If you’re active on social media, you’ll already have seen a carousel ad, even if you’re not sure what it is. Particularly popular on Facebook and Instagram, carousel ads are a form of advertising that collates several images or videos into a single advertisement. If you’ve ever scrolled through your feed and come across a promoted advert that invites you to swipe left or right to check out a range of (usually) related products, then congratulations: that’s a carousel ad!

As a leading Facebook ad agency, we know how effective carousel ads can be for brands, particularly those with large product and service ranges. In this article, we will take a closer look at carousel ads and what they can do for your business:

Why Choose Carousel Ads?

The main reason to choose carousel ads over a single advert is to maximise exposure and messaging of your range of products and services. If you sell a wide variety of items, producing an individual advertisement for each of them will prove to be both costly and time-consuming, likely with little return on your investment overall. Even if one product or service sells better than expected, any gains you make are effectively eaten up with the promotion of the other items that didn’t do so well.

With a carousel ad, you cover multiple bases at once, at a fraction of the overall cost. You can present dozens of items, personalised choices to your audience’s interests, through a single advert, giving them the opportunity to browse through products and services that resonate best with them, making it more likely that they will make a purchase or submit an enquiry.

A Versatile Advertising Medium

While the most common use of carousel ads is to promote multiple products that resonate best with your audience (dynamic carousel ads), that’s only one of the options. You also get to fill each ‘slot’ of the carousel with whatever you want. That could be reviews from satisfied customers, it could be more shots of the same product (perhaps in close-up or from different angles), it could be technical specifications, multiple offers or, really, anything else you can think of. So long as the media you put into each ‘slot’ is sufficiently engaging, it will help to keep your target audience hooked and move them towards closing a sale or generating a lead.

Engaging Advertisements

Because they are more visually-arresting than static adverts which contain products or services the audience are already interested in, carousel ads stand a better chance of capturing the attention of your prospective customers. They offer instant gratification, as buyers can immediately get more information about the product without leaving their social media feed (or details of related products, depending on what kind of advert you’re running). By stopping them mid-scroll with an attention-grabbing carousel ad, you are more likely to encourage them to act.

Interactive and Informative

Even if a potential customer doesn’t click through to your website, just by flicking through the panels of your carousel ad, they are interacting with your brand who can be retargeted thereafter. They might not be ready to commit to a purchase right now, but they are becoming more aware of your product, expanding their knowledge base, and increasing their familiarity with your company and what it has to offer.

Whether you currently use carousel ads or not, if you are spending over £1000 pm on online advertising, let Disturb Digital make sure you are getting value for your money. Contact us to arrange a free consultation to see how we can help you, as well as a free, no-obligation quote for our services.