Your Guide To Instant Experience Ads On Facebook

What are Facebook Instant Experiences?

This article will provide you with everything you need to know about this exciting format—covering functionality, use-cases, benefits, best practices, and how to get started. 

How do Instant Experiences work?

Instant Experiences can be broken down into three steps in order to explain how audiences will interact with the format. 

First, you have the lead-in ad. This can be an image, video, carousel, or collection ad, and can appear in standard Facebook and Instagram placements such as News Feed and Stories. The purpose of this ad should be to grab audience attention and encourage them to click-through into the Instant Experience. 

Once audiences click the CTA from the lead-in ad they will be transported into the Instant Experience itself. In this full-screen space, they will be able to explore the different elements that are being presented. 

After interacting with your Instant Experience, audiences will then be directed towards an end destination. The destination will completely depend on the type of experience that you have chosen. For example, this could be a landing page where they can purchase one of the products featured. Or, the destination could remain within the Facebook app in instances such as Instant Forms where audiences can share their contact information if interested in learning more about your product or service.

Types of Instant Experience

As mentioned earlier, Instant Experiences can take shape in a number of different forms. Advertisers can either choose from the five off-the-shelf templates (shown below) that are offered by Facebook, or build something completely unique and customized. 

Source: Facebook

Your industry, along with your campaign objective will determine the type of Instant Experience that you decide to utilize. For example, if you’re an e-commerce company wishing to showcase a range of products and drive sales, the Instant Storefront, or Instant Lookbook formats are likely to be your best candidates. If you’re a FinTech company wishing to garner leads that can be added to your CRM, the Instant Form would be a perfect solution. 

The great thing about Instant Experiences, is that their infinitely customizable nature means that they can be tailored to suit any brand and any objective.  

Benefits of Instant Experiences

So, now that we know what Instant Experiences are—what makes them so special? Why should you include them in your media plans? 

The first benefit of Instant Experience ads is the fact that it is a mobile-first format designed to offer an optimal experience for Facebook’s predominantly mobile users. A big part of this is load-time, with Instant Experiences loading 15 times faster than standard mobile sites.

Secondly, the interactive, hands-on nature of Instant Experiences helps to enable higher levels of engagement, allowing brands to spend longer with their audience and efficiently communicate a richer amount of information. Average view time for Instant Experience’s predecessor Canvas ads was 31-seconds, significantly higher than the averages achieved through In-Feed or Stories ads. 

Lastly, the Instant Experience format can be used by advertisers to combat signal loss in the wake of changing privacy regulation. Due to the audience's engagement with Instant Experiences remaining entirely within the app, advertisers will be able to see exactly how audiences are interacting with the different components. This valuable data can be used to inform future campaign decisions, or (for certain data variables) to create custom audiences for retargeting. 

Instant Experience Creative Best Practices

1. Open with an engaging lead-in

Your Instant Experience will only be successful if people actually click through to begin exploring. For this reason, you need to ensure that you have an engaging lead-in ad that prompts scrolling users to click-through to open the Instant Experience.

Utilizing video instead of statics will help you to better engage scrolling audiences. Within the video, focus on one clear message accompanied by a CTA with supporting visual cues to encourage click-through. 

2. Use a combination of different media elements

The best Instant Experiences utilize a mixture of video, photo, text, and interactive components in order to provide audiences with a rich experience. It is important however that you combine these elements in a way that is logical and offers a clear path for audiences to follow. Think of your different components as building blocks that combine to form a strong, engaging narrative. 

3. Include clear calls-to-action (CTAs)

You should always include at least one, if not many calls-to-action (depending on your type of Instant Experience) within your Instant Experience. These can be used to help audiences navigate through the experience itself, or direct them towards landing pages where they can learn more or make purchases. Be sure to consider ways that you can  enforce these CTAs in creative ways visually. 

4. Utilize your existing brand assets

Instant Experiences are a great opportunity to repurpose a selection of your existing brand assets. They may need to be adapted slightly, however, by using existing assets as a starting point, you are able to save on time, money, and resource.

Create attention-worthy Instant Experiences with Shuttlerock