How To Create Effective Facebook Carousel Ads For Your Business in 2022

What Are Facebook Carousels, and How Can They Benefit Your Business Strategy?

Similar to how you would create a carousel post for Instagram, Facebook Carousel Ads allow you to include multiple slides within your ad. With a combination of up to ten photos together, anyone who comes across your ad can simply swipe from one screen to the next with ease. Not only are these user-friendly, but significantly more people can also see them. Research done around these ads has also proven that carousel links can drive cost conversions down by between 30 to 50%. This means that you can efficiently reach more people at less of a cost. These ads also receive approximately 12% higher click-through rates than alternative Facebook ads. It’s clear to see that there are many reasons why Facebook Carousels should be utilized, and these are only a few of them. Since, as a business, expanding your potential business reach and establishing relationships with individuals worldwide are priorities, Facebook Carousel ads are an excellent means of achieving both. But what are the best practices for setting these ads up? Here’s what you need to know.

Setting Up Facebook Carousel Ads: Research Beforehand

Not only is it essential to understand what specific content to create, copy to write and keywords to include, but there is also the discussion of ensuring low-friction conversions. Because people respond better to being asked to sign up for something instead of flat out asking them to buy things, how you approach your ad will have just as large of an impact as the other previously mentioned aspects. If your end goal is to sell more products, perhaps approaching your ads as highlights for several smaller purchases rather than one big one will be wise. The language and approach to your ad will play a significant role. Keyword research is one of the most essential steps to ensuring that your content will be well received and optimized correctly. To learn more, you can read our full guide to keyword research.

Aside from researching for the content you will include within your Facebook Carousel ads, there is also research done to find your target audience. This will align with your business’s key demographic; however, here’s what you need to establish if you’re just starting out.

Firstly, figure out the correct location in accordance with where you’ll want to find your customer, their age range, interests, and more. Although it’s not always specific to gender, if your key demographic is women aged 45 to 60, you can input this data when setting up your ads. Facebook can also go very in-depth with the boxes you can check off because this platform is essentially one big pool of data that it learns about its users. Whether intentionally specified on their profiles or they are interests that have indirectly been mentioned or observed by Facebook, there is endless information at your fingertips to work with. From where people went to school to where they have worked, their relationship status, etc., you can get very specific with who you want your ads to target so that they fall in front of the right people.

This is what’s referred to as “Detailed Interest Targeting” and allows you to use information that people have put on their profiles, such as their likes and interests, apps they use, etc. With all of this information readily available, you can laser-focus people’s interests, which is far more effective than taking a broad approach. Since trying to focus your ad on something like “photography” will quickly become rather expensive, try a more refined approach.

When you’re implementing all of the specifics for a targeted search, you can also see Facebook’s “lookalike audiences.” This essentially presents you with Facebook users that fit within a similar category as your current demographic. Similarly, the idea of retargeting with Facebook ads allows you to reach customers that are already familiar with your business or brand. Again, drawing from the knowledge you already have is just as important as drawing from the audience you already have. You will need to install Facebook Pixel to do either of these things.

Setting Up Facebook Carousel Ads: Knowing the Sizes

Before you can go ahead and proceed with creating a Facebook Carousel Ad, you will need to establish the proper dimensions. For example, the image sizes you can use would have a 1:1 aspect ratio or a 1080 x 1080-pixel size with a maximum of 30 MB. Facebook video ad sizes, on the other hand, can be up to 4 GB and a whopping 241 minutes long. Now, of course, that’s very extreme, and you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who would watch a video ad for anywhere near that long. Ideally, short and sweet videos will be the best for capturing the attention of your viewers. Videos that are less than 30 seconds will loop about three times, but anything over the 30-second mark won’t automatically loop.

Now that you know about the dimensions you’re working with and how to establish a more targeted approach, here’s how you would create a carousel for Facebook.

Step-By-Step: Creating a Facebook Carousel Post

Whether you would like this representation to come through a model of that age group, someone from your business, or even a customer (if you have permission to do so), there are endless ways to approach the design.

Aside from the image you use, it’s also important to ensure that your typography is clear. For instance, bright ad colours will allow your images to stand out, and how you word things will also have an impact. It’s best to approach your text image as an extension of your copy. This means that it’s best to ensure it’s easy to read and evokes curiosity from your audience. Perhaps you will ask a question within your text that others might already be asking. How does your product, service or brand answer the call to that question? Get your audience curious about you and your company, so they feel drawn in to swipe through your ad.

This brings us to our next step: successfully writing the copy for your Facebook ad.

Step Two: Writing Effective Copy

The next thing that users will likely look at if they’re intrigued enough by your images, is the copy that accompanies it. For Facebook Ads, there is a 40-character headline limit and 125- a character body limit. With that said, you can still effectively include every piece of information you might need within this amount of space. Start by having an attention-grabbing headline, followed by the top benefits of your product or service that your audience might need to know right away. Immediately present your readers with what they need to know and follow it up with something that will be desirable for them. Whether this comes through the offer of a free trial, discount, etc., present something within the text that will make your ad feel more appealing. And lastly, of course, ensure you include a CTA. The Call To Action will be the final step and is incredibly important to let your viewers know how they can receive the discount or offer or what steps they need to take next.

Whether you’d like to improve your website traffic, page likes, etc., there are different options that you can choose from here so that your ad can align with your goals. Your next step will be to add a name to your campaign and set a budget. This will prompt you to either choose an ongoing budget or a daily one. You can get as specific as you’d like here by setting a schedule of when you would like to run the ad. Then, determine your target audience. There are many options in this section to choose from that will allow you to pinpoint your desired demographic.

Once you have filled out all of this necessary information, you will be redirected to upload the images or videos and copy we spoke about earlier. From here, you can go ahead and publish your campaign.

Aside from monitoring how well your ads are doing to bring traffic to your site, it’s also essential to see how they’re doing on Facebook itself. The most important aspect to track through Facebook is the CTR (Click-Through Rate), as this will determine the number of clicks you’ll receive on the link and how much you’ll be paying per click. Facebook Carousel Ads that have a lower CTR will eventually become more expensive. Alternatively, ones with a higher one will generate as many clicks as will fit within the budget you have set for your ad. This data is vital to keep track of, as it will allow you to see which ads pique the highest interest of your users. At this time, once you have more information, you can understand what works and what doesn’t for your given audience. If you feel like one ad can be improved based on this information, ensure that you create a whole new ad instead of editing an existing one, as this will not provide you with precise data moving forward.