Social media is brimming with advertising potential, but it’s usually hard to have any idea about what type of ad will work best for your campaign. When it comes to drive campaign goals and maximizing engagement, Carousel Ads and Canvas Ads are two popular yet opposite formats. But which one of these will be better for your strategy?
Getting to Know Carousel Ads
Carousel Ads are an easy ad format through which you can feature multiple images or videos within a single ad unit. Within each “card” of the carousel, you can have your own headline, description, and call-to-action link. Carousel Ads are ideal for businesses looking to share a story, feature several products, or highlight features step-by-step.
One of the main advantages of Carousel Ads is that they can drive engagement. With interactive navigation and multiple images, users are encouraged to swipe through content at their own discretion, creating additional touchpoints with your brand. For product-based campaigns, every carousel card is a mini-display ad and is ideal for online shopping or showcasing a product catalogue.
In building effective Carousel Ads, simplicity and design are crucial. Add engaging images that are brand-aligned but curiosity-arousing. Make sure that each card totals up to an overall story if narrative or to various value propositions if product showcasing. Diversification between the cards, both on Facebook and Instagram, can keep users engaged for longer.
Finding Canvas Ads
Canvas Ads, also known as “Instant Experience Ads,” take mobile immersion to a new level. These high-performing, full-screen ads load immediately upon tap, with no interruptions and a multimedia-enriched experience. By integrating videos, images, carousels, and text into a single interactive ad unit, they allow brands to deliver a micro-landing page within the app itself.
What is so revolutionary about Canvas Ads is that they offer unparalleled capability to deliver brand immersion. They offer almost unlimited creative potential to engage an audience and tell a more complete story. Built from the ground up for mobile consumers, Canvas Ads load fast, feel native, and facilitate deep interaction. Perfect for narrative marketing campaigns, product launches, or intricate product demonstrations, they can reproduce navigating a site without pushing users away from the application.
To maximize the use of Canvas Ads, invest in high-quality assets and begin with a fresh, mobile-led design. Leverage strong visuals and let interactivity lead the call to action. Keep in mind that such ads are longer to produce, so organize your creative strategy well ahead of their production.
Head-to-Head Comparison
The choice between Carousel Ads and Canvas Ads depends mostly on your campaign objective. In terms of engagement metrics, Carousel Ads are more action-oriented and to the point. Every card is designed to elicit engagement from the users and therefore suitable for conversion campaigns. Canvas Ads excel at attention capture and storytelling in a more compelling way. They do well where brand awareness and user engagement with multimedia content matter most.
In terms of flexibility, Carousel Ads provide multi-payer customisation of individual cards to enable you to try out different calls to action and imagery. Canvas Ads, however, have a unifying creative canvas that may contain a number of different elements but tends to require more up-front investment in design.
In terms of user experience, Canvas Ads lead the pack with smooth and full-fledged interactive ads on mobile. For cost savings, Carousel Ads are more affordable and faster to use, and therefore a go-to for smaller, direct sales campaigns.
Which One Do You Use?
There’s a place and a time for both Carousel Ads and Canvas Ads in any proficient social media manager’s toolkit – PPC marketing services can help you decide when to use each. If you need instant engagement, product visibility in multiples, or cost-savings to the nth degree, Carousel Ads could be your go-to. But if you want to deliver a more immersive, mobile-first experience and have the resources to create rich visual content, Canvas Ads can take your brand further than anything else.
Mastering the inside scoop on these ad types makes your campaigns smart, not laborious. Pick the best option for your aim, and your next ad campaign might just elevate it to unprecedented heights.
