Instant Articles, meet Instant Ads. Facebook wants to give advertisers an immersive way to reach people without making them leave the social network. So today it officially launched its ad Canvas for all advertisers. When users click a Facebook News Feed ad connected to Canvas, it opens a full-screen, rich media page inside of Facebook rather than forcing users to wait for a mobile website to load.
Last year Facebook started testing Canvas, which I called Instant Articles for ads. The impetus was that mobile sites have tripled in size since 2011, leading to five to ten second load times users don’t want to sit through to see an ad. The types of rich media marketing experiences that people actually remember load far too slow on mobile. So Facebook built the endpoint of ads into its own app so it can pre-load and show them in about one second.
Canvas removes constraints that low-power mobile sites put on content. Facebook Canvas allows interactive elements like animations, carousels, product catalogs, tilt-to-view images, and videos. Canvases appear linked to from News Feed ads on iOS and Android, and Facebook is evaluating how to expand this to other versions and apps such as Instagram.