How your brand can use Carousel Ads on Twitter

By Michelle Lee
Best practices
Three employees sitting together and laughing while one holds an iPad. The woman on the left is blonde and wearing a grey shirt, the man in the middle has brown hair and a check shirt, and the woman to the right has blonde hair and is wearing a green shirt

We all know that short and sweet is the best way to Tweet, but sometimes 280 characters or one video just isn’t enough to tell your story. That’s where Carousel Ads come in.

Carousel Ads are an engaging format on Twitter that support up to six swipeable, edge-to-edge images or videos in a single Tweet, that all serve as clickable space for website landing pages or app download pages of your choice. You can mix the media used in your Carousel Ad – image or video. 

With multi-destination functionality, Carousels allow advertisers to customize headlines and landing pages to drive their audience to multiple destinations within one Tweet – driving the right actions with their customers.

During our Beta testing of the multi-destination functionality, we saw on average:

  • ~20% increase in click-through rate across all objectives, relative to single-asset ads*

  • ~25% lift in click-through rate for campaigns that optimize for site visit conversions, relative to single-asset ads*

This added creative space and flexibility allows brands to tell their full story, drive a specific action, and deliver the right message. The visually interactive media is also more appealing than standard single assets, and can help promote engagement. 

This multi-destination functionality also means advertisers can have granularity in their Twitter Ads campaign, because they can leverage URLs with unique tracker IDs in each media card.

As well as the edge-to-edge design, video Carousels have auto-advancing cards. This means that once a video in a Carousel card is played until completion, the next card to the right will advance and begin playing automatically (if the user has auto-play settings enabled).

Carousels can also be used in both organic and paid advertising campaigns.

How can your business use Carousel Ads on Twitter?

Carousel Ads can be used effectively across business industries and verticals of all shapes and sizes. Have you ever created a list of the top benefits your product or service offers? You can easily turn those bullet points (up to six) into a Carousel.

Carousel Ads are also great for:

- Showcasing multiple features or products

- Promoting multiple offers

- Illustrating various benefits of an app, product, or service

- Highlighting multiple reviews and customer quotes or testimonials

- Breaking up a single image across multiple frames 

- Telling a multi-faceted story

Carousel Ads are available globally and are easy to create. They follow our standard creative specifications and are best suited for website and app-based objectives, but can also be used in video views, engagements, and awareness campaigns. Carousel ads can be created by navigating to your Ads Manager at ads.twitter.com, then Creatives > Tweet composer. 

Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough:

1. Add your Tweet text. Your Tweet will automatically appear to the right as a live preview. Click the 'Add media' button to upload and add creative assets, or to select from the library. 

User interface of Twitter Ads manager. A Carousel Ad is being chosen as the ad type

To Tweet your Carousel organically, just un-check the “Promoted only” box at the bottom of the composer and Tweet.

User interface of Twitter Ads manager showing the button to choose whether your Carousel Ad is promoted or organic

2. In the ‘Add media’ window, there is the option to select up to six existing assets in the media library or to upload new assets. Select the your media for the Carousel Ad. You can now leverage both image and video assets within a single Carousel Ad.

User interface of Twitter Ads manager showing where you choose what media to upload for your Carousel Ad

3. If you’re leveraging mixed media for Carousel Ads, be sure the aspect ratios remain consistent:

- 1:1 image with 1:1 video

- 1.91:1 images with 16:9 video

4. Next, you can customize your ad destination. If you’re applying the same headline and URL, check “Apply this headline and URL to entire carousel” under the first asset. You can also choose ‘Customize a destination’ for each of your media assets, adding a unique headline and URL for each.

User interface of Twitter Ads manager showing how you you can customize your ad destination.

5. To publish your Tweet immediately, click the ‘Tweet’ button in the top right. To designate a future time to publish the Carousel Ad, click on the drop down on the Tweet button, then select ‘Schedule’.

User interface of Twitter Ads manager showing where the Tweet publish button is

If you’re not quite ready to Tweet one yet, brainstorm and practice with our printable Carousel template:

What are some best practices of Carousel Ads?

Here are a few key elements to include and pay attention to for a successful Carousel Ad: 

- Make sure that your images and videos tell a cohesive story and follow a visual narrative across each frame

- Clearly feature your product, service, or app and its benefits in your creative

- Don’t ignore your accompanying headlines, Tweet copy, and calls-to-action. Use these fields to provide extra context and encouragement to readers

- Customize headlines and URLs if using the multi-destination functionality. This will drive your audience to unique landing pages

- If leveraging mixed media in your Carousel Ad, image and video aspect ratios should remain consistent (1:1 image with 1:1 video, 16:9 image and 1.91:1 video)

- Check in on your detailed card-level and swipe metrics reported in your Ads Manager to iterate and learn 

And what better way to learn but to learn from the best? Here’s some standout examples of brands who saw success with Carousel Ads:

Cooke Optics (@cookeoptics) uses a mixed-media Carousel Ad to launch and highlight the features of their new S8/i FF range of lenses.

Fashion brand @CelticandCo uses a multi-destination Carousel Ad to showcase multiple items and drive their followers to specific product pages.

Everyday essentials app @gopuff used Carousel ads to showcase their product diversity and drive more app downloads.

Comic book app @comico_jp highlighted different cuts of their most popular comics to display across video Carousel Ads.

What campaign objectives are supported by Carousels?

Single-destination Carousels support the following campaign objectives – App installs, website traffic, Video Views, engagement, and reach. Multi-destination Carousels are only available for web currently, and support the following objectives – Website traffic, Video Views, engagement, and reach.

Please note that the Video views objective will not be supported for Carousels leveraging mixed media at this time.

For more information, visit our Carousel Ads page and follow us @TwitterBusiness for more tips and best practices.

*Source: Twitter internal data from Carousels while in Beta testing July - September 2021. Multi-Destination website Carousels compared to single-asset Website Cards. These numbers are averages across iOS and Android, across Image and Video assets. These numbers may change in general availability and may vary depending on format, region, or platform.

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