Carousel ads enable businesses to showcase three to ten products within a single ad unit on desktop or mobile. Each product will have its own image, description and click target.
Examples on how to use carousel ads.
To maximize the quality of your ads, we recommend that you follow Facebook's Ads Guide when uploading your creatives. Note that the recommended specifications for different ad units can change depending on your campaign's Objective.
Carousel ad optimization
Carousel ad optimization allows Facebook to test and choose the best set of products to be shown to your customers. You can add up to 10 products into your ad, and Facebook will choose the appropriate number of products to optimize the performance of the ad.
To enable this feature in Smartly.io, select Allow Facebook to optimize products and add up to 10 products to your ad.
Carousel ads in the Right Column placement
Carousel ads can also be placed in the Right Column placement. Please note that carousel ads in the Right Column are rendered slightly differently than in News Feed.
- Ads will showcase only the first two images.
- The headline is always replaced by the page name.
- No description is shown for the products.
- The "See more" link and message are shown below the headline.
Carousel ads in Facebook Stories
According to Facebook's developer documentation, carousel ads are currently not supported in the Facebook Stories placement via the Marketing API. Ads with this configuration will not deliver.
Setting up carousel ads for the Facebook Stories placement should be available via Ads Manager. See the Facebook Ads guide for more information.
Carousel ads for dynamic ads
When using carousel ads with dynamic ads, you don't select the number of cards that will show in the carousel. Instead, Facebook's recommendation algorithm will show as many cards as it considers best based on its own data.
Note: Facebook's algorithm chooses how many cards should be shown in the ad delivered to users. If the algorithm determines that only one product in the selected product set is relevant for users in the target audience, it is possible that Facebook will show a dynamic carousel ad as a link ad instead.
The ad type can change for example if Facebook considers some products in your chosen product set invalid. The risk of this happening thus increases the smaller the product set you are using for your dynamic ads.
As a workaround, we have noticed that adding a static card to the end of the carousel usually ensures that the ad will be shown as a carousel ad.
Using a map card in carousel ads
Carousel ads can include a map card that displays store locations that are close to the user. The creative uses the physical locations listed for the page and allows the user to get directions to the listed locations, as well as see the opening hours if they have been specified for the page. It is also possible to customize the position of the map card in the carousel.
This feature can be used for Conversions and Link Clicks Facebook objectives. The map card is not available for Automated Ads or dynamic ads, but it is possible to make Automated Ads to display maps in a similar fashion.
To get started, you'll have to specify locations for your page. You can specify a single location under the settings for a page or set up multiple locations in Business Manager.
How to set up a single location (facebook.com)
How to set up multiple locations (facebook.com)