Carousel Ads: Sequence or Catalogue, Decided First

Decide first which of two incompatible things the carousel is, because the answer changes everything after it. Either the cards are interchangeable, ten rooms, ten sofas, ten listings, and the platform should reorder them by performance, in which case a catalogue ad driven by a product feed usually beats a hand-built one. Or card two only makes sense after card one, in which case optimised card order has to stay switched off, and one toggle in Ads Manager destroys the piece. Most briefs arrive without that decision made. Settling it is the first hour of the engagement, and it sometimes ends with me telling you not to build a carousel at all. Sequenced carousels: Where order matters, the sequence is written as beats before anything is drawn: the problem, the turn, the proof, the price, the action. Cards one and two absorb most of the impressions, so the argument has to be complete by card two, and the rest earns the swipe rather than depending on it. I design assuming card five may never be seen, then make card five worth reaching. What breaks, and how it is handled: The panorama that continues across cards is unreliable. Card gutters render differently between placements, and the effect that looked exact in the mockup arrives sliced. I will build it where the buy is restricted to placements that hold it, and refuse it for an open placement set rather than hand over something that only works in the preview. Card headlines truncate around forty characters, so they are written to that length rather than trimmed to it afterwards. Catalogue and feed work: For furniture retailers and property portals the useful version is usually dynamic: a template that has to survive every item in the feed, including the listing with the badly lit kitchen and the sofa shot on white beside one shot in a room. I build templates against the worst items in your feed rather than the hero ones, and I will name the feed fields that need cleaning before any template can make the set look consistent. LinkedIn: Two to ten cards at 1080x1080, and often a document ad does the job better. If the carousel is really a slide deck, I will tell you and quote for the thing that works. Delivery: The card set as a Figma file with the sequence documented, exports at platform resolution, a written card order stating the optimise-order setting per campaign, feed template files where the ad is dynamic, and final primary text and card headlines rather than placeholder. Not included: Video cards and motion. Feed engineering: I specify what the feed needs, your developer or PIM team implements it. Campaign setup, audiences and budget. Product photography and retouching, though I will list the items that need reshooting before they go anywhere near a template. Who this is not for: Anyone who wants ten cards because the format permits ten. A four-card carousel that earns each swipe beats a padded one, and I will quote for four. Also not for teams whose media buyer changes settings without telling creative; a sequenced carousel under automatic reordering performs worse than a single image, and where that governance is missing I would rather build the single image. Existing carousels: Bring me one that is underperforming and I read the per-card metrics before proposing anything. The fix is frequently deleting cards three through six, which takes an afternoon and costs you nothing beyond the reading.