Facebook Instant Experience is a compelling way to tell a story in an immersive post-click experience. Instant Experience allows you to build full screen, interactive, native interactions without having to wait for web views to load. It provides unprecedented creative control on mobile, all built on Facebook’s optimized performance, insights, and targeting infrastructure. Instant Experience can include text, images, videos, and buttons. An integration of Lead Ad forms is expected for the future.
Best practices for Instant Experience ads
- Tell a story
Instant Experience ads that blend content and product tend to perform better than ads which just have a lot of products but no compelling narrative. Suggestions include featuring a collection or attributes of a product rather than simply a long list of products.
- Make your Instant Experience ads interactive
Immersive Instant Experience ads lets you do more than just have a single image or video, and lets you include horizontal scroll elements so people can explore more deeply. This enables people to engage with the product or attributes that resonate most with them.
- Experiment
Instant Experience is a new ad format and advertisers should explore innovative ways to use it and optimize performance.
How to create Instant Experience ads in Smartly.io?
These instructions cover creating Instant Experience ads in regular campaigns. For information on how to use Instant Experience ads in Automated Ads campaigns, see Instant Experience Templates for Automated Ads and Automated Instant Experiences using a product catalog.
To create an Instant Experience Ad in Smartly.io, either start creating a regular campaign, or add a creative to a regular campaign.
- In the Ad Creatives section, select Link post
- Under Link Destination, select Canvas
- To use an existing Instant Experience, select the Instant Experience from the dropdown menu. Any Instant Experiences that you've previously created in Business Manager's Page Publishing Tools should appear in the dropdown menu.
- To create a new Instant Experience, click the link on the right. You will be redirected to Facebook Publishing Tools for creating the Instant Experience. See How to create an Instant Experience? below for instructions.
How to create an Instant Experience?
Instant Experiences are created under the Publishing Tools section of your Facebook page. You can access Instant Experience creation through Smartly.io campaign creation.
Inside the Instant Experience builder, you can put together your Instant Experience from several elements. No coding skills are required, but you may want to work together with a graphic designer to design the experience.
You can save your Instant Experience as a draft and then send the preview to your mobile device from the Preview button.
Instant Experience ads with video
If you want to use a video as the entry point for the Instant Experience ad, set the ad type as Video, and copy the Instant Experience URL to the "Call-to-action link URL" field in the creative settings. The URL will then work as the link for the entire video post.
Currently, in campaign creation, we use a custom preview for mobile video ads, which does not yet take into account the Instant Experience URLs. This means that you will see the preview of this ad in the wrong format, but after creating the campaign you can see the correct Instant Experience preview by clicking on the ad name in the campaign view.
ℹ️ Note: The title for the ad is mandatory.
Metrics
Instant Experience ads metrics do not differ much from regular ad insights. You can get all the normal Facebook ad insights and a couple of metrics specific to Instant Experience.
However, for direct response purposes, there are fundamental differences. The Instant Experience itself is treated as a "destination", which it could be for branding purposes, but this is unintuitive for Direct Response advertisers. For example, Link Clicks and Website Clicks include the click to open the Instant Experience, and not the clicks from the Instant Experience to your website. To see more accurate metrics, use the metrics specific to Instant Experiences.
In Smartly.io, the following reporting metrics are available for Instant Experiences:
- Instant Experience Clicks to Open
- Instant Experience Clicks to Start
- Instant Experience Outbound Clicks
- Instant Experience Average View Percentage
- Instant Experience Average View Time
Metrics for Immersive Instant Experience are not yet fully integrated into regular ads insights on campaign view.
How can I preview my Instant Experience ad?
Previewing any Instant Experience ad can be done with the following workaround:
- Go to the Instant Experience ad URL e.g. on your mobile web browser and like the post (you can't see the Instant Experience ad yet)
- Open the Facebook app on your mobile phone and go to your profile
- Swipe the tiles below your profile picture to the left
- Tap Activity Log
- Click on the Instant Experience ad post you recently liked
FAQ
Can I use Instant Experiences created in Facebook Business Manager when building campaigns in Smartly.io?
Yes, you can. There are two different ways of doing this, depending on the campaign type you are using:
- When using Automated Ads
- You can use existing Instant Experiences by adding links to them in your feed. For detailed instructions, see Instant Experience ads in Automated Ads campaigns.
- When creating a regular campaign
- Any Instant Experience created directly in the Page Publishing Tools should appear in the dropdown menu for Instant Experiences.
Are there any limits on the amount of text in images inside Instant Experience ads?
No, the limits ("20% text rule") only apply to the actual ad images. You can use any amount of text in the images inside an Instant Experience ad.
I have built an Instant Experience ad in Power Editor and I have different links to different websites inside it. Do I need to add the UTM parameters to each of the links manually, or will Smartly.io add the click tags to all of the links?
We will add the UTM parameters just like in other ad formats.
Can I use UTM tags inside the Instant Experience?
Yes, Smartly.io UTM tags will work inside the Instant Experience like with any other ad type.
Why does my Facebook preview keep loading indefinitely, or the preview in the Facebook app fails with an error?
Facebook will generate previews for Instant Experiences only if the ad and the campaign are active. If either the campaign or the ad is paused, you will not be able to preview the Instant Experience.
Why am I getting an error when trying to preview an Instant Experience in the campaign editor?
While there may be different reasons, one of the less obvious ones may be issues with the Image Template when using a feed. If rendering the template for one of the feed items fails, the whole preview will fail as well.
We recommend checking that all the items in the feed have data in the fields that are used by the Image or Video Template. If they do, but errors during preview still persists, reach out to our support for assistance.