Collection vs. Canvas. Who is the king of conversions?

As you might already know, collection contains a title image or video followed by a showcase of 4 products from a product set below. Once a user clicks on the product, a little screen opens to show a range of products, prices and so on. On the other hand, canvas only shows an ad image or video, and if you want to see more, you have to click on the ad to open the whole extended canvas.

So, although it may seem that there is a small downside to using canvas because it only shows one video if a user clicks on it, they can experience much more personalized content (including brand images, videos, carousels). You can use it to increase brand awareness if your goal is to increase engagement. 

Let the battle begin…

For test purposes, we went purely after direct conversions. We also strayed away from mixing branding content with products in order to keep both formats competitive. We ran identical texts, images, and videos in both campaigns. We used a core interest audience of around 300 000 people in Slovakia and ran both campaigns head to head in a split test. The client we used for the test is Shoozers – customized sneakers with crystal elements. They are an up and coming brand from Slovakia with good engagement rates in their home market. The brand also has audiences heavily skewed to mobile.

And here are the results:

What did we discover?

Collections had a much better open rate (CTR All), beating canvas by a 50% margin. We suspect that the featured products were a big motivation for clicks. This resulted in much more favorable CPC for collections.

Collections also won the next round: “Link to Click Ratio”. This is the percentage of people that clicked on a link inside of the canvas/collection. This ratio was almost double for collections and when combined with the former metric, resulted in much cheaper and more abundant traffic.

View duration is similar between the two, however, the “View content” percentage is larger for collections – this might be because buttons funnel away traffic way too early (but it needs to be tested).

The only upside for Canvas is concerning higher conversion rates. A large portion of the visits resulted in adding a product into the cart or even purchasing. Our experience is that canvas brings in more relevant traffic with higher intention to buy which was our hypothesis, to begin with.

Collection – only for fashion? Not at all!

As you can see, collections work for other e-commerce brands such as betting companies, travel, etc. In ROI Hunter, you can enhance products in collections with your branding, highlight offer or price using different layers. All this is thanks to our Dynamic Template Editor which our clients use for dynamic campaigns to make their product sets more eye-catching.