Facebook MPA (Multi-Product Ads) are for everyone, not just for e-Commerce players

Stephanie Bissonnette

Length

4 min read

Date

6 February 2015

If you’ve got any form of marketing automation or some semblance of a funnel, you can use Facebook MPA (Multi-Product Ads) to tell a story.

In other words, string together messages into a sequence. Social is not about a one-night stand but progressive nurturing, so Facebook is adding increasing sequencing capabilities for you.

Currently, MPA is available only to API partners and by special request in Power Editor, but you can get your hands on it soon. Interestingly, dynamic retargeting is coming to Facebook natively, which is another nail in the coffin of FBX (third-party retargeting).

Other ways to use MPA are to test out anything that comes in multiples– not just multiple products. You could try out multiple benefits of your product. Or try multiple images since people will want to swipe left to peek at the other images in the stack.

They can be lifestyle images, product images, feature-promoting images – anything with a general theme. Another way to look at this is that you’re getting up to 4 “impressions” for the price of one when you use MPA.

Think of this like extensions within Google AdWords – link extensions to get more real estate, review extensions when you have great reviews, map extensions, etc…

To our knowledge, we don’t get stats on whether the user swiped to view more of the ad. I don’t believe those count as clicks, but I could be wrong.

Note also that the images are 600×600 for MPA, so you’ll create more work for your design person here. But it’s worth it. And you’re creating more work for your content marketing team since every frame can have its image, description, and link destination.

We’d be curious to see how much more traffic the image in position one gets versus all the other ones. Google gives us ad performance by position – and Facebook does, too. But it’s by positioning in the News Feed, not the relative positioning within a MPA unit.

We have just started testing, so we don’t have any clear conclusions to share with you on general performance, what types of creatives work best, or what verticals are finding the most success.

But you can certainly see from Facebook’s test results, that CPA, CPC, and CTR are all greatly improved. We asked Franco Puetz for his thoughts:

Each time Facebook releases a new ad unit, we see a spike in CTR, and these Multi-Product Ads are no exception, but this increase in click-ability isn’t the real value proposition for me.
Facebook is finding new ways to let advertisers tell their story in a visual way, first with video, now with multiple images per ad unit – as an advertiser this is incredibly exciting because it can allow you to paint a much better picture in your prospects mind before they even visit your website.
Each image can represent an additional value proposition for your product or service, giving you multiple opportunities to entice and excite your target audience.
I’ll snag any extra chance we have to build that “desire for more” pre-click, and I feel like this new ad unit gives us the opportunity to do just that.

Franco Puetz, Social Ads Manager for Veterans United Home Loans

Part of this is due to the novelty effect from any new ad unit that launches, plus that beta testers are usually more sophisticated and get assistance. But we think this will stick.