Facebook Carousel Ads Overview

Facebook has a number of different ad formats available, but one of the ones that I like quite a bit that I don’t think very many people take advantage of are carousel ads. So in this video, I wanted to focus on just carousel ads in Facebook. I want to talk about how you set them up, some of the different customization pieces, and then discuss some ways that you can use carousel ads to tell stories, to engage with your customers, and be a little bit more interactive than maybe some of the other formats on the platform.

We’re going to start off by being in a Facebook ads account, and I’m just going to run through the setup of a carousel ad. As you can see, I’ve already skipped through all of the other setup processes. I’ve already got an ad name for the sample carousel. I’ve already chosen the Facebook page and Instagram account, unchecked branded content that’s for a different video. I’ve even gone through the ad setup piece. So let’s go ahead and scroll down a little bit.

You can see here I’m going to create a new ad, and I’ve already chosen the ad format of the carousel. One thing I don’t want to skip over but do want to call out for this video is the creative source. For today, I’m only going to cover the manual upload option, where you can upload images or videos to your carousel ad.

I’m not going to use the catalog option, and I’m not going to run through it because usually, when you use that, you have a much better chance of being able to create a more dynamic and engaging carousel because you already have a number of different product shots in the mix. What I’m hoping to help with today is getting people who are a little bit stuck and don’t have as many ideas out of the rut. So utilizing a catalog is a little bit of a cheat for that.

There’s certainly a lot that you can do. And if you’re interested in customizing your catalog ads, whether it’s for a carousel or a single image, we do have a video that you can check out at the top of the screen right now. But for today, I’m only going to be talking about the manual upload option and what we can do with that. Now that’s done. Let’s jump into the meat of this setup and go down to the ad creative section.

Here’s where we’re going to customize the majority of our carousel ad. So the first alert you can see is that we need to add at least two cards to a carousel. If you only have one card, that’s just a single-image ad. So let’s start by adding our first card. Just come over here, click the Drop Down, and you can see there are a handful of options available for creating individual cards within a carousel.

You can create image cards, video cards. You can create a video, or you can add cards from previous ads. I’ll go through each of these just so you can see what each of the setups look like. Let’s start off by adding an image card. Now, because Joe and I don’t actually run any Facebook ads, our account got disabled.

So I’ve already filtered all the images here for the Instagram account. That way, we don’t have to blur any client images. But you can see up here in this top navigation, right next to my arrow, that you can find images from all sources that you’ve uploaded to the account, images that are recommended from the business itself, from the Instagram account, or from the Facebook page. Each of these sources is going to be just fine. They’re going to let you utilize any image available.

So for right now, I’m just going to click any of these images to get something in the mix. Once I clicked an image, now you can see I still have up to ten available that I could add. So I’m going to go ahead and add one more. Now we’ll just click continue. Now I have two cards out of ten, which you can see up here in the total count, and I need to review the errors in cards one and two because there’s no other information other than the image itself.

So to adjust the card, we need to come over here to the pencil. I’m going to scroll down just a little bit. And now you can see that we have a headline, a description, and a Website URL available. One of the key benefits of carousel ads is that you can actually have different headlines, descriptions, and Website URLs for each of the different cards within a carousel ad. More often than not, I see advertisers utilize the exact same headline and at least the Website URL for each of these cards, but that’s leaving a lot on the table.

There’s a lot of customization that you could put in here to make sure that you are being compelling with each of your cards and trying to make the message diversified so that if one message doesn’t resonate well, maybe one of the other ones will. I’m just going to add in some sample information here.

My headline now highlights that this is Joe from Paid Media Pros, and the website URL is for Joe’s videos. Don’t go to that URL. That’s not how we have our videos named on the channel. But you can at least see that there is a specific URL for that. If I wanted to, I could click Apply to all cards. But again, that leaves a lot of customization on the table.

You’ll notice I didn’t put in a description just yet because I did want to call this out. In the preview off to the right, you can see the entire headline Joe Martinez, Paid Media Pros. It gets cut off a little bit, but if I add in a description, you can see that the headline gets scooted up a little bit, and the description shows up below. But that doesn’t always happen in all placements.

Different placements around the Facebook and Instagram networks will show more of the description or more of the headline. In some places, you see only the description or only the headline. So make sure you’re always filling out all of the different copy areas because, depending on the placement, you may or may not see some of the text.

Now the second image we have down here in the second card, we need to resolve those errors as well. So we’ll just click the pencil and then fill in some more information. I’m going to click on the preview off to the right so you can see what this looks like. Now you can see the image of me. Speaking of SMX, you can see the headline reflects me. The description is about my videos, and the website URL, if it were real, would take you to my videos on the paid Media Pros channel.

So now we have two cards that are customized to speak specifically to each of us and still drive people to the YouTube channel the way we would want. So that’s all for images. Let’s go ahead and narrow this down a little bit, and then we’ll add our next card utilizing videos. Again, I had to narrow it down just to the page because I don’t want to have to blur out a bunch of stuff, but this is going to feel very similar to the images that we had.

We just need to click up to ten videos, which will still be quite a lot, but let’s just click this one and click continue. Again, we have to click the pencil to resolve any errors. We can’t edit the video just like you could for any other video here, but then we get to add the headline, description, and website URL. So I’ll go ahead and do that, and again I’ll advance the preview so you can see what it would look like.

And now we have a third card for a video that talks about the fact that Joe messes up sometimes. To be fair, I do too. But this is a video of Joe messing up, and then we call out the Bloopers, and then we have a Blooper-specific website URL.

Let’s create the next kind of card, which is going to be to create a video within Facebook. You’ll notice here that this is going to be the exact same builder that you can use when you create any video ad on Facebook. So I’m actually not going to go through a full setup here, not to mention.

All of these are going to have to be blurred-out images because it’s only populating the client image. But you can put together flexible templates, square templates, and vertical templates for this video that you can then utilize in your Carousel ad by simply combining and making a dynamic view of a lot of images that you already have uploaded to your account.

Once you create that video, you will still be able to update the headline, description, and final URL, just like you would for a regular video that you uploaded to the channel rather than created on the platform. For now, I’m going to click Cancel. Then the last type of card I’m a pretty big fan of if you already have a lot of great assets that you want to use in your account. So let’s come down to add cards, and let’s choose the last option here, which is going to be ad cards from previous ads.

Again, all of these need to be blurred out, which I apologize for, but each of these individual boxes is going to be an image ad or a card from a carousel ad that we’ve used in this account in the past. So rather than creating something from scratch, if you have a handful of single-image ads that you think would work really well as a carousel, all you need to do is come in here, click on a couple of those, and then you can click Confirm.

And then, each of those single-image ads will be added into your carousel as individual cards. The nice part is everything is already pre-populated. Again, we’re going to have to blur it out, but if I open the pencil next to this first ad, it’s already pulled in the image, the headline, the description, and the website URL being used for that single image ad and applied it to this carousel.

This is a super easy option if you already have pieces in your account that are set up in a way that you want them to be. For now, I’m just going to close this. The last piece I want to pay attention to in this card creation and selection box is how you can customize the order or get rid of a card that you’ve already added.

So let’s say we don’t actually want this fourth card. We just need to click the pencil, come down here to the bottom, click Remove, and now it’s out of the list. We still have the fifth card here. And to be quite honest, just for the sake of being able to edit this video and not have to blur stuff out, I’m also going to remove this one.

Now we’re back just to our paid Media Pros content. I’ve got the video creative in the third spot and two images in the first and second. Let’s say I wanted to change that order, and I wanted the video card to go first. All I would need to do is come up here to these six dots. You’ll see that my cursor changed to a little grabby hand. I just need to click and hold and that I can pull this image up and reorder into the first spot for this carousel.

Overall, it’s really easy to customize the order and adjust any of the different cards that you already have in place. Now let’s work through the remainder of the sections for carousel ads. First is that we can edit the placement. So let’s click on this. Now let’s just pick a placement. I’m just going to go with Instagram Feed because that’s the first one.

Here we can customize every portion that we want to of the video and image cards that we have in this carousel by simply changing the image, adjusting the thumbnail, adjusting the headline, or the destination. And that’s just for this video card. If I wanted to adjust it for this first image, I just need to click on that, and then I can change all of the different pieces here, could crop it, adjust the headline, so on and so forth.

I’m not going to show you all of the different levers you can pull here because we already have a video that shows how you can customize ads by placement. You can check that out at the top of the screen right now. But the biggest thing to remember is that when you edit your ads in this section, you’re only adjusting them for that one placement. For just the Instagram Feed that we clicked on earlier, your ads will look the same in every other placement around the Facebook network.

So let’s go ahead and click out of here. There are three carousel optimizations that are just checkboxes to utilize on Facebook. The first two are always going to be preselected for you, so you need to decide if you want to use them or not. First is automatically show the best performing cards first.

So if you’re on the Facebook or Instagram feed or on Instagram Stories, the carousel card that performs the best will be shown first. For all other placements, they’ll be shown in the order that you arrange them in here. Depending on what type of message you’re utilizing in your carousel ads, maybe this option is great for you. In this specific instance, it really doesn’t matter if the video or the two images come first, and between the two images, it doesn’t matter which one goes first.

So here, I might leave this box checked so that Facebook will dynamically show different cards first to see which performs best. But in some instances, it might matter what order I have things in because I’m trying to tell a specific story. We’ll get to an example of that in just a little bit. But if you do need your cards to always show in a specific order, you just need to uncheck this box, and then Facebook will always show your ads in the order that you have them listed up here in the Carousel cards section.

The second box is going to be to add a card at the end with your page profile picture. Now you’ll notice we have three cards selected. I’ve only created three. But if we go to the preview and I scroll over a little bit, you’ll see that the last card here is going to be the paid Media Pros logo, which is just the logo that you have uploaded to your page profile or the picture that you have uploaded to your page profile and then some additional text and landing page pieces down at the bottom.

In almost every instance, I leave this card at the end added to my carousel ads. I haven’t really run into an issue where it performs poorly or has really hurt performance, so I personally usually leave it on. But if you feel like it’s out of order with the story you’re trying to tell or just doesn’t feel right in the carousel itself, all you have to do is uncheck this box, and it’ll go away. But for right now, I do want to leave it on because there are some customizations you can make with it in a little bit.

The last carousel optimization is to add a map card showing your nearest stores. For this, you do have to have different business locations added. And you can see here that the map card will show information about your nearest stores, including a map, open hours, and directions. We don’t have a store. I work out of my house, so I’m not going to check that box. And the last two ways we can customize the carousel ad itself is to add in the primary text, which is going to be the introductory text, just like you would with a single image app.

So I’m just going to put in some placeholder information. And now you can see that populated above this first card that we have. And this text is always going to stay here. So as I rotate through the carousel cards, that introductory or primary text always stays in place, no matter which card I’m on.

And the last option we have down here is going to be to adjust the call to action. You can see here each of the buttons says Learn More. You can’t adjust that to any of the other button options in the account, but again, this will be the same for every card that you have. You can utilize No button, and then that’ll make it so you can see more of the headline and description, but it does remove one of the call to action pieces, which isn’t really my favorite. I’m probably going to leave this Learn More button on.

Now the last section I want to talk about in the builder before we get to any examples is going to be for the destination URL and tracking on your ads. So the first thing you can do is you can utilize either a website as your landing page or you can use a Facebook Instant experience for your carousel ads.

If you want to learn more about Facebook Instant experiences, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now. But for this example, I’m going to keep using the website. You’ll see here that the destination says tell us where to send people immediately after they click or tap the last carousel card. So this is going to mean for that brand image that we have at the last card.

So I’m just going to add our overall YouTube channel. Now people will be taken to the homepage of our YouTube channel if they click on that last carousel card. The last piece that I think is pretty cool is if you want to be able to track which cards people came to your site from, you can build a custom parameter that you can append to the end of your individual cards.

So right now, I’m on that last image card. I could add a parameter if I wanted to, where the parameter name is carousel card, and let’s say the value is brand image. Now, if anybody comes to my website by clicking on that last carousel card, I’ll know which one they came from. I just need to click apply for this, and you can see that that adjusted our SEE MORE URL to include that carousel card parameter.

Now you might be thinking, okay, that’s cool for the last card, but that doesn’t tell me anything about the other ones. Actually, it does. I just wanted to address it all at the same time. So if I scroll up and go back to these individual cards, and you’ll see that right below the website URL, I can build a URL parameter. I can do the exact same thing here, do carousel card and then add in the parameter value of Bloopers video. Then I would just need to click Apply.

And the same thing here we’ll see in the website URL. It now has carousel card of Bloopers video. So if anybody clicked on this specific carousel card for this Learn More Button, it will take them to our YouTube channel or, in the example, that you’d probably really want to use your own website, and we would know that they came via the Bloopers video card.

So not only can you customize all of the images and the text and everything that you have here, you can also track which source and which card was the most impactful at driving people to your website. As a really quick check-in, I know I didn’t discuss it while we were going through everything, but you can check out the Facebook Ads guide to see what the different specs are for carousel cards.

You can choose the placement to customize off to the right if you want, but then you can see here that there are design recommendations for your images, videos, the ratio you’ve got, all the text recommendations, and the tech requirements to make sure that your carousel cards fit in each individual space around the web.

Now, the last thing I want to do before I let you go is talk about a number of ideas you can use to make your carousel ads more customized and more engaging for your customers. Now, all of the ads that I’m going to show you in this next section, I took directly from the Facebook or Meta ads library because I wanted to utilize real world examples.

Each of these might not be exactly a perfect fit or address every single scenario, but hopefully, you can see what real advertisers are doing to take advantage of their carousel ads. The first thing you can do is simply to have a conversation. In the example that I showed, it really just said, these are Joe’s videos; these are Michelle’s videos. We have bloopers. But this advertiser is starting off by asking a question that might entice people to start clicking through the carousel cards to see what they have to offer. Feeling pressured to spend more money, and it says they’ve got a sale, all that good stuff. And then the headline down below says Pause, consider, act. If you go to the second card, you’ll see that it just says Pause. Then the third talks about how they have a better way.

And then the next couple of cards talk about consider. You can save cash by selling or trading in a spare camera kit. You can also browse used kits that cost 30% less. So there are a couple of ways that you can consider saving money, and then you can act by taking a break from the madness. You can get an instant quote, put more money towards your next purchase.

And then they’ve got the last card, which likely is customized and not that brand image because it utilizes the exact same creative message as this carousel, but still is reflective of the brand image that we could see in the demo that I just did. So overall, this starts with a question and then leads people down a specific thought journey.

I like to say this is like having a conversation because this might be the way that somebody talks to you. They ask you a question, they give you more information to consider, and then you get to act on what they said to you. Think about how you can utilize that for your customers. Maybe you can ask a question at the beginning, but it doesn’t have to be a question. But how can you lead them on a journey through each of the cards where each time they get more information or can take a neck step and get a fuller picture of what you’re trying to offer?

The next is pretty simple. It’s just showcasing products and services. This one’s a little bit shorter, but not every carousel ad has to have ten different cards. Some of the ones I’ll show you in a little bit well, but that’s beside the point here. This is a tire and auto center, and by the cards, you can tell exactly what they do. They help you with tires. They’ll give you an oil change, and they can change your batteries.

And that’s what they’ve got outlined here so that each of the different calls to action are to learn more and schedule your service. But then they do have headlines customized by each of the different cards. Might not be as specific as I would like, but you can showcase individual products on a card, use the next card to showcase a different product or service, then use the third, so on and so forth to continue highlighting all of the capabilities or products that your company has to offer.

You can also use carousel cards to highlight only one product or service. If you only do one thing and you’re really good at it, you can show it from a lot of different angles. I’m still in the car space because these were easier to find in the ad library. But you can see here that your electric vehicle may last forever, but the paint will not, so you need to get it protected.

Effectively, this entire carousel ad is just showing you different angles of the same car, how it’s being cleaned, how it’s being maintained, and that it looks really nice. And while this might not sell you on the idea that you need to get your car detailed and cleaned and have your paint protected, you can see how this would apply to any other company that sells really just one product or one service.

Show it from a lot of different angles, maybe highlight different pieces, and make sure that you’re showing that one product or service in the best light possible. One of the things I think is always really clever is if you can create a continuous scene regardless of the message itself. I do love when carousel cards easily blend from one to the other.

You can see here that even though the text is different and the section of the table is different, these three carousel cards make up one image of one wide table. So as people are scrolling through, they get more and more of the same scene. Rather than seeing different individual products or services, you can also showcase customer reviews.

I’ve seen customer reviews do really well on Facebook and Instagram, and a carousel ad is a good way for you to highlight a lot of different customer reviews all in the same space and be able to highlight different reasons why people enjoyed working with you. It can be either the fact that you had great service and you were fantastic people to deal with, or you just had great products overall, and people enjoyed the products that you had.

If you’ve got a number of good customer reviews, why not use them now? The next couple of ads are actually for the same company, the same product, but they’re highlighting it in a slightly different way. This is a workshop for 3D character artists, and it has six individual workshops within the entire course. Here you can see that they’re outlining the features. What is going to be in each of the different workshops?

You can start your career. You can get your foot in the studio door. You can level up your career, overcome your fear, expand your skill set, and learn about the newest tech. Each of these are different features within the workshops, and trying to explain what each one of them is about. Now you take the exact same course, and you try to frame it in the way of benefits instead.

Now we have all the exact same pieces. You can see that the art has changed a bit, but overall, this is the exact same course, just outlined differently. The benefits are highlighted in the creative itself. You learn how to get your foot in the studio door. You can overcome imposter syndrome, you can learn about the newest tech, you can carve out your road to success. You can learn what it’s like working at different studios and adapting to it.

And then, you can understand how meta-human tech changes character artists’ workflow. But again, these are the same course. Just one focuses a bit more from a features perspective, and the second creative focuses a little bit more from the benefits section. What you’re going to learn as opposed to what the course is.

Overall, there’s a ton of inspiration that’s out there. The easiest thing that I’ve seen is honestly go to Google and just type in Facebook Carousel Ads and go to the Images page. You can get a lot of different examples of the creatives that can be used because they’re all being pulled from inspiration posts for carousel ads. So if you find one that you like, just click on it, go to that post, and read through all the different examples that they have available.

The second option is to utilize the Meta or Facebook Ads library, which is what I did for this video today. Overall, this tool is pretty easy to use. That’s the image in the middle there. But if you have any questions about how to use the Facebook Ad library, as you can see on the far right, we have a video on the channel that will walk you through what this ad library does and how to use it to get the most returns from it. So if you’re interested in that, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now.

Now, overall, carousel ads are highly customizable, and they leave you a lot of room to create a compelling message to engage with your target audience on the Facebook and Instagram platform. I know single image ads and single video ads are really easy to use and easy to set up, but that doesn’t always mean that they’re best at conveying complex messages to your target audience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of how you can set up and customize your carousel ads and, ideally giving you a little bit of inspiration so you can start creating some new dynamic carousel ads in your own account. If you have any questions for us on Carousel ads or anything in the Paid Media space, feel free to leave us a note in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan