Formerly known as Canvas ads, Instant Experience ads — also just called “Instant Experiences” — are Meta’s fullscreen interactive ads specifically designed for mobile use. Not only do they improve engagement but, with the way they’re presented to users, they give you the ability to better tell your story in the process, giving people a more compelling look at who you are and what you can offer them. 

Let’s take a look: 

How Instant Experience ads work 

Instant Experiences are broken down into three parts: The lead-in ad, the main Instant Experience, and the end destination. 

Part of what makes Instant Experience ads compelling from a marketing perspective is how diverse and versatile they can be, which is true of each of these three components. Each of these segments can be made up of different sub-components, which is helpful but admittedly does make it hard to comprehensively describe each here. 

This versatility begins off the top with the lead-in ad, which can consist of an image, video, carousel, or collection ad within Facebook or Instagram placements. Just like with any lead or hook, this part is focused on piquing audiences’ attention to look through the rest of your Instant Experience ad. 

After that is the Instant Experience itself, which is brought up when a user clicks on the CTA part of the lead-in ad. In this portion, they’re able to explore different elements of the full-screen ad, in the process learning more and interacting further. 

Lastly, users are directed to the end destination. Similar to the lead-in, this can manifest itself in a handful of different ways — in this case it depends on the type of Instant Experience you’ve created prior, and can remain within the Facebook or Instagram app itself or take the user to a separate page. The end destination comes down to your goal for the ad; for example, if you want your ad to sell products, presumably the destination will be to a spot where people can browse and buy from you. 

Types of Instant Experience ads 

Beyond this three-part system, there are five different types of Instant Experiences you can create from templates, or you can make a custom type. The five different templates are: 

• Instant customer acquisition 

• Instant storefront 

• Instant storytelling 

• Instant lookbook 

• Instant form 

Just like how you build the three segments of the ad itself, which template you choose (or however you decide to customize) depends on your goals. In many cases, it’s pretty evident in the name which template basically aligns with which goal. 

Customer acquisition, for example, is of course designed to do just that. This Instant Experience template is aimed at driving conversions from a mobile landing page, but beyond that it’s also for introducing new customers to your brand. In that way, it’s somewhat of a combo template regarding improving awareness and purchases together. To that end, the mobile landing page for Instant customer acquisition is geared towards encouraging users to take action. Good for: Awareness + conversions. 

Storefront is even more intuitive, showcasing your products in a grid layout. Obviously, this is all about showing off the physical items you have to offer and making sales based off that. Particularly useful is how this lays out all products in one space, simplifying the browsing experience. Good for: Sales! 

The storytelling template is helpful for building up the image of your brand, especially in conjunction with video features that help support this. This is a good template for showcasing how your products or services can benefit users. Good for: More in-depth awareness, consideration, and educating users. 

Lookbook is kind of a cousin of the storefront Instant Experience. It works by showing full-screen images depicting your product list, through which people can scroll to see more. This allows them to not just see your products, but to get inspired by seeing examples of how they appear, how they’re used, etc., along with other relevant information. Good for: Consideration + sales. 

Lastly is the form template. This allows users to submit a form directly through your ad without diverting them away from the platform. Because it eliminates that extra step of taking users to another page, you’ll typically see lower costs-per-click, since it’s subsequently easier to get users to convert. Good for: Form fill conversions. 

What are the benefits of Instant Experiences? 

There are multiple benefits from Instant Experiences, in many ways all coming back to the format’s versatility and immersive-ness. That also allows it to be adaptable to a variety of not just goals, but industries. 

For one, the real estate Instant Experience ads take up, the way they invite users to interact, and the process of that interaction means it provides a hyper-seamless user experience. 

In turn, this eliminates barriers to them taking the desired action(s) while making it easy to explore the contents further. This is especially true of Instant Experiences that don’t use a landing page but keep everything on the platform itself, the seamlessness of which leads to more conversions and often lower bounce rates and costs-per-click. 

These ads and their interactive features are also great tools for telling the story of your brand, products, and/or services and, through extension, giving users a compelling reason to engage further. What’s the image and feelings you want to invoke? What’s your narrative that people might be missing elsewhere? Instant Experiences help convey that. 

Lastly — and this isn’t an afterthought just because it’s last — the seamlessness of Instant Experiences means you don’t have to depend on variable load times unlike most other ad formats. 

This doesn’t necessarily sound as important as the other factors, but it actually can be quite a huge deal; it’s been shown over and over that attention spans are ever-decreasing when it comes to how long people are willing to give any form of digital content — ad or otherwise — their focus. A difference of less than a second of load time or hook can determine whether someone follows through or abandons — so minimizing the impact of that can, over a greater sample size, be significant. 

How Instant Experiences fit into the paid social marketing funnel 

As a marketer, you’re familiar with at least the basics of the customer journey, marketing funnel, however you choose to call it. We alluded to it earlier, but different types of Instant Experiences are better-suited to certain stages within that funnel. 

To simplify things here, we’ll break it down into awareness, consideration, and conversion without getting more granular. 

At the awareness stage, you’re trying to, as the name suggests, make people more aware (or aware at all) of your brand and its products or services. Much of this is telling the story that you want to be conveyed — for this goal, storytelling and customer acquisition fit well. 

In the middle after awareness is consideration, where you’re reaching customers who are already somewhat familiar with you but maybe aren’t as familiar with the details that make your brand a compelling solution to their needs. There are many approaches here, but in general you’ll be providing more in-depth information on your products or services. You also want to make it simple for users wanting to learn more. 

For consideration stage campaigning, look to the lookbook, customer acquisition, and storytelling. 

Lastly is the conversion stage, where users are looking to actually make a purchase (or convert in whichever way is relevant to your business). Here you want to provide a compelling experience to encourage users to convert. Ideally you want to avoid making users leave the platform to do so too, for the reasons we discussed earlier. Ideal here are the storefront and form types. 

Really, Instant Experiences are just one of many helpful tools through which you can diversify your campaigns’ repertoire. Their immersive-ness comes with many advantages and, when paired with strong creative assets and a clear vision, can be quite effective. 

And as always, if you’re interested in professional help with your digital marketing including Instant Experiences and beyond, don’t hesitate to give us at Fujisan a call!