Facebook shares data for Canvas

Last year at Cannes, Chris Cox unveiled a vision to build an immersive experience and flexible creative space.Facebook, Canvas launched globally on February 25th. Their goal was to build an amazing mobile experience that people wanted to spend time in plus make it easy and fast for businesses to create this experience on mobile (in all parts of the world).

Canvas was built through the collaboration of the advertising community; Facebook Engineers, Designers, and Creative Shop; all working together in a constant feedback loop.

Canvas was built for People to create an experience that respects their time and data. Started with a simple challenge they created experiences that people wanted to spend time and respect people's time. Facebook also created engaging experiences with compelling content.

According to statistics canvases load approximately 10 times faster than mobile web while the average mobile web page download is around 8 seconds.

In the past 3 months, people have spent more than 100 years of time in Canvases. People spend an average of 31 seconds in Canvas.

Canvas was built even for businesses to enable creativity and drive results.  The product design team and Creative Shop met with key stakeholders to build something that was more valuable for people, more flexible for creative, and more powerful for advertisers. The team met with creative and media agencies, large advertisers and small businesses. The product needed to simple so businesses could take creative control and leverage existing assets without coding.

An easy, streamlined tool for creation, teams simplified the creation experience to six core elements that they heard were the building blocks that people cared about and provided enough creative freedom to build compelling experiences: headers, photos, videos, text, buttons, and carousels.

A small number of core components (all customizable,) helped them achieve ease-of-use and creative control. Over 50% of Canvas ads are built in 10 minutes or less.

Videos took too long to load which is why the team made a huge shift to re-architect all of their client renderings to enable content to load faster and progressively fetch elements in a Canvas as they were needed (rather than downloading the whole thing) making video compression much more efficient.

People in 186 countries experienced Canvas in the past two months. The Top 10 countries' people viewing Canvases are US, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, UK, France, Thailand, Germany, Turkey, and India.

Mobile-first experiences need to be previewed first on mobile. Facebook built a way for creators to preview Canvases, as they build them, on their phone (exactly as they'll appear in an ad) with one click.

When the creator clicks “preview on mobile” they send a push notification to their Facebook app that they tap to immediately preview their Canvas. Creators are able to open Canvas builder to previewing the ad on mobile in less than a minute.

Advertisers need to understand how people experience Canvases to make them even better so Facebook built out Canvas-specific metrics, including average view time and average scroll depth (how much of a Canvas people view). Some advertisers view new metrics real time, pause campaigns to incorporate learnings, and then turn campaigns on again.

The creative community said they want to collaborate and share ideas as part of the workflow. The brand built a creation tool accessible in Pages (where designers and creatives told us they were familiar), and Power Editor (where advertisers were familiar running ads). Plus to accelerate approval time period we built a way to send a preview to a colleague's device