The Benefits of Facebook’s Multi-Product Ads

In June, Facebook® announced the inauguration of multi-product ads, designed for direct response advertisers. Multi-product ads enable advertisers to showcase three products within a single ad unit, on desktop or mobile. Each product highlighted has its own image, description and click target. This feature is only available to advertisers via the Facebook Ads API. Adobe Media Optimizer has been an early adopter of this new API feature.

Below is how multi-product ads appear on desktop vs. mobile. The mobile view incorporates a scrolling feature of the three products across a single ad unit. More recently, Facebook introduced a new desktop view of multi-product ads, which appear taller with an updated scroll design and closely resembles the mobile view. Facebook reported improvements with this desktop change compared to original design, showing a 15% increase in click through rate (CTR) and an 83% improvement in engagement CTR (defined as any click or interaction with the ad).

Desktop view before November 7th:

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Desktop view after November 7th:

https://blog.adobe.com/media_268af5c4ec7afb87fa640fed2cecec152454e003.gifMobile view:

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Benefits of multi-product ads

Through multi-product ads, advertisers can offer a user more than one product to choose from, reducing the amount of clicks necessary to get from an ad to an order – which is great for direct response objectives. Facebook has outlined several key benefits:

1. Increased web traffic – you are giving the customer more options to click and buy resulting in better click through rates and lower cost per click.
2. Improved conversion rates – more products seen translates into higher conversion rates.
3. Stronger remarketing results – when executed through Custom Audiences, a lift is seen in performance results.

Results from our customers

Using Adobe Media Optimizer, our customers were able to test multi-product ads and benchmark performance against standard link ads. These tests were over the same period with media cost evenly allocated between the two types of ads with a 1-5% variance. Key findings across the Education vertical include:

• Significant improvements in click through rates (CTR), with increases anywhere between 50 percent to over 300 percent.
• Reductions in cost per click, with costs decreasing by as much as 35 percent as a result of higher click engagement driven by the availability of more product options.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA, conversion goal) efficiencies up to 261 percent.

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Conclusion

It’s clear multi-product ads are a winner, with uplifts seen across key performance metrics. We strongly encourage other advertisers start using this great unit, especially if standard link ads are already important drivers of direct response for your advertising campaigns. Benchmarking multi-product ads against standard link ads is a good way to measure initial success. Advertisers can clearly quantify both scale and cost efficiencies, and are able to refine their direct response strategy for both prospecting as well as remarketing through Custom Audiences.

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