HOW DO Facebook Collection Ads Stack Up to Carousel Ads IN 2022?
Social media is an ever-evolving platform. It is constantly changing, adding new products, even rebranding its name to META. Because of these changes, we often A/B test our strategies to ensure their effectiveness. In this most recent case study, we evaluated the effectiveness of Facebook Carousel ads vs. Collection ads.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FACEBOOK COLLECTION ADS AND CAROUSEL ADS?
A Carousel ad on Facebook is a sequence of images or videos scrolled from left to right. These ads help showcase several products or services to improve clicks and entice engagement. Because carousel ads can be visually appealing, they’re a very engaging way to promote New or Used cars. Collection ads are a bit more involved. The collection ad includes a cover image or video followed by three vehicle images in the Facebook News Feed. When someone taps on a collection ad, they see an Instant Experience—this is a full-screen landing page on your mobile device that drives engagement and nurtures interest and intent.
The main difference is Collection ads are meant for mobile devices, meaning you will miss out on desktop users; however, these ads present very well on Facebook, allowing you to showcase your inventory with more messaging.
Furthermore, carousel ads work on both desktop and mobile with the same experience.
Collection ads received a whopping 1,105 views whereas Carousel ads only received 221 landing page views.
Why did we test Facebook Collection Ads vs Carousel Ads?
In the past, we’ve debunked the myth that Carousel Ads are the best format for dealerships, and our goal now is to put our theory to the test once more. As you will see in the details below, the numbers speak for themselves. One of our main reasons for this belief is the high cost per click on Facebook ads for many reasons. Our goal was to identify why Collection ads cost less. We believe it’s due to the Instant Experience and overall better quality score.
Our gut and the extensive usage on mobile still gave us high hopes that Collection ads were still superior for Car dealers.
HOW WE TESTED FACEBOOK COLLECTION ADS AGAINST CAROUSEL ADS
- We used one client to test out used car ads during the same one-month period.
- We created two separate campaigns with separate but equal budgets and had the same goal of generating traffic to the website.
- Our social media strategist used the same creativity and description content for both ads.
- To ensure Facebook gave equal exposure, we used the same target audiences for both; these were in-Market Used Car shoppers.
Collection ads garnered 18% more sessions than the carousel, with 23% more new users and 21% more total users. The collection ad had a 16% lower bounce rate, with 5% higher pages per session, and an 8% higher average session duration.
The Results of our Facebook Collection Ad vs. Carousel Ad Test
Overall the Collection ads performed the best in almost all areas. So let’s dive into the data. First, we used Facebook Ads Manager to run and track the results of the ads.
With both campaigns using the same budget for the month, the Collection ads received over double the number of clicks of 636 vs. 316 the Carousel ads received.
The same is reflected in the Reach and Impressions. Again, the results were double for Collection.
Next, we can see that the cost per click (CPC) was again half that for Collections at $0.26 Per-click, and Carousel cost $0.49. So we can speculate that there are two possibilities for this outcome, which brings us to the last two pieces of data that we will look at from these campaigns: frequency and landing page views.
The number of landing page views had the most significant performance gap when comparing the two campaigns. Collections ads received a whopping 1,105 views, whereas Carousel only received 221 landing page views.
Then when we pair this with the Frequency, we can see that the Carousel ads had to be shown to the same person an average of 3.24 times before they would engage with the ad; however, the Collection ads only had to be seen 2.19 times before a shopper would engage.
This means the Collection ads are more engaging for shoppers in most circumstances. They prefer the multiple options of the Collection ad and its Instant Experience to the more straightforward Carousel ad with just the swipe right feature. After reviewing Google Analytics, it was determined that the collection ad garnered 18% more sessions than the carousel, with 23% more new users and 21% more total users. The collection ad had a 16% lower bounce rate, with 5% higher pages per session and an 8% higher average session duration than the carousel.
Another observation may be that most users are on a Mobile device, and Facebook prefers the Collection ads for this reason. Either way, the clear choice for Inventory ads will be the Collection ad.
Conclusion.
Collection ads seem to be the best choice given the data for Inventory ads at this time. In addition, the multiple options and Instant Experience allow shoppers more insight into your product offering and options to choose for navigating to your site. Our next step will be to test out goals for campaigns, evaluating the effectiveness for Service, Remarketing, and even New performance vs. Used.
Contact us if you would like to learn more about our Social Media Marketing for Dealerships or would like to talk about what you’re seeing with your campaigns.