Facebook Canvas has been available to all advertisers for about 10 months now, and it?s still going strong.
The immersive, full-screen ad unit is mobile-only and designed to load quickly and utilize features that Facebook users are already familiar with: tilt-to-pan panoramic photos, carousels and looping video, in addition to text, photos and call-to-action buttons.
It?s an opportunity to tell a story with more room than a 1,200-pixel-by-628-pixel ad, and the results have been great: users spending an average of 70 seconds with a Canvas that explained a new product feature. Users who interacted with the unit who were retargeted with another relevant ad. The click-through-rate was more than six times the CTR of the same ad shown to non-exposed users. But Canvas is not without its challenges. The biggest pain point I?ve experienced is simply explaining it to other stakeholders?namely, the creative team/agency actually concepting and creating the unit and the client that needs to buy in and approve it.
The things that make it great also make it complicated. It can include a wide variety of image and video sizes (until recently, there weren?t any official specifications); it can link through to as many websites or other Canvas units as there are components to clicks on; it?s like a microsite but it?s not actually a microsite.
There?s something soul-crushing about sitting in a room full of designers and squashing their amazingly cool big idea with the fact that while Canvas is...