Improve CTR 3x over with Dynamic Slideshows

To recap a little bit, let’s go over the dynamic slideshows basic functionality again. Dynamic Slideshow is build on top of the most popular DPA format - the carousel. So it looks like a regular carousel, but the images in the carousel rotate, in order to show more images. With ROI Hunter, you can decide whether you want to show more images of the particular product from your feed or a fixed image. It turns out that the second option is actually very powerful.

Slideshow and “Dwell Time”

You definitely need to understand the concept of “Dwell Time” before making a successful Slideshow campaign. The key is the fact that Slideshows don’t have any timing controls. The slides are displayed some 2 seconds after each other. This also means that the user needs to “dwell” on the carousel card for at least 2 seconds before they even notice that the format is a slideshow!

This basically means that slideshows are only displayed to people who are already showing some interest in the product. They are the ones that are likely to stop to take a proper look at the ad. The people just scrolling through the ad will only be able to see the first slide. Even if they quickly thumb through the carousel and then go on, the slideshow won’t even start. They have to stop and keep looking at the ad for at least 2 seconds, which is already a significant attention investment in the realms of a social feed.

Takeaway 1: Use dynamic slideshow for people that are already interested in your product/service.

Give People Reasons to Buy

This concept has important marketing consequences. It makes you focus on giving users serious reasons to buy. Do not lose their interest by showing redundant images or generic claims just for the sake of making a moving slideshow. Make them click and drive action instead.

Consider the case of Allegro, a Polish marketplace, which has decided to use slideshows to run a temporary “Free Shipping” promotion.

The slideshows gained up to 3x better CTR and revenue than their regular DPA counterparts. The messaging and graphics were the same with one difference. The different ads were then used to push the promotion to the people already on the hook for their products. The non-slideshow version showed the promotion up front as the first card of the carousel.

What’s interesting is that the graphics on the slideshows were acted upon by people who lingered on the ad meaning that there was double interest - first to be included in the DPA audience and then to actually still be interested in the product by staring at it for 2 seconds or more. These were obviously people that were extremely interested in the product, company and were ready to click through.

Ad with Dynamic Slideshow

Ad with Classic DPA

Takeaway 2: Lead with a compelling reason for better results.

Leverage the power of Slideshow Editor

ROI Hunter enables you to use our Slideshow Editor to create slideshows with any imagery you decide to use, even if your feed doesn’t come with any bells and whistles. It only takes a couple of clicks to include a banner in your slideshows.

In fact most advertisers run their re-targeting campaigns in a “set and forget” mode. Most of them don’t reflect any current promotions or marketing campaigns inside of their DPAs. Using the Slideshow Editor makes it very easy to switch out the marketing message shown in your slideshows regularly. All you need to do is to change the image in the template and it gets applied to all your running DPA campaigns automatically, without the hassle of restarting your ads again every time.

Takeaway 3: Make your ads relevant with Slideshow Editor.

You can go even deeper and use the conditional formatting feature of the editor to run multiple promotions at the same time. You can tie these to different groups of products. So you can have a sale promotion running for one category and free shipping promotion running for another, all with the graphics to match. But that’s whole another story for some other time.

From this article, you should be able to see that dynamic slideshow is a format that can bring your organization results. However, as with any advertising format, the key is to understand how it works and find what best practices will help you to reach your goals. If you think that dynamic slideshow can help you feel free to contact us for a demo and we will show you the Dynamic Slideshows along with all the other features of our platform!