Stories Ads – Now Available on Facebook and on Smartly.io

This article was originally published @ Smartly.io Blog

Illustration and animation by Aki Tanninen

Instagram proved it – consumers love creating and interacting with full-screen content on mobile. The evolution of Stories Ads continues; the ad placement is now available on Facebook and through the Smartly.io platform. With more than 150 million daily Facebook Stories users,

Stories-style posts are predicted to surpass the number of feed content in 2019.

Smartly.io customers have previously seen incremental results with Stories Ads on Instagram; the flight app Hopper tripled their conversion rates and grew their app installs by 67% earlier this year. With the Facebook Stories Ads addition, advertisers will be able to reach and convert even more customers across the Facebook family of apps and services.

Facebook Stories Drives Incremental Results: TUI Success Story

“With the Smartly.io Creative Studio, we were able to increase our creative volume by 100x while running beautifully designed ads that drove a clear lift in sales. It’s great to work with a technology partner who understands creative through the eyes of data insights.”

TUI is the world’s largest travel group that took part in Facebook Stories Ads launch to debut and test the new full-screen ad placement. With the help of Smartly.io Creative Studio, TUI was able to successfully run one of their biggest campaigns, the Big Smile Weeks, on Facebook Stories.

Creative Studio used Smartly.io Video Templates to produce video creatives that pulled dynamic content from their destination catalog and combined with TUI brand elements to ensure creative quality and consistency – even when running a high volume of variations. The Creative Studio designers based their work on insights proven through close collaboration with many of Smartly.io’s 650+ brand advertisers:

1. Suggest the action you’re driving in the creative. The red BG works as curtains that slide up to show new destinations. The animation of the red BG prompts the user to take action and swipe up while revealing dynamic content from their feed. The final video scene also incorporates swipe up cues with animated arrows and elements sliding up.

2. Make your value proposition clear. Another travel brand working with Smartly.io saw a clear lift in performance with designs that incorporate a clear value proposition (such as destinations and prices) with plenty of negative space. The TUI ads were designed similarly, leaving a lot of room for the red background.

Results

• Click-Through-Rates increased by 14%
• 100x higher creative volume thanks to Creative Studio and Smartly.io Creative Automation
• Facebook Stories creatives cut the Cost-per-Acquisition by 12%

Get Started on Stories Fast: Video Templates by Smartly.io

Getting started with running vertical content can sometimes feel cumbersome for brands who are used to creating their ads and videos in the more traditional formats. At Smartly.io, we want to help all brands adapt their assets to Stories quickly, easily, and effectively.

With Smartly.io Video Templates, brands can either produce their Stories ads from scratch using the template editor or choose from over 40 preset templates that are fully customizable to any brand look-feel: bring your fonts, logos, change template layout, and pull dynamic content from a product catalog. With Smartly.io Video Templates, advertisers can run a virtually unlimited number of creative variations, also on Stories. In the TUI case, we produced 285 videos for one campaign with dynamic prices and discounts.

Faster workflows leave more time for testing and iteration; on Smartly.io, our built-in testing functionalities allow brands to quickly run multiple variations to see what drives results. What’s better, you can apply learnings to your Video Templates and changes go live in real-time.

Technical Specifications

Facebook Stories Ads supports Single Video and Single Image ads with the same objectives that Instagram Stories:

• Brand Awareness
• Conversion
• Lead Generation
• Mobile App Install
• Reach
• Traffic
• Video Views

As with Instagram, Facebook Stories Ad formats must meet the following media specifications:

• Facebook Stories media must have an aspect ratio between 9:16 and 1.91:1
• Minimum media width: 500 pixels
• Aspect ratio tolerance: 1%

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: Articles & Blog posts, Facebook and Instagram

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