Facebook Video Ads Guide

Key Takeaways

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 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 suggested 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 a human being 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 plat form 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 account got disabled because we haven't run any campaigns in a long time so there's 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 want to discuss today whenever you create a new campaign in Facebook there are going to be six objectives if you're not familiar with these objectives or 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 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 it's going to have video views that are compatible with it and then 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 creative tab I'm going to skip past the identity portion and go right down to 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 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 an instream video in the middle doesn't have any sort of warning but if you can look on the left you'll see that stories reals ads on Facebook reels apps and sites recommends a 9 by6 aspect ratio if I scroll down a little bit that should show you a little bit better that 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 16x9 size which is more of a landscape than anything as you can see here by the grade 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 to1 16x9 1:1 4x5 and 9x6 just so you can get an idea of what each of these look 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 by6 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 Rec commend for each so for Facebook feed they recommend one to one for images but 4x5 for videos same thing is true for a number of other placements in the feeds column but then as you scroll down you'll see 9 by6 is recommended for all of the different stories placements because that's going to look better on a 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 16x9 ratio 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 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 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 only be 5 to 10 seconds instream video on 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 2 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 doesn't mean that you have to completely abandon that 240 minute 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 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 reals 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 also a couple 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 for doing some sort of prospecting campaign they'll see our logo the 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-second video if I wanted it to run for the whole thing just drag this all the way over here and now it'll run the entire time or if I want it to be only at the end I can carry that over and it'll 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 this 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 it'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 people are using a mobile device so making sure that you have the right 9x6 aspect ratio in place it's 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 we 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 this same Builder here you probably noticed earlier that there's a caption section and there are a couple of ways you can add captions to your videos that's 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 the sound turned off they will be able to see the text itself now 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 go 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 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 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 p 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 Facebook feed if I scroll down a little bit you'll see text recommendations it says 125 for primary text 27 for headline 27 for 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 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 audience 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 just need to go to create audience custom audience then you're going to use the meta source of 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 through 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'll 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 and 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 thanks for watching our video we really appreciate it if you liked it give us a thumbs up below if you really liked it maybe think about subscribing to the paid media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops if you really really liked it you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf as well as looking at the super thanks button