Facebook Canvas: An Immersive & Expressive Experience

Facebook Canvas as of today, is a new feature that has been rolled out to all Facebook advertisers.

Simply put, now advertisers can bring life to their stories within the mobile device.

When a user clicks on a Facebook Canvas ad the media will open up a full-screen on the mobile device which will keep the user inside of Facebook rather than forcing them to wait for a mobile website to load.

If you are wondering where to find Facebook Canvas, you can find this feature on your Facebook Fan Page under publishing tools as shown in the image below.

Now you might be wondering what this means to you as an advertiser. Well that all depends on what type of business you are promoting and how you decide to use Facebook canvas.

First off think of Facebook Canvas as a mini website built within Facebook with faster load speeds than if you were to drive traffic off of Facebook to a website. You can create a Canvas ad and add things like animations, carousels, product catalogs, tilt-to-view images, and videos to promote your business.

Below is an example of a Carnival Cruise Facebook Canvas ad.

In its testing Facebook has found that Canvas ads keep users engaged for longer than traditional ads. These ads can be up to 70 seconds long and 53% of users that click on a Canvas ad stick around to view at least half of it. The average Canvas ad view time is an astonishing 31 seconds.

Great data indeed but as an advertiser you will definitely want to test this yourself to see if you get better results.

Here’s another example from Wendy’s. As much as it pains me to show this because I am Vegan, it is a good ad example.

First if you were on your mobile device and saw this Facebook Canvas ad, you would see the first image on the left of these 3 side by side images and as you clicked through the ad the next media rich image would show and so on.

Then after clicking the ad to learn what makes Wendy’s so different you would see how it’s different as you see the process of putting a hamburger together.

And……

With a call to action at the end to go taste the difference and now find a location near you.

Creating a Canvas ad is quite simple once you familiarize yourself with the process. If for some reason you don’t have access to Canvas ads via your publishing tools on your Facebook Fan Page, you can go HERE to request.

Below I have put together a video on how to create your very first Facebook Canvas ad. Enjoy!