Loading...

10 Types of Facebook Ads You Should Know.

Running a successful ad campaign on Facebook can be a challenge.

There are hundreds of targeting options based on location, demographics, behavior, interests, and connections, as well as at least eight standard ad formats in various combinations.

And getting the right message across can be challenging if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.

Facebook currently has over 2.9 billion monthly active users. Understandably, the world’s most popular social media site represents a gigantic opportunity for advertisers. The flip side is that you run a considerable risk of losing your message in the crowd if it’s not carefully calibrated to reach the right audience.

Facebook advertising consists of a sequence of advertisements or ad sets designed to achieve one or multiple goals. Those goals may include driving sales, increasing traffic to your store or website, creating awareness about an issue of public interest, or boosting the number of app installs.

Depending on your objectives, a Facebook marketing campaign calls for a series of ads. There are different types of Facebook ads, some of which are compatible with other Meta platforms like Facebook Messenger and Instagram. These include:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Instant experiences
  • Polls
  • Carousels
  • Slideshows
  • Collections
  • Leads
  • Dynamic ads
  • Stories

Let’s explore these ad examples and their unique advantages in depth.

Images

Image ads are some of the easiest, yet most engaging, ad formats on the Facebook canvas.

Images can tell an entire story without a word of ad copy. They grab attention, are easily relatable, and leave lasting impressions on the hearts and minds of the audience.

Images can make your ad stand out in a sea of clutter and rival distractions on a Facebook page.

A single image often speaks louder about your business positioning and goals than pages full of text, facts, and statistics. They are most effective in achieving the following campaign objectives:

  • Building brand awareness
  • Increasing reach, traffic, and engagement
  • Improving lead generation and conversions
  • Driving product catalog sales

With dozens of professional ad makers and free photo galleries available online, image ads are often the easiest part of designing a Facebook campaign.

Alternatively, you can hire a graphic designer on Ndiwano.com to create images that align with your brand and voice. Just ensure all images are high-resolution images.

Videos

Digital video viewership is growing fast.

Research suggests over 3 billion internet users streamed or downloaded videos at least once a month in 2020. That figure is expected to reach 3.5 billion by 2023.

These figures alone prove video content is an unmissable marketing strategy for any business.

Facebook video ads are a great way to build trust among your audience while increasing brand and product recognition.

The combination of images, sounds, and motions is perfect when your objective is:

  • Capturing attention quickly and retargeting custom audiences
  • Creating a brand story, highlighting product features, and differentiating from competitors
  • Conveying a concise message and call to action (CTA)

Get more views by uploading your videos directly to Facebook instead of linking them from another site or platform. Facebook prefers unique content, and its algorithm is likely to promote native videos more than resourced ones.

If you don’t have much experience on the subject, creating videos is easy using Facebook’s video creation tools. It has all the information you need on video quality, aspect ratio, and more.

Instant experiences

This format bypasses the standard click-link ad to create a full-screen, mobile-optimized, immersive experience that plays out right on the Facebook app.

Instant Experience combines multiple ad formats into one designed to capture the viewer’s complete attention.

Your audience can watch a combination of images, videos, and carousels amplified with interactive elements and augmented reality. It lets people click, swipe, scroll, tilt to pan, tap, and explore lifestyle images—all in one ad.

Although this may sound complicated, Facebook offers optimized templates to help you create engaging experiences to connect with audiences in the most engaging manner imaginable.

This category of Facebook advertising drives post engagement and page likes and can help you:

  • Give audiences a broader perspective of your brand
  • Acquire new customers
  • Boost mobile shopping
  • Get access to Facebook analytics and ad reach

Use Instant Experience to reach your most ambitious social media marketing objectives.

Polls

People are generally thrilled when someone wants to know their opinion. This is where the business benefits of polls come into play.

Although not a standard advertising format, Facebook advertising polls are unbeatable for making an instant connection with your target audience. They stand out from the news feed visually, so people are more likely to notice and respond to them.

Polls are an appealing campaign tool because they require minimal effort to elicit a consumer response. Voting stimulates engagement and can be a subtle way to gain wider exposure.

Asking Facebook users about their opinion lets them know you care about their views. You can use polls creatively to target people and achieve multiple ad objectives, including:

  • Getting product feedback
  • Conducting market research on new products or service ideas
  • Knowing customer preferences
  • Building brand rapport

Most of all, polls can be a fun way to engage with your audiences.

Carousels

Carousels give you access to increased creative space by letting you add up to 10 videos or images in a single ad, each with its own link.

They come with a deck-of-cards feel and are considered the ideal format for promoting product catalogs.

They are also great for telling stories that develop with each card. Carousels increase brand exposure by drawing out the length of time your consumer engages with an ad and multiplying the chances that they click a relevant link.

Facebook carousel ads can help you fulfill some of the following ad objectives:

  • Product catalog sales
  • Lead generation and conversions
  • Brand awareness and reach
  • App install promotion

Much of the appeal advertisers have with Facebook carousel ads is due to the increased interaction they allow. They also work exceedingly well in campaigns seeking to generate awareness about relevant topics by allowing advertisers to reinforce their message across multiple cards.


Slideshows

Collections are mobile-only and let you showcase multiple products to your target audience at once.

They offer a virtual window-shopping experience, letting customers browse through multiple product options and categories effortlessly.

As the name suggests, they let you show off an entire product collection and help shorten the distance between discovery and purchase. They are highly customizable and especially effective if you have a large product lineup.

A collection ad features a primary image or video with three or more underlying images of related products or features. They pack a smooth and immersive experience that is immensely successful for large online stores and e-commerce platforms.

Used effectively, collection ads can be your primary conversion tool. They also serve a host of other ad objectives, including:

  • Brand awareness
  • Reach
  • Engagement
  • Traffic

Collection ads work best when you intend to have people discover your brand, browse through your products, and make a fast purchase.

Leads

This is the next evolutionary step of the traditional lead generation method.

The traditional method involved users redirecting to a landing page and filling out the information in a form. Disinterested customers would avoid this step altogether.

Facebook lead ads solve this problem by allowing users to stay on the platform while filling in their details. By cutting out the necessity of an external landing page, Facebook leads increase conversion by never compromising the user experience.

Because of its unique format, Facebook leads offer advertisers several key advantages, such as:

  • Simple data collection easily integrated with your CRM
  • Targeted segmentation across location, demographics, and interests
  • Mobile optimization that lets users complete the form hassle free
  • Native functionality that avoids redirection to an external landing page

Lead ads come with an auto-fill feature where customer information is pre-loaded onto the form, saving time and reducing friction.

Dynamic ads

Dynamic ads are a format of hyper-targeted ads that lets you zero in on a narrow spectrum of audiences directly from your Facebook page.

And let you engage segmented users with your entire product range without the need to create hundreds of individual ads for each product or audience category.

The ideal scenario for using dynamic ads is to target users who have visited your website but left without making a purchase. Once you’ve selected the products or services you’d like to promote, Facebook generates images from your portfolio of ad creatives to create a series of dynamic ads. It will then display these ads to every potential customer who visited your website.

Dynamic ads have several unbeatable features, including:

  • Automatically updated in real time without manual intervention
  • Highly customized, showing the most relevant products to audiences with purchase intent
  • Designed for cross-device targeting, working across desktop and mobile devices

Dynamic ads help familiarize audiences with your brand, generating more leads that could increase conversions.

Stories

Stories leverage Facebook’s full arsenal of advertising tools, including targeting, remarketing, and measurement options.

They are highly customizable, full-screen ads that have been shown to delight users and help stimulate a lasting interest in a brand.

Facebook stories are personalized to each viewer and consist of full-screen immersive experiences that combine segments of video, image, and carousel ads. Viewers can tap an option to “Keep Watching” or swipe up to reach the advertiser’s landing page.

Stories combine multiple campaign objectives in one engaging format, and can boost brand awareness, reach, conversions, video views, app installs, and lead generation. Other advantages of stories include:

  • Location. Stories appear at the top of the app, making them the first thing users see on their Facebook feed.
  • Creativity. Stories let you play with a wide range of creative inputs—filters, effects, stickers, and more—to create compelling narratives.
  • Tracking and analysis. You’ll have the full advantage of Facebook tracking and analytics to help judge performance, change strategy, and improve targeting.

This incredible ad format is steadily growing in popularity on Facebook as more and more brands use this ad strategy to lead their Facebook ad campaigns.

Set up your Facebook Ad campaign with expert help

The sheer variety of options Facebook provides calls for expert hands to design and manage a successful campaign on the platform.

Ndiwano.com is your one-stop location to find the best talent for this purpose. Whether you’re a one-person startup or represent a Fortune 100 company, we have a pool of professionals and agencies that will take your business places.

And if you’re one of those independent professionals or agencies, consider signing up with us. We have many companies that want your help setting up Facebook ads.

Leave your comment