This week, Facebook introduced its Canvas Creation API, allowing developers to create solutions for advertisers; to help them take advantage of the interactive full-screen, mobile experience that Canvas offers.
In case you are not familiar with Canvas – it’s an ad format introduced by Facebook last year, offering several creative ways, for businesses and creators, to design and tell rich stories natively on the platform. Canvas loads almost instantly when a user taps on it, so it avoids slow load times that might arise during the customer journey. Up until now, Canvases could be created only “via the Canvas builder […] accessible through Page and ads creation interfaces.” Now, Facebook is allowing the creation of Canvases through its API.
Facebook says that it’s opening up the API to its “developer community, who can add value by providing advertisers with solutions across a wide array of use cases.” Developers can now scale creation, develop templates, or deliver creative insights for Canvas, so that advertisers can focus on conveying “product or brand benefits and education by enhancing video experience.” Canvas allows them to tell a story that can effectively show a product’s benefits in a deeper way. This applies especially to “feature-rich products and offerings.”
As an ad format, Canvas is effective when being used to “improve brand and product awareness, as much as to drive customer acquisition.” In terms of Customer Acquisition, Canvas allows advertisers to bring the landing page to Facebook, educating customers with a product’s benefits, before even taking them through the signup flow on their website.
All Canvas components are all now available through the API for developers to get creative. Facebook has been testing Canvas API’s functionality for some time now, but has already seen very creative examples of use cases from partners. For example, Smartly,
[quote] leveraged the API to make Canvas creation easy at scale. [They] created a template that can be filled dynamically with the relevant information from a catalog or another source. Using this, advertisers can create hundreds of Canvases on a product level.[/quote]
Another partner, MakeMeReach, built creative testing abilities allowing
[quote]creation of multiple versions of a Canvas with different creative elements. The advertisers can use this to test different creative elements quickly and focus most of the spend on the highest performing Canvas.[/quote]
A third partner, HYFN, built a Canvas insights tool. The API offers access to all the metrics available to advertisers, so they
[quote]overlaid [these metrics] on Canvas in a visual way that makes decision-making and driving insights about different creative elements easier and actionable.[/quote]
What could you build?
To find out more and get started with Canvas API see the overview webinar here. You can also find the API’s developer documentation here.
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