Linked Canvas & Other Canvas Enhancements

According to Facebook, the equivalent of 150 years have been spent viewing content in Canvas on Facebook. As more brands use Canvas tell their stories, Facebook has rolled out new capabilities to ease the creation process and make the unit more engaging.

One if the hesitations we tend to see from brands is that Canvases appear complicated to build and involve a lot of creative assets and/or creative hours they do not have. To combat this, Facebook is providing advertisers with Canvas templates that implement best practices and simplify the creation process.

One of our favorite new features (we may be biased on this one) is the option to link canvases together. Tapping on a button or image leads to another Canvas to continue the brand story further.

Our team was able to participate in the beta for linked canvases with client Beats by Dre. In the Beats Unity Headphones Canvas, users could explore different colored headphones that represented their country’s flag. Clicking on an image opened up a Canvas specific to that pair of headphones.

With the linked canvas we saw an uptick in time spend in the unit compared to previous Canvas units, and 73% of the Canvas was viewed on average.

You can check out the linked canvas in action in AdWeek.

Originally advertisers were only able to run Canvas as website clicks or conversions, but now the ability to run Canvas with the video views or brand awareness objective is available. The capability to add 360 videos also adds to the immersive experience and potentially lengthen the time people spend viewing content in the Canvas.

Need Canvas inspiration for your brand? Join Facebook’s Canvas Example Public Group to see and share beautiful canvases brands are creating.