Don’t use clip art in your Facebook campaigns, your creative has to be just that – CREATIVE Once upon a time, Facebook Ads had less stringent set of guidelines when it came to creative. Images could have writing and logos throughout and videos could be…well, close to anything you desired. Nowadays Facebook has stricter guidelines…
Don’t use clip art in your Facebook campaigns, your creative has to be just that – CREATIVE
Once upon a time, Facebook Ads had less stringent set of guidelines when it came to creative. Images could have writing and logos throughout and videos could be…well, close to anything you desired.
Nowadays Facebook has stricter guidelines when it comes to Ads. This is what we interpret as quality control on Facebook’s part. A wider strategy to encourage advertisers to use higher quality and engaging content in campaigns. Regardless of what format your ads are, they must now adhere to general guidelines such as:
Aspect ratio: 16:9 or 1:1 Video: H.264 video compression, high-profile preferred, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan Format: .mp4 container ideally with leading moov atom, no edit lists Audio: Stereo AAC audio compression, 128 kbps + preferred Caption length text: Text only, max. 2,200 characters Recommended aspect ratio: 1:1 / 1.33:1 / 4:3 / SDTV, 1.375:1 / Film, 1.77:1 / 16:9 / HDTV, 1.85:1 / Film, 2:39:1 or 2:40:1 / Widescreen / 9:16, no pillarboxing or letterboxing Length: 120 minutes max. Thumbnail image ratio: Should match the aspect ratio of your video. Your image should include a minimal amount of text. Minimum resolution: 600 x 315 pixels (1.9:1 landscape)/600 x 600 pixels (square) File size: Up to 4GB max. Frames: 30 fps max. Formats supported: 3g2 (Mobile Video) 3gp (Mobile Video) 3gpp (Mobile Video) asf (Windows Media Video) avi (AVI Video) dat (MPEG Video) divx (DIVX Video) dv (DV Video) f4v (Flash Video) flv (Flash Video) m2ts (M2TS Video) m4v (MPEG-4 Video) mkv (Matroska Format) mod (MOD Video) mov (QuickTime Movie) mp4 (MPEG-4 Video) mpe (MPEG Video) mpeg (MPEG Video) mpeg4 (MPEG-4 Video) mpg (MPEG Video) mts (AVCHD Video) nsv (Nullsoft Video) ogm (Ogg Media Format) ogv (Ogg Video Format) qt (QuickTime Movie) tod (TOD Video) ts (MPEG Transport Stream) vob (DVD Video) wmv (Windows Media Video) ACHTUNG! bolded needs dot points
Bit rate: No limit to bit rate file if you’re using two-pass encoding, as long as your file doesn’t exceed 1 GB. Otherwise, 8 megabits per second for 1080p and 4 megabits per second for 720p.
Facebook is also very strict about how much text you can use in your creative and will penalise the delivery of ads with ‘too much’ text (inclusive of logos). You can read more about how much text you can use here.
So what have we learnt?
Facebook Ads have to be creative, engaging AND high quality. Don’t be that business that uses MS Paint in ad campaigns. Just don’t.
Are you worried that your creative abilities may not be up to scratch?That’s okay, not everyone is a creative professional but with these free-to-use tools, you’re one step closer:
Canva: A free graphic-design tool web application. It has an easy to use UX and provides access to over a million photographs, graphics, fonts and other resources. Animoto: A cloud-based video creation service that produces video from photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows. Audacity: Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems.
