Facebook Collection Ads

Key Takeaways

Collection ads are probably the least utilized ad format on meta ads. At least in my experience, they are. And there's not necessarily a great reason for that. While single image video and carousel ads are super easy to set up, collection ads only take just a little bit more work at the beginning and they can be really attractive to potential customers. So, in this video, I want to walk through what collection ads are and show you how you can set them up and customize them for any account that you work on. I first want to go over what collection ads look like so you can understand what we're going to be building when you get into the platform. We're just going to be in Facebook's help article because it's going to be the easiest way to see it. So, if I scroll down just a little bit over here on the right, you can see what it's going to look like. A collection ad consists of a image or video up here at the top that is followed by three smaller images that either are reflective of your product or the different services that you're trying to offer. So this is effectively what that's going to look like. Obviously it's not quite the same as a single image or video which takes up the entire creative area. But down here below it's a little bit different than a carousel because all of the images that you could see here are already showing. And rather than swiping through them, you would then just click more to see more that's available. One big difference between collection ads and the other types of ad formats is that whenever a user clicks on a collection ad, they will automatically be taken to an instant experience. These are going to be required by Facebook for a collection ad, they can eventually find their way to your website, but they first have to visit an instant experience. Now, if you're not familiar with what an instant experience is, it's a full screen landing page that is intended to drive engagement and nurture interest and intent with your users. Effectively, they're like a mini landing page that you can customize with either links to your products, images, videos, and different texts as well as different calls to action that should load more quickly and be highly mobile friendly that will then engage further with your customers. Now, although the video is a little bit old, we likely need to do a new one. If you want to learn more about instant experiences, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now. While they are required for collection ads, I will not be going through creating an instant experience in this video. Now, just to make sure we get a few other of the texts and design recommendations out of the way. So, images, videos, all those things, same file types, the ratios for a collection ad can be 1 1:1 or 9 by6. If you upload an image or a video that is a different ratio, either 16 by9 or 4x5, they will be supported, but they might be masked to a 1 one. So, just keep an eye out for that. We'll go through the text in a little bit, but before things get truncated, you've got about 125 characters of primary text, 40 characters of headlines. Down here at the bottom, technical requirements. Again, instant experience is required. Got your max file sizes for images and videos depending on what you want to use. Now, the next thing I want to cover are going to be the objectives and placements that you can show up. Collection ads can be used in five of the different types of campaign objectives. The only one not available here is app, but you can use collections for awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, and sales. And then down below, you can see the placement options available for collection ads. There's a handful here. And while this might look like a lot, it's actually not all of the placements. If we head back into the previous help article, I'm going to scroll up a little bit here and you can get a preview for your collection ad in each of these different placements. But if I go to, I don't know, a single image ad, and then I come over to the placements list that we would want to preview. Now, there's a ton more. We even have to scroll down to see all of them. So, collection ads are going to be mobile only. So, that's going to change some locations that you can show up, but also they're narrowed down to only the specific placements that Facebook wants to show them. So, if you're going in and reviewing placements later on, just know collection ads have a limited run of the network. Okay, with all of that out of the way, let's go through and start creating some collection ads in one of our campaigns here. I'm going to create two different versions because there are different experiences you can have depending on whether you are an e-commerce or a lead generation company and your setup will look different either way. So the first example I want to walk through is for e-commerce companies because I think for the most part collection ads are used by people who are trying to show off and sell individual products. So for that let's go into our sales campaign and I just need to get to a point where I can create a new ad for it. So I'm going to skip ahead to that and now we can start putting our ad together. So Facebook has already decided that for a catalog I'm going to use a carousel ad. I'm actually going to switch that. So if we scroll down here the ad setup we're going to click collection. And now you'll notice that the ad preview entirely went away. That's because we don't have an instant experience built yet. And one other thing I want you to keep in mind, if you scroll down here, you'll notice in the add creative portion, there's not actually anything for us to do. We can customize the images, and we'll look at that here in a minute, but there's not an immediate spot where it says upload images, upload videos, that sort of thing. So, just be aware of that. So, let's scroll back up. Like I said, the first thing we have to do is create an instant experience. We don't have any in this account, so I'm going to click create new. And then, since this is meant to be a sales example for e-commerce, I'm just going to click storefront. Click next. And as I mentioned, we're not going to go through the instant experience building process. But this is what that would be. You're going to be prompted immediately to choose your catalog and then choose from your different product sets. For some reason, Facebook right now is not letting me choose a different product set in this instant experience. Typically, it does let you do that, but right now I'm not able to. You would then fill out all of the rest of your instant experience requirements. But the only thing you need to know for the purpose of this video in this moment is that the product set and your product catalog are going to dictate what the creative is for your collection ad. So, make sure whichever instant experience you use promotes the products that you want to use in your collection ad and doesn't have lots of additional products added in there, or else you're going to start showing products that you're not intending to in the collection ad. For now, I'm going to go ahead and click done. I didn't cover it, but we had to upload an image otherwise it was going to throw an error. So, yes, this image is terrible. This is not what you should use here, but you can customize the header image or video to whatever you want. Once you have your instant experience set, most everything else is pretty much taken care of. So, here you can see we've got the cover image or video. From here, I can crop this image if I want to, which definitely probably makes sense considering that everything is going to be a terrible ratio. It's like we talked about earlier. The image is probably going to be masked to a 1:1 even though the original horizontal image that I uploaded the 1.91 to1 or 16x9 ratio was accepted probably be masked to a 1:1 anyway. So at least if I do it this way I get to choose what that image looks like. And although this means nothing to the ad as a whole probably means that things are a little bit cleaner. The next piece you get to choose is which products are going to be featured. You can start off with Facebook's suggested dynamically selected feature, meaning that it will pick the top four products and have those showing up down here below. These are going to be those additional cards. And if you want Facebook to just choose products from your feed for you, you don't have anything that you're trying to specifically highlight, that's great. You can run with a dynamic option. But if you're trying to focus on specific ones or create an entire aesthetic with your collection ad, you can customize the images. You'll then just click the button again. And I'm not going to scroll through this because we'll have to blur everything out. But effectively, these are going to be all of the different products that are showing up in your feed. So, whatever you've uploaded to Facebook with your feed or that you're importing through Shopify, everything will show up here based on the product set that you chose. You can just click the button on the four that you want to use and then they'll populate at the top. For now, let's just go ahead and stick with dynamic. After that, you'll be able to include your primary text, which again has about 125 characters before it gets truncated. And then your headline is required to be able to complete and publish it. And we can go ahead and say that we'll just put in a short headline here. And again, that has about 45 characters before it gets truncated. Once you're finished with that, you come down here, turn on any of the advantage plus creative enhancements, do any of those additional features. All of the tracking is going to work pretty much the exact same way it does for every other creative. You then be able to publish it, see all the different metrics that you want to see just the same way you would for every other Facebook ad format. Now, let's talk about what it would look like for a lead generation company or somebody not trying to promote products that are uploaded to Facebook through a product feed. Same thing. I just need to get to a point where I'm creating an ad for this awareness campaign because we can use collection ads for awareness campaigns. So, let's skip ahead to that. And now we can start to create our collection ad for lead generation or just awareness in general. Got everything switched over to the paid media pros Facebook page. So come down to ad setup. And again, we'll click collection here. And just like with the last one, we're going to be warned that there's no instant experience. But again, down here at the bottom, you'll still see the primary text and headline, which will operate the same as it did in the last one. But now there's literally nothing you can do under ad creative. And that is again because all of your ad creative is going to be dependent on what you put in your instant experience. So if we come up here to create new, then for a lead generation experience, you will need to use either the customer acquisition or custom instant experience. Storefront, digital circular, and lookbook all require you to use a product feed. So if you're trying to promote something that's, you know, not in a product feed, you're going to need to use a different format of instant experience. For now, I'm just going to use the customer acquisition template. We'll click next. Again, we're not going to go through all of this. You can check out the other video or a new one that might be coming sometime soon. But the biggest thing to know is that you will have the image or video that you can add up here at the top. You'll have the different text options that you can have available here. You can have carousel images down here. So, uploading different images in that space. And then all the different button text because this is a template that already exists. So, here you could scroll through all the different images. won't let me do it now. But this is effectively what we would do for the instant experience for customer acquisition. I go ahead and click done. And now you can see up here we have the instant experience. It's already been built. But when I scroll down into add creative, you'll probably notice that these look really familiar. This was the image that was the header image even in the instant experience. And then all of these images down here below are the ones that were part of that carousel that was included. There are no additional images that are uploaded here, but all of them that were in the instant experience are included. So, what that means is that if you want to have an image that is in your ad, you have to have it in the instant experience as well. You'll then be able to customize which ones you want in the feed. As you can see here, I can click each of these four. That's because there were four by default. But if I would have uploaded 20 in that instant experience, I could choose the top four that I want to use here, and those would be the ones that show in the lower bar down below my header image. Just like with the last option, you can crop the header image to be whatever space you want, but again, remember that 1 one or 9x6 is probably what's going to show up more often. You'd then add in your primary text and headline just like the other ones and have all of your tracking in place just the way you need it. So overall, collection ads are kind of a cross between a single image or video and a carousel ad, but they also have that kind of interstitial instant experience included in them. So it kind of functions like a lead genen ad, but then doesn't totally do it. So these are definitely a unique version within the Facebook platform. The biggest takeaway is that your instant experience dictates a ton of what's happening in the ad itself. Whether it's the services-based business that we just looked at where all of the images you select are uploaded into the ad creative itself or if it's more of an e-commerce focus and everything is heavily rellyant on your product feed. Which product sets you use in the instant experience and then how those manifest in the creative. Just remember that your collection ad and your instant experience are heavily tied together and one will absolutely impact the performance of the other. Hopefully, this overview of collection ads has gotten you maybe excited about trying to test out this format for yourself, no matter what your business type is. But if you have any additional questions about collection ads or anything else in the meta experience, let us know in the comments below. Thanks for watching our video. We really appreciate it. If you liked it, give us a thumbs up below. If you really liked it, maybe think about subscribing to the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops. If you really really liked it, you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf, as well as looking at the super thanks button.