Facebook Lite Advertising experiences

Building ad experiences to meet the needs of everyone on Facebook Lite

Background

The Facebook Lite app is a smaller, lightweight version of Facebook that allows users to save space on their phone and use the app in 2G conditions. Since launching in 2015, Facebook Lite has grown into a substantial Meta platform - with usage most concentrated on high-growth markets like India, Indonesia and Brazil.

Optimising experiences for the internet & device constraints of the Facebook Lite environment.

Key Products:

Building new ad formats for consumers

The Facebook Lite advertiser experience

Building new ad formats for consumers

As Product Designer, I designed the Facebook-Lite specific experience for a range of ad formats. Formats included single image & video ads, image carousel ads, Click-to-Messenger ads, lead generation ads, Page Like ads and ads that contained political content. While these ad formats existed on other platforms, designs were often intentionally changed to accommodate for both design & technical constraints of the Facebook Lite platform. 

Below shows early explorations to understand how Facebook Stories Ads would work on the Facebook Lite app

Considerations

Clear affordance to user interactions

In the time of this project, almost half of Facebook Lite users were completely new to Facebook altogether. It was important therefore that call-to-actions and other user interactions needed to be as clear & explicit as possible in the UI, as New Feed behaviours and other Facebook interactions may not be obvious.

Consistency and clean up

Introducing design iterations that sought to adjust visual spacing and create a stronger typographic hierarchy to the ad units. This work also involved partnership with other Facebook teams seeking to improve the ad format experience on Facebook Android and iOS. 

Negotiating design intent and technical feasibility

As seen in the Facebook Lite Ads format, there was careful consideration around feasibility of gestural support and accompanying screen animation that characterises the Stories experience. Partnering with engineering to arrive at a minimum launch experience that supported an upward swipe gesture by the user, and sliding screen animations both up & down.

The Facebook Lite advertiser experience

As well as designing Facebook Lite specific ads formats, there was a substantial effort to evolve the advertising experience that would empower small businesses to use the app for small-scale campaigns.

Data-driven design changes

A series of design changes were made to the ads creation & management flows, seeking to increase user understanding in the advertising process - lead to more ad campaigns successfully created. These 10+ changes were driven by research & data hypothesis over a 1.5 year time period, leading to more businesses actively advertising using the Facebook Lite app. They included changes to default budget options, clearer call-to-action buttons and in-line education guidance.

Identifying the biggest pain point of payments

Design supported the qualitative research and quantitative data insights that identified the area of difficult payment setup as one of the biggest opportunities to support businesses seeking to advertise on Facebook Lite. These insights provided necessary evidence to support further investment in the Facebook Billing revamp that was being driven as a separate initiative.

Results

While exact figures cannot be shown publicly, below are an indication of the metric types that were used to measure progress, and value added to Facebook Lite advertisers.

-

New ad formats for consumers

Increase in $USD millions / per 7 day average, incremental revenue

Lite iOS & Android revenue coverage increase

Advertiser experiences

% Incremental increase of Active Advertisers (last 7 days)

% increase of ads being created by businesses using Facebook Lite