Dive Brief:
- According to marketing tech firm Kinetic Social, Facebook’s carousel ads are already outperforming other ad formats in clickthrough rate to advertiser’s websites.
- In fact, the carousel ads are driving ten times more traffic than other formats, though the increased clickthrough rate is relative at 1% compared to 0.1% for other ad formats.
- Facebook’s carousel ads are more dynamic and have multiple images that lead to a call-to-action with a link.
Dive Insight:
“Carousels are a major push for Facebook,” Don Mathis, CEO of Kinetic Social, explained to Digiday, adding that,“the pricing is competitive and the performances are stellar. But we don’t know if that continues forever, because it’s a new product, and they tend to get good adoption in the early days.”
Kinetic Social research found carousel ads get ten times the clickthrough rate compared to other Facebook ad formats at 1%, a figure that also bests most display ads such as mobile banner ads for retail marketers that get a 0.5% CTR. Marketers have been taking advantage of the carousel format on Facebook and Instagram.
VML reported an Instagram campaign for Wendy’s resulted in a 20 point increase in ad recall. Chad Martin, VML’s director of social and emerging media, said, “We can tell if they’re engaged heavily on Instagram and retarget on Facebook with carousel ads. The ads allow for more of a conversation than a quick flyby.”
Facebook has been actively testing new features, such as a dedicated shopping channel for retail marketers and a dedicated video channel to more directly compete with YouTube.
