Facebook Video Ads Guide

Over the past few years, it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that Facebook and Instagram, as a result, are starting to prefer video creative over the other ad formats, whether it’s a single image or carousel. So because of that shift, I think it’s really important that all advertisers know how to make the most of their video ads on the Facebook platform.

So in this video, I’m going to give you a number of our suggestions tested best practices, show you how to set up a video views campaign, and a number of other pieces. So let this serve as your Facebook video ads guide!

The first thing I want to talk about is why we should use Facebook video ads in the first place. And there are three pretty basic reasons as to why I think they should at least be part of your ad format rotation on Facebook.

And the first is that they are very attention-grabbing. Just as human beings, we can probably all agree that a video is more captivating than a single-image ad. Something that moves has any sort of color variation, potentially has sound, is probably just more captivating in general than a picture of something that doesn’t move or have sound or change at all.

So just from a brand perspective, you have a better chance of catching somebody’s attention using Facebook video ads. Second, you have more control. And what I mean by this is not necessarily the fields in Facebook about what text you can use, about what sizes, all that sort of thing.

What I mean is that you have more control over your brand message because you are using video, something that can change. You can tell a story in your ad messaging rather than just using again a single image ad or a carousel to try and convey that same message. There’s a lot more opportunity for you to connect with your potential customer simply because you’re using a video format instead of another one.

And then lastly, Facebook usually prefers video ads. If you’ve been running Facebook campaigns over the past couple of years or over the past decade like I have, you’ve probably noticed that video ads are taking a larger impression count than single images and carousels in most Facebook advertising campaigns.

Now it’s not to say across the board. Facebook always prefers video ads, but it does seem to be trending that direction to where more often, Facebook will show a video rather than a single image or a carousel ad format for one of many different reasons, which we won’t get into today.

So now that we’ve talked about why you should use Facebook ads let’s hop into the platform and start putting together an example campaign where I’ll show you what all video ads can do as well as talk about a number of the best practices as we’re going through it!

We’re going to be in a client account today because Joe and I’s Facebook accounts got disabled because we haven’t run any campaigns in a long time. So there are going to be some things that need to be blurred out. But I’m going to do my best to try and use things that don’t. That way, you can see all of the different tools available to get started. Let’s create a new Campaign, and this brings us to the first thing that I want to discuss today!

Whenever you create a new campaign on Facebook, there are going to be six objectives. If you’re not familiar with these objectives where this ordering looks different to you, we have a video that covers all of these Facebook campaign objectives that you can check out at the top of the screen right now. But for this video, what I want you to know is you can use Facebook video ads in every single one of these campaign objectives.

They’re compatible with all of them. So regardless if you want to run brand awareness campaigns, generate leads, or promote your app, any of them will allow you to use a video ad on the Facebook platform. For the sake of keeping this video under 6 hours long, I’m not going to run through all of the different campaign objectives and talk about video ads.

Instead, I’m going to focus on just the campaign that matches up to the previous video views objective just to show you how you can create it and because I mentioned it in the intro. So for a video views objective, you come down to Engagement. You’ll see here, down to the right, that’s going to have video views that are compatible with it. And let’s go ahead and click continue.

Again, for sake of time, I’m going to skip over a couple of steps. The first being that I’m going to set this campaign up to send users to a website, and then we’re going to jump right to the creatives tab. I’m going to skip past the identity portion and go right down to the ad setup. For video ads, you can use an ad that is already existing if you want to find it, but I’m not going to do that today. I’m going to focus on mostly just the format and then all of the different ad creative pieces below.

So for a video ad, you probably figured out that we need to choose a single image or video. You can utilize videos in carousels and collection ads, but I’m not talking about those today. I really want to talk about just the single video ad because I think that can still be highly impactful and probably the one that most people are trying to use anyway.

So since that’s already selected for me, I’m just going to keep scrolling down. Now we can add media to our campaigns. We can do this either through adding something from the library, so adding an image or a video. Or you can create a video utilizing Facebook’s video creation tool. Just like with the campaign objectives. We already have a video that goes through how this Facebook video creation tool works.

So if you’re interested in using this rather than manually uploading a video, check out the video at the top of the screen right now and then meet us back at the end when we start talking about best practices. For now, I’m going to just choose Add Media and Add Video again, trying to make sure we don’t have to blur out too much. I’m going to use the Paid Media Pros Facebook page and choose this video that has Joe in it and select Ad Media.

And this is going to bring us to our first best practice for Facebook video ads, and that’s to, more often than not, use a vertical or square video aspect ratio. Depending on the placement around the Facebook ad network, square and vertical video ads are going to have the best chance to show in the most flattering light around the network.

As you can see in this example, the original of this is Square, so the Feeds and Instagram video in the middle doesn’t have any sort of warning. But if you can look on the left, you’ll see that Stories, Reels Ads on Facebook, Reels, Apps, and Sites recommend a 9/16 aspect ratio. If I scroll down a little bit, that should show you a little bit better. But that is effectively the size of a phone because, more often than not, people on Facebook are accessing it from a mobile device.

The only place where they don’t recommend either square or vertical video is going to be over here, off to the right, and that is for right-column search results and Instant Articles. Here they’re going to recommend the 16/9 size, which is more of a landscape than anything, as you can see here by the grayed-out images off to the right and the left of Joe’s face. But you’ll also notice that a Square video by itself doesn’t look that bad there.

And I believe that’s why Facebook suggests utilizing square or vertical because those two are going to cover the higher volume placements of Stories and Reels, as well as Feeds and Instream for videos, and then right-column search results and Instant Articles can benefit from a square size as well.

Now, I’m not going to lie. There are quite a lot of different aspect ratios on Facebook. Here are all of the different sizes that Facebook can support. So a 1.91:1, 6:9, 1:1, 4:5, and 9:16, just so you can get an idea of what each of these looks like on a mobile device. But depending on which placement you’re trying to optimize for, there is an entire help section that talks about all of the different placements and the different aspect ratios that are good for video.

Now, unfortunately, Facebook has tried to put up this super unhelpful help section right over the 9/16 column. So it’s a little bit difficult to see. Doesn’t really matter what size I make this screen. It’s always kind of hovering over that. But if you can find this page for yourself, you’ll be able to see the different ratios up on the top and the different placements and what they recommend for each.

So for Facebook feed, they recommend 1:1 for images but 4:5 for videos. The same thing is true for a number of other placements in the feeds column, but then as you scroll down, you’ll see  9/16 is recommended for all of the different stories placements because that’s going to look better on the phone.

So all this is to say that the more you’re able to resize and crop your video to fit into each of these different spaces, the better it’s going to look. In theory, if you’ve created the same video, but you have it in all different aspect ratios, at this stage, all you need to do is come down to replace, and you can replace it with another video from the library, which could be the 16:9. Or you could simply crop the existing video to fit into the space the way you want it to.

So depending on the placement, you can customize the videos to fit into each one. For now, I’m just going to click next and click done. Now that we know the aspect ratios that we need to use, I want to talk about the length requirements for Facebook video ads. That brings us to our second best practice, which is going to be that we want to keep videos relatively short on average.

As I mentioned, video ads are pretty engaging. We all know that as human beings, and we also as human beings, probably know that long videos can be really boring, especially when they’re ad promotions. It’s very rare that an ad video will capture my attention for longer than 30 seconds. Just really doesn’t happen!

So because of that, Facebook wants you to keep your videos short. But not only do they want you to keep them short because of the attention span, but because there are length requirements within each of the different placements. And some videos that are longer than certain time frames won’t show in different placements. I don’t think a lot of people know that.

One of the typical notes that you always see is that Facebook will allow you to run a video up to 240 minutes. But I bet you didn’t know that Instream video on mobile can only be 5 to 10 seconds. Instream video on the desktop can only be 5 to 15. Facebook Stories can only be 1 to 15 seconds. Instagram can be anywhere from 1 to 120 seconds.

If your videos are longer than any of these different maximum lengths, they won’t show in these placements. So if you have a video that’s 121 seconds long, which is basically two minutes and 1 second, it will not show on Instagram. So depending on which of these placements you’re trying to run your video creatives, make sure that you have your video length contracted accordingly.

Now the good part is that it doesn’t mean that you have to completely abandon that 240 minutes video that you wanted to run back in our sample Facebook ad. If you want to come edit the media itself, you can come down here to edit the video, and as you can see here, you can change it for the different aspect ratios, but you can also trim the video itself.

Right now, I’m editing 19 placements, but if you wanted to adjust it for a single placement or a group of placements, let’s say stories and reels, I could come over here to this pencil. Now I’m editing for only seven placements and come down to trim. Then I can drag the ends of the video to make it shorter than it was before.

So I can find just the most impactful 3.8 seconds of this video and run only that as the ad creative in these seven placements. You can do the same thing for the other placements that are on there. And if you wanted to, you could even do that by individual placement, by adjusting Instagram stories compared to Instagram, reels compared to messenger stories. You can customize each one of these simply by using that trim tool.

So make sure that your video is the right length to not only be impactful and capture attention but also so that you can actually run in each of those individual placements. The next best practice is to make sure that you pack the first portion of your video with your brand and product and any engaging messaging to try and make sure that you make the most of the first few seconds.

You’re always trying to make sure that you’re getting somebody to stop scrolling on Facebook or on Instagram, and using the first few seconds to be really attention-grabbing and get your brand name in there will make sure that you maximize those chances. Because either you’re going to entice them to continue watching the video, or they will have some impression of your brand name and potentially logo as well.

So that later if they’re making any purchase in your specific industry, they’ll probably have some recognition and have a higher chance of working with you in the future. So while you can do this with the video creative itself, whatever ends up being part of your video, your creative team puts it together, and that’s part of the script and the visuals, all that stuff. There are also a couple of things you can do in the Facebook ad platform to help make the first few seconds of your ad impactful.

So again, we’re going to come up to edit media, edit video, and the first thing you can do is to customize the thumbnail. The thumbnail is going to be the image that shows before a video starts and after it ends. Right now, there’s an automatic thumbnail, and it’s going to be that picture of Joe’s face because that’s the one that it’s going to use.

But if I wanted to upload one manually, I could either choose a thumbnail from the video itself, which it gives you a lot of different versions of Joe’s face, and that’s more than I ever want to see in a single day. But I can upload, and now the thumbnail is going to be the Paid Media Pros logo. This is what’s going to show before the video runs and what shows after it.

So rather than seeing just Joe’s face, which people might not associate with Paid Media Pros, especially if we’re doing some sort of prospecting campaign, they’ll see our logo, the brand name, and then the video will progress to show Joe’s face. So people will at least start to recognize Paid Media Pros and associate Joe with the brand as well, even if they don’t take anything else away from the video.

The next thing you can do is run a logo overlay. So again, I went through and chose the Paid Media Pros logo from the list that was available simply, so we didn’t have to blur out everything from the client account. But here you’ll see that the Paid Media Pros logo will be superimposed on the video, and it’s currently set to run for the first 3 seconds of the 14 seconds video.

If I wanted it to run for the whole thing, just drag this all the way over here, and now it will run the entire time. Or if I want it to be only at the end, I can carry that over, and it will only run toward the end of the video.

So depending on how often you want the logo to run, you can have it added here. You can then choose the position that you want it. So depending on what looks best for your video, that probably looks best for ours. You can place the logo, and then you can also choose a specific size.

So whether it’s through the video itself, the specific messaging you’re using, or if you’re leaning into a thumbnail or a logo overlay, make sure that the beginning of your video has your brand, ideally your product, and then any type of engaging messaging as much as possible at the very beginning.

The next couple of best practices, I think, go together. So I grouped them that way, and that’s going to be to design for mobile first and design for Sound off. As we talked about with the aspect ratio piece, more and more people are using a mobile device. So making sure that you have the right 9/16 aspect ratio in place is going to be really useful.

But additionally, we need to assume that people are going to have the Sound off. Only really annoying people or old people have their phone playing their Facebook feed on full blast. Everybody else has things turned off or way down, and they probably are not going to get the audio message that you have in your ads unless you give them a little help.

So in the same builder here, you probably noticed earlier that there is a caption section, and there are a couple of ways you can add captions to your videos that are going to be to upload your own using an SRT file, which I will admit I have never used. But they can be really easy if you can develop them really quickly and upload your own because you know that they are accurate to start, or you can generate captions automatically with Facebook. So let’s go ahead and click this one!

Now you can see here that we have the video on this side that we can play and run through and hear the Sound for. Not going to do that right now. But then, off to the right, we have all the different captions and text that are showing up for it. So you can either play what that segment is, you can get rid of it, you can adjust the start and end times of when you want this text to show up, then you can adjust the text itself.

More often than not, Facebook is about 75% accurate on these automated captions, and all you really need to do is go through, review them, make sure that they look right, make any adjustments that you need on timing or the text itself and then click Save to video. And then those captions will always show up with your video so that even if somebody has a sound turned off, they will be able to see the text itself.

And the other way that you can make your ads more enticing, even if the Sound is off, is to use this text overlay. I specifically did this after the captions because I want you to see where this write something text shows up. This shows up pretty much right where the captions would be showing up on the video as well.

The builder for it is going to be very similar to what we just did with captions and the timing that we have here. You can add more, but it’s also going to have some of the different controls that the logo overlay did. You can choose the position. You can also choose the text size, the font, and the color of it.

So because you can already see what the example looks like here, I’m not going to go through making an example, but I have just a couple of points. First, make sure that these are not being shown over your captions. You probably only need one set of text on the screen at a time because people can’t read two things at once.

So if you have captions running, make sure that you don’t have a text overlay at the same time. But a text overlay can be great if your video doesn’t actually have any text. There are plenty of videos out there where people just have some sort of music running, and they have imagery to tell the story.

You can use text overlay to make sure that people are getting the message that you’re trying to convey with your video. Once you’re done making all of the different optimizations to your video ads in here, you would just need to click save. I haven’t changed anything, so it’s not going to let me hit save.

And then the remaining portion of your creative is also going to be down here. And again, this text helps you engage with users who have the sound off or who are trying to get additional messaging on top of the text and the message that you have in the video itself. Just like all other Facebook ads, you have the primary text, the headline, and the description.

The only thing I want to make you aware of, and for this, I jumped into the Facebook Business Ads guide, is that depending on the placement, you’re going to have different text recommendations. So right now, I’ve chosen my Facebook feed. If I scroll down a little bit, you’ll see text recommendations. It says 125 characters for primary text, 27 for the headline, 27 for the description. But if I scroll up a little bit and change this to, I don’t know, Instagram stories, then I scroll down again to text recommendations. It only shows the primary text and 125 characters.

So again, as unfortunate as it is, all of the different text recommendations are going to be different depending on which placements you’re choosing. So ideally, as you’re putting together your ads, try and make sure that you’re using messaging that can resonate in each of the different ad placements and also still supports all of the different video creatives that you have and that you’ve constructed for each of those different places as well.

I’m going to skip all the different destination parts because those will be different based on your campaign objective. But once you’re finished with your ad, you just click Publish, and your campaign will run just like it would for any other ad creative. But that’s not the last best practice that we have for video ads.

Facebook allows you to retarget users who engage with your videos, and I want you to always make sure that you’re at least creating the audiences, even if you’re not using them to retarget those people who have watched your videos. I’m in the audience portion of Facebook Business Manager, and to create these video view audiences, you just need to go to create an audience custom audience. Then you’re going to use the meta source of the video. Click next.

And now, you get to choose the engagement type of the video engagement audience. From the drop-down, you can choose people who viewed 3 seconds of your video, 10 seconds, anybody who did a thorough play, which is either the whole video or at least 15 seconds.

And then, you have different percentage brackets of 25, 50, 75, and 95% of your video. So let’s assume I want to retarget people who watched 15 seconds of the video or more. Now, we have this option selected here, and if I leave everything the way it is now, I will be targeting everybody who watched any of my videos to completion or for at least 15 seconds.

But if you only have a select number of videos that you want to use for this, you can come up to choose videos, and then you can select the specific videos that you want people to have watched a through play or 15 seconds on.

So if I only want this one, this one, and this one, I can do that, and then I can click Confirm, and I will be making an audience out of the people who watched only these three videos. You can then set the retention date, give it a name, a description if you want, then you can apply that audience to your campaigns to retarget people who have already seen your videos.

I’m a big fan of the different engagement audience types on Facebook, and I think that they are underutilized because people don’t see them quite the same as retargeting lists of people who’ve been to your website. But in a lot of ways, depending on how much of your video they watched, people probably have more an idea of what you do from watching your videos from your ad campaigns or from your organic Facebook page than they do from visiting your website.

So here again are the Facebook video ads best practices that we would like to see everybody pay attention to in their ads accounts. And as we walked through in this video, there are tons of different ways to customize your video in the Facebook ad platform that doesn’t require your creative team to put in hours and hours more just to make sure that everything looks good in each placement.

So don’t hesitate to use those tools or even create a video completely from scratch using the Facebook Video builder that we talked about earlier, just like any other video on this channel. If you have any questions about Facebook video ads or any other thing about Facebook ads, feel free to leave us a note in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan