image” then use the cropping tool to highlight the part of the image you want to show.

Launching The Ad Manager

In order to launch the carousel ad campaign from Facebook’s ad manager follow these steps:

• Create Ad
• Send People To Your Website
• Increase conversions on your website
• Get app installs

Creating The Ad

From Facebook Ad Manager, click on Create Advert

A window will pop up and provide you with a long list of objectives which you should choose from

Next, you’ll be required to select an audience and a budget

Finally, you’ll be asked to choose your ad creative. It’s at this step you can create your carousel ad. Click on multiple images in one ad to create your carousel.

You can launch your ad as soon as you upload your creative.

Executing The Perfect Carousel Ad

Carousel ads appear on a user’s news feed which has plenty of content. To get your carousel ad to stand out, you need to ensure that the first image in the carousel series captures the user’s attention. In fact, that first image can be a make or break.

Facebook’s Recommendations

If you’re not sure about how to design your carousel ads, you should refer to Facebook as they have design recommendations made specifically for carousel ads.

Below is a summary of some of those recommendations:

• Image size should be 600x 600px
• Text should contain not more than 90 characters
• Image ration should be 1:1
• Link description should have a maximum of 20 characters
• Headline should have 40 characters

In addition, the headline space should be used for the following only:

• Call to action
• Product names
• Product benefits
• Product price
• Percentage discount (if any)

Some advertisers opt to break up one long image into multiple cards so as to tell a story to their audience with each scroll.

Here’s how to break up one long image into multiple cards:

First, you’ll need to determine how many carousel cards you want. You can have up to 5 carousel cards

Next, you’ll need to design an image that has the right dimensions. Since a card image should be 600 x 600px wide, if you choose to have 5 carousel cards, the original image you plan to break apart should be 3000 x 600px minimum.

Here’s the fun part, you don’t need to use any fancy software for cropping though that’s an option too. Simply upload your entire image then use Facebook’s crop tool to crop at regular intervals.

When breaking up an image into multiple cards, you should ensure that you don’t tick Facebook’s option to automatically show the best-performing image first.

Below are a few examples of great performing carousel ads:

Straight Outta Compton was a biographical movie that used carousel ads to inform audiences that it would be releasing on VUDU.

To promote the most recent installment of Tomb Raider, Xbox used a large panoramic shot which was broken into multiple cards to tell the game’s story. The very last card in the carousel was a purchase link.

Tesco showed a step by step recipe using carousel ads. The very last card contained a link to a blog.

Are you thinking of advertising on Facebook and not sure where to begin? We have years of experience promoting businesses using Facebook and will happily consult with you on what’s the best way to proceed forward for your business.

Our social media package includes:

• Page management
• Social page creation
• Offsite monitoring
• Graphics creation
• Ad creation

Get in touch for more a more detailed breakdown.

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