Facebook has been exploring new ways to monetize its platform. On March 24th, 2017, the social giant is introducing an ad format it calls 'Collection'. What it does, is to help retailers and e-commerce businesses showcase their products.
With Facebook Canvas that aims for fast-loading rich media ads, Collections are meant for mobile users, designed to win users using the Facebook app before redirecting them to the advertiser's mobile website.
"Collection is, at its core, a new ad experience that we've built specifically for news feed, to drive product discovery and sales through an engaging format in a fast-loading shopping experience," said Facebook’s director of product marketing, Maz Sharafi.
The Collection ads will show up in users' News Feed with a video or image, followed by four product images below it. If users tap on the ad, they will see a broader catalog that can consist to up to 50 different products. When they tap on a more specific product, they'll go straight to the advertiser's website or app to make the purchase.
The Collection format is "to really build a great new shopping experience for people and to help marketers really drive discovery and sales in mobile." Collections are designed to be easy for sellers to set up.
While advertisers can choose the initial four products that show up in a Collection, the rest are automatically selected by Facebook, based on the sellers' preferences and on user targeting, aiming to create an experience that is "as relevant as possible for the consumer."
So here Facebook is doing the heavy lifting.
Sharafi added that Collections take advantage of a number of broader trends: The growth of mobile commerce and video, and also the increasing importance of fast performance on smartphones.
Accompanying the Collection ads format, Facebook is also announcing a change to the way advertisers can measure their results. For units like Collections and Canvas, for example, they won't only show when someone clicks on the ad as they will also measure outbound clicks.
This way, advertisers can get insights when someone clicked thieir ad and have been redirected to the their website.
While advertisers on Facebook hope that their ads can drive people to purchase their products, most of the time that isn't happening. As a social network, Facebook doesn't involve in giving advertisers that chance, or at least not directly.
Advertisers can buy Collection ads based on one of two Facebook ad objectives: traffic or conversions. If they pick traffic, then Facebook will charge them based on the number of times people click on the initial ad to open the product catalog. And if they opt for conversion, Facebook will show the ad to people that it thinks are more likely to click and will charge the advertisers based on the number of times the ads appeared on people's News Feed.
So if advertisers opt for Collection ads based on conversion, ordinary Facebook users will more likely to see product-pushing ads that can be either flashier or a bit irritating.