Facebook Brings A Mobile-First Ad Strategy With Collections

Facebook is at it again with a new update to their system, and this time it’s geared at the advertising world.

To help retailers better present their current and upcoming products to consumers on the social media site, Facebook has announced its new ad format. Canvas, which served to load rich media ads quickly, was the last update to Facebook’s advertising options last year.

This new format, dubbed Collection, is one that was created with the multi-device consumer in mind. Designed specifically for mobile, the hope is that Collection will help persuade consumers to shop on a retailer’s mobile website following a brief interaction with the Facebook app.

Rather than retailers customizing what is shown in the collection, the good people at Facebook have taken it upon themselves to select items to showcase to consumers. Given the amount of data Facebook collects on a daily basis from its nearly two billion users, it’s likely that this will help retailers create a more personalized advertising experience.

As the eCommerce trend continues to grow, these new Collections will appear inside Facebook users’ newsfeed and take consumers to retailers’ mobile sites if clicked on. With GfK Research sharing that 45 percent of all shopping begins on mobile, Facebook is looking to capitalize on this by enabling retailers with a mobile-first advertising offering. Evidence of this being a good move strategically for the social media giant is the fact that Gartner predicted 85 percent of all enterprise interactions by 2020 will be done without any human interaction.

With consumer expectation leaning toward both instant gratification and an increased desire for personalization, this latest addition to Facebook’s ad format may serve to enable more meaningful and profitable retail-consumer interactions.