Facebook carousel ads: The marketing strategy taking retailers by storm

What is a carousel ad?

Ever since their launch in 2014, Facebook carousel ads have been a hit with retailers. This is mainly due to the nature of the ads allowing them a little more space to be creative and stand out from the crowd on an already highly competitive advertising platform. Carousel adverts work by showing several product images or videos (up to 10 in on ad), which are available for users to browse using a swipe feature on mobile and clickable left and right arrows on desktop. They can click straight through to buy the product on your website. Other than the file size restrictions and other minor requirements from Facebook (there are the usual limitations to the number of characters in both the text and headline) Facebook carousel ads are an ideal way to showcase hero products, new lines and special offer, particularly in the fashion and jewellery market, where a picture really does speak a thousand words. Perhaps most importantly, many advertisers report significantly lower cost per conversion when using carousel ads when compared with single image link ads on Facebook, and this is something we frequently see with our own fashion and jewellery clients at Hit Search.

I own a fashion and/or jewellery brand – why should I be using Facebook carousel ads?

When it comes to Facebook advertising for retailers, here are some of the reasons why carousel ads are your new best friend:

• Room to show off. With so much available space in one advert, Facebook carousel ads give you tonnes of freedom when it comes to showing off exactly what your brand can offer your customers. Imagery is so important in the fashion and jewellery industry and this is the perfect way to show off your best assets – whether it be professional photos of your products, quirky videos to act as a hook or user generated content from an outreach or influencer marketing campaign.
• Opportunity to show a product in more detail. You might have a best-selling or brand-new product that you’d like to showcase in more detail to the right demographic – carousel ads allow you to use several images to do this. From showing different angles to the different functionality of the product, you can really draw people in with this useful series of swipe able images.
• You can highlight multiple offers. Got more than one offer on your products at the same time? Use a carousel to show the fantastic deals that you can offer to your customers, whether that’s 20% off site-wide or a flash sale of specific lines.
• You can tell your brand’s story. The series of images that are shown in a Facebook carousel ad can all be connected into a bigger picture or can include up to ten images that can tell the story of your brand. Carousel advertising encourages the user to interact with the images, so it’s the perfect opportunity to really get your brand’s messaging across.
• Increase clicks and conversions. Although restricted to a character limit, Facebook carousel ads allow for a CTA to accompany each image and link straight through to the product page, which is a sure-fire way to increase website visitors and encourage conversions. The variety of images included in a carousel ad also allow the customer to feel as if they are in control, only clicking through on products that specifically attract their attention.
• They’re highly cost-effective. Carousel ads, along with any Facebook or Instagram ads, can be targeted to an audience that meet your specific demographics, so you’re not spending money showing the ads to people that aren’t relevant to your brand. Along with a proven cost effectiveness when compared with other types of ads, you can also use Facebook’s features to enable your carousel ads to be generated by a specific catalogue feed of your products. This means that retailers don’t have to spend lots of time and resources manually creating the ads all of the time - Facebook pulls your chosen products from the feed and simplifies the process.
• Hyper-targeted for pushing people along the conversion funnel. One of the real benefits of catalogue ads using carousel features is that they provide really easy-to-use functionality for a highly segmented remarketing strategy. For instance, without needing to build out custom audience, using Facebooks event tracking functionality, you can remarket product-specific ads exclusively to people who have added a product to cart and not purchased. You can do this in a time-sensitive manner. For instance, only remarketing to people who have added to cart and not bought for a 3-day period. Likewise, for prospecting, whilst it is still possibly to build out custom audiences based on demographics, location and interests; catalogue ads in this format also provide built-in prospecting functionality to find consumers who have an increased propensity to take action.

Creating a carousel ad

Now that we’ve established that carousel ads are a high-performing tool for your marketing strategy, here’s a bit about how to begin creating your own, if you haven’t tried already.

• First things first, establish the objective and purpose of your campaign. That way, you’ll know exactly the audience that you want to target, to save your well thought out ad being shown to the wrong people.
• Select the desired format for your ad (carousel) and begin to create your content. You will be able to view a preview of your ad before it goes live which will then allow you to make any changes you feel necessary so that the ad really does your brand justice.

There’s no denying that carousel ads do a lot for your business at very little cost to you, meaning that they are an absolute no-brainer when it comes to stepping up your marketing activity, particularly if you are a jewellery, accessories or fashion retailer. Don’t get left behind!

If you’d like more information about how Hit Search can help your brand with carousel ads or any other paid media campaign, don’t hesitate to get in touch!