Out of the eight ad types on LinkedIn, carousel ads are one of the least used. However, they can be instrumental in increasing brand awareness and building trust with your audience if used correctly.
In this article, I’ll show you how to create, apply and optimize your LinkedIn carousel ads to scale your business. I’ll also be sharing some of my best tips and tricks on how to use carousel ads to tell engaging stories and attract new customers for your business.
Let’s dive into it!
What Is a Carousel Ad?
The Linkedin carousel ad is an ad type that allows you to attach multiple images (cards) that prospects can scroll and see.
The carousel ad shows the first image and the cutoff of the next card so that you can preview what’s coming next. Unlike standalone image ads or video ads, carousel ads are more interactive because you can swipe through them and click on the URLs on each card.
Each card allows you to customize three features: the headline, the display image, and the destination URL. Your URL can link to your website, a landing page, or a resource. Additionally, each card can have a different destination URL so you can have a catalog of services or products that prospects can swipe through.
Standard carousel ads that link to a website or landing page don’t include a CTA button, but ads that use lead gen forms include a button.
You can also track the CTR (click-through rate), number of leads acquired, impressions, and clicks for each card besides the standard advertising metrics.
Right now, carousel ads don’t support video so you can’t embed them. Until then, make sure your images are attention-grabbing but not too exciting.
Why Should You Try Carousel Ads?
Carousel ads are great for creating brand awareness, brand consideration, increasing engagement with prospects, and increasing conversions on your landing pages/website.
By using storytelling to engage your prospects, you can get them more invested in your brand and direct them to your other platforms when they click on the links on each card. This can also generate more web page visits for your website or landing page.
Unlike other ad formats which feature one creative piece, carousel ads allow you to add up to 10 images or cards. More content also means that you can get more engagement and click-throughs, and prospects can get more details about your solution.
Let’s go into what specs & requirements you should use to create great carousel ads.
What Specs Should You Use?
Before we get into the specs, your ad account needs to meet two prerequisites:
- You must have permission to post direct sponsored content, and
- Your LinkedIn page admin must have access to the Campaign Manager tool and permissions higher than Viewer
Carousel ads have the following specs & design requirements:
- Image requirements: You must use JPG, PNG, or non-animated GIF images with at least 1080 x 1080 pixel resolution with a 1:1 aspect ratio. Each image shouldn’t exceed 10MB.
- Text requirements: For the text, the ad name is optional but you can use a maximum of 255 characters. The introductory text has a maximum of 255 characters. For carousel ads directing to a landing page, the ads have a 45-character limit while ads with a lead gen form CTA have a 35-character limit.
- URL requirements: You need at least one landing page URL with a http:// or https:// prefix. The maximum character limit for the URL is 2000 characters.
- Technical requirements: You can use a minimum of 2 cards and a maximum of 10 cards per ad.
10 Best Practices for Making Great Carousel Ads
It’s not enough to just make the ad. Here are some techniques to optimize your ads for more conversions:
- Don’t use vague headlines and body copy so that your audience understands your message.
- If your ad is telling a story, the first slide should be attention-grabbing, and the last slide should have the main CTA so that your audience is encouraged to swipe to the end.
- Your card descriptions and CTA should be concise.
- You can start with 3-5 cards in your carousel and then test adding more cards from there.
- Don’t narrow down your target audience too much, but choose a location and two other criteria. You can also follow these ad-targeting best practices to help you target the right audience.
- If you’re using ads with a destination URL, you have a better chance of converting prospects when you link to dedicated post-click pages instead of your homepage.
- You can retarget customers by showing image cards related to the offer your audience showed interest in on your website/landing page.
- Use customer testimonials to show prospects how your solution improves their lives. If you’re using multiple slides, you can create a more detailed case study they can swipe through.
- Test different orders of your cards and optimize based on performance.
- In each ad, track each card’s carousels and clicks to measure your brand’s awareness. You can also use your click-through rate to measure traffic.
Now that we’ve covered ways you can optimize your ads let’s look at how you can apply them to increase your brand awareness and conversions.
5 Ways to Use LinkedIn Carousel Ads
Let’s look at five ways you can use carousel ads to get more traffic and conversions for your business:
1. Brand Awareness & Engagement
Since carousel ads do better in creating brand awareness and engagement, I would not recommend that you use these as a cold ad in front of a target audience that has never been to your website, never heard of you, or never interacted with you.
You want to retarget those that go to your website. This is just one of the different layers that you re-target them with.
In my opinion, the best way to use carousel ads is not to put them in the cold layer. They’re effective for showing different angles of what you do or offer. They’re also effective for getting more website or targeted page visits from warm prospects. Note that the cost per click is going to be a lot higher than a single-image ad.
2. Show Your Social Proof
This ad type can be used to show your results and build demand for your solution. Some ideas you can use include:
- Case studies that detail how you helped a client solve their problem
- Sharing 2-10 client reviews for your product or service
- Showcasing different examples of the work you’ve done depending on your product or service
- Sharing a client testimonial per slide and linking to your services page in each one
3. Retargeting Warm Prospects
I would recommend using carousel ads in retargeting campaigns as a way to build trust and credibility for your brand, instead of retargeting visitors with more generic ads.
For this, the goal wouldn’t really be clicks or low cost per click but rather to just get back in front of warm prospects with informative type carousels.
Help your prospects overcome hesitations about working with you by letting them review your product or pricing page, or displaying testimonials on each card.
4. Drive E-commerce Sales
Although carousel ads are great for increasing brand awareness for B2B, in my opinion, this ad format is better suited for the B2C world.
Linkedin carousel ads are great for e-commerce businesses that sell multiple products such as clothing brands and office technology brands such as Cisco where potential customers can swipe through latest designs/products.
In my mind, these would be best suited as retargeting ads.
You visit their website for one thing, and then you get hit with a carousel ad as a retargeting ad that has five of their top-selling items. If you click any of those images, it will take you to that specific item in a different section on that website.
5. Brand Awareness & Differentiation for B2B Brands
Linkedin carousel ads can be applied in the B2B world as well. If you’re a B2B Saas company or B2B service company, highlight the pain points that you solve or the benefits of your solution, or the different ways that you’re different in your ad.
Let me use Impactable as an example. We create a carousel ad that shows all of our different services such as LinkedIn outreach, LinkedIn paid ads and Website visitor identification. Prospects can then click the ad to visit our website and get more details about our services. Now the carousel ad has turned into a product catalog that drives more traffic to our website.
Final Thoughts
Although carousel ads are scarcely used, they can be great for increasing your brand awareness, generating demand for your solution, and driving traffic to your landing pages/website with visual storytelling using multiple images.
Make sure your ads meet the spec requirements so that you can create optimized ads that convert your audience. Test your ads to see how you can optimize their performance.
Want to know how we can help you get better results from your ad campaigns? We’ve helped 1,500+ B2B brands scale their business by getting their solution in front of their ideal prospects. Book a call to get started.
