What You Need To Know About Instant Experience Ads
by Tristan Ramirez •
As the digital climate continues to evolve and change, businesses have come to realize the importance of the landing page experience. Not just in terms of aesthetic, rather in terms of performance. The time it takes a page to load and whether or not it is optimized for conversions are just a few of the newfound factors that businesses are having to tackle head-on in the digital world. Not only is page performance critical to the success of one’s marketing efforts, but the customer journey must be taken into account as well. Finding the balance between faster, shorter, and less while still providing enough information and value is a challenge in itself.
Fortunately for marketers and businesses alike, our friends over at Facebook have recognized this challenge and have worked to provide advertisers an in-house solution to complement the ongoing efforts to improve conversion rates for our businesses and clients. Two years ago, Facebook introduced the Canvas ad format – an ad format that brought a full-screen experience to mobile users without ever having to leave the app. This was good news for both Facebook and advertisers because it kept users from leaving Facebook and allowed advertisers to utilize new forms of advertising that loaded nearly instantaneously.
Over the years, templates tailored for specific purposes have been introduced to make design easy and implementation quick for advertisers. Fast forward to today and the ad type formerly known as Canvas is now Instant Experience. A better representation of what the ad format has grown to become. Perhaps the most important development of the ad type is the speed at which these ‘mini landing pages’ load at. According to Facebook, an Instant Experience ad can load up to 15X faster than standard mobile websites.
As mentioned above, the ad type offers a number of different templates that are designed for various business objectives to make it easy for advertisers to design and implement an effective ad. These include the following:
- Instant Storefront
- Instant Lookbook
- Instant Customer Acquisition
- Instant Storytelling
- Instant Form (newest addition)
So what exactly is new about Instant Experience ads?
Instant Forms
Instant forms allow businesses and advertisers to deploy a customized lead form within the app to collect information from users for various purposes. This is an effective tactic for email capture, lead generation, and list building for businesses advertising on Facebook.
New Pixel Capabilities
Facebook has given advertisers increased granularity when looking at the performance of the Instant Experience ad type. The Facebook Pixel is automatically installed on the Instant Experience ad, allowing for effective retargeting and a better understanding of users engaging with the Instant Experience Ad. Perhaps even more exciting, however, is the new capability of advertisers to implement 3rd party tracking pixels on the Instant Experience ads to gather insights via third party analytics tools like Google Analytics. This is particularly important in order to understand the customer journey of a prospect making a purchase through this channel.
All in all, the Instant Experience ads open the doors for advertisers to build more unique, customized content in order to better differentiate themselves within Facebook. The possibilities are near endless when it comes to design and build structure of Instant Experience ads. According to Facebook, the use of this ad type has more than doubled over the past year. This is a big area of opportunity for brands to build engaging content and market more effectively in Q4 and beyond. With that being said, get ahead of the curve while you can and implement this ad type as a test in your digital strategy – it has the potential to pay off big especially for new and emerging brands.