Socium Media
Dec 30, 2020 | Paid Social

A Guide To Facebook Ad Formats

Facebook ads are an important part of growing your business. You don’t have to be a Facebook expert to begin telling your story through various ad formats. Facebook’s versatile guided setup for ads makes it simple for you to create a combination of elements, from videos to photos. Below, we’ll guide you through the ad formats Facebook has to offer and how they can help you reach your audience on their everyday device. 

Facebook’s advertising algorithm is a complex system of signals and levers that allow the advertiser to reach its consumers. Among those signals is the inventory of ad formats. Facebook’s ad formats give you the customizations you need to drive your audience towards different objectives – whether that’s visiting your website or making a purchase. By utilizing multiple ad formats in your campaigns you’re giving Facebook more signals to optimize with and bid on. This is what we call “optimal liquidity.” 

It’s important to recognize that your objective can affect what placements your ad can appear and what formats are available to you. Familiarize yourself with the options at Facebook.com/Business. Here are the most common and important ads to run for your business:

Photo Ads

Commonly referred to in the advertising industry as “Static” ads, this format gives you an engaging, simple way to reach consumers through imagery and copy. By having a single focal point on your product and targeting users in the news feed, your photo ad will appear naturally among a users’ friends’ and family’s posts. To customize even further, you can use different aspect ratios across placements to ensure the image fits just right.

Video Ads

Showing off your product and brand through movement and sound can quickly capture the attention of consumers. Use these formats to tell your story and showcase the features and value propositions of your product. Similar to photo ads, you can customize aspect ratios here as well to create newsfeed videos as well as Story videos. With some objectives, you can become more advanced with your format – creating 360 videos, where users can move around within the video and discover all the angles. Follow best practices with video ads for optional results with no more than 15 seconds in duration and including your brand/product within the first 3 seconds to capture attention. Have only photos to work with? No worries! Facebook can take your images and create a slideshow which you can customize as well for a quick video ad format.

Carousel Ads

If you want to display more than one image or video, a carousel unit may be the ad type you’re looking for. Carousels give you more space to include up to 10 images or videos within a single ad type. Each asset can have its own link, allowing you to showcase various products and their specific product description pages. Carousel units can even link to your product feed to serve specific products that your consumers have added to their cart on your site, further incentivizing them to return and purchase.

Collection Ads

Collection formats bring a branded image or video to the forefront of your ad, four highlighted product images, and, once clicked into, brings an immersive experience to the consumer. A Collection Ad brings Facebook’s Instant Experience to use, creating a fullscreen page that categorizes your products by collections, color, and more. The custom experience grows customer intent and grows the opportunity to retarget users who have opened your Collection ads.

Explore and experiment with different ad formats on Facebook. With countless options at your disposal, you’ll begin to understand what works for your audiences, test further messages and formats for specific segments, and drive results. If you need inspiration for ad formats and types you can run, take a look at your competitors. By looking at the Facebook Ads Library, you can search for your competitors by their Facebook page name and see what units they are running with, what creatives are on specific placements, and even the copy/promotions they are running with.

To Sum It All Up

If you have questions about how you’d set up ad formats on Facebook and how they can grow your business, reach out to us here at Socium for more information. With our expertise in Facebook’s system, we can offer solutions to how to implement the right formats for your business, measure success, and build roadmaps for testing and learning.  

Kevin Johnson
Latest posts by Kevin Johnson (see all)