Introducing the Canvas Creation API

This is Canvas Canvas is a full-screen, mobile experience that lets businesses and creators tell rich stories in a native, post-click environment designed to connect with audiences in a meaningful way. Canvas is tailored towards educating and acquiring customers for advertisers. It also solves the problem of slow website load times by nearly instantaneously loading upon ad click. Canvases can be created via the Canvas builder and are accessible through Page and ads creation interfaces. We are now opening the capability to create Canvases via the API.

Launching the Canvas API With the launch of API access for Canvas creation, we have opened Canvas to our developer community, who can add value by providing advertisers with solutions across a wide array of use cases whether it’s scaling creation, developing templates, or delivering creative insights. The Canvas API lets you take advantage of this mobile solution and build creative, full-screen content for the businesses and agencies you partner with.

Two Use Cases: Improve Brand & Product Education, Drive Customer Acquisition Canvas can be used to improve brand and product awareness, as much as to drive customer acquisition. Two specific use cases for which Canvas is really effective are:

• Convey product/brand benefits and education by enhancing video experience: This use case focuses on advertisers that are interested in telling a story that portrays product benefits in a deeper way, especially for feature-rich products and offerings. Canvas enables them to tell this story in a meaningful fashion by allowing advertisers to layer on an instant experience to their videos in feed.
• Customer Acquisition by bringing landing page on Canvas: This use case focuses more on customer acquisition scenarios. Advertisers often lead users through signups, subscription and acquisition flows through advertisers. Canvas is a great tool to educate potential customers with product benefits before leading them into the website signup flow.

Canvas API Capabilities Canvases are built with a simple set of components that are the building blocks of the experience. We narrowed the creation experience to a minimal set of features that can create powerful and compelling creative experiences, like photo, video, text, button, header, footer, store locator and product set. These flexible Canvas components are all now available through the API .

We know it’s important to understand how people experience Canvases to make them even better. That’s why we built out Canvas-specific metrics , including average view time and average scroll depth (how much of a Canvas people view.) We also added component-level breakdowns, so you can see where people clicked out of the Canvas. This helps businesses and creators make adjustments and iterate quickly.

Innovative Partner Solutions While we were testing functionality, we saw innovative use cases and early success from partners. For example,

Dynamic Canvas Creation at scale: One of our partners, Smartly, has leveraged the API to make Canvas creation easy at scale. Leveraging the API, the partner has 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 in a seamless fashion.

Creative Testing: MakeMeReach has built on top of our API to enhance the creative testing abilities. It allows 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.

Canvas Insights: HYFN has built a Canvas insights tool. They have taken the metrics that are available through the API and overlaid it on Canvas in a visual way that makes decision-making and driving insights about different creative elements easier and actionable.

Other innovation opportunities for partners could be around replacing microsite functionality and extending the video experience. We’re excited to see what you’ll build.

Learn More To learn more and get started, watch the Canvas API overview webinar here . And you can find developer documentation here .