Facebook rolled out a new mobile advertising experience on Thursday with the launch of its full-page Canvas ads.
Unlike traditional ads that are smaller and usually linked back to a full website that can sometimes be slow to load, the new Canvas ads are hosted on Facebook to allow for a more responsive experience. The setup is essentially the advertising equivalent of Facebook’s “Instant Articles” product for publishers that was introduced last May.
Like Instant Articles, Canvas ads open directly from a user’s News Feed. When tapped, the ads expand to full-screen.
Facebook said the product allows advertisers to use a combination of text, photos, video and call-to-cation buttons in the ads to create an “immersive” mobile experience.
“Trends tell us that advertisers need a better way to share information after people click on their ad, and the information offered after someone clicks needs to load quickly, look beautiful on mobile and allow people to take action easily,” Facebook wrote in a post introducing the new ads. “We built Canvas—a new post-click, full-screen, immersive mobile ad experience on Facebook that loads nearly instantaneously—to solve this problem.”
Facebook, however, isn’t the only tech company to realize the need for a better mobile experience.
Earlier this week, Google launched its Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), which aims to improve both speed and user experience on the mobile web by making it possible for content-rich pages to load instantly.
Unlike Facebook’s solutions, which apply only to content on the social networking site, Google’s AMP project utilizes a new, open framework of light-weight code to help all media-rich pages load faster.
While tech and content companies like AOL, AdSense, Outbrain, Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, Nielsen, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Vox Media, CBS Interactive and the BBC have all signed on to the project already, Google said it is still hoping to grow the project further.