Facebook Ad Size Guidebook 2020

 

Why Tweak Facebook Image Ads To Suit Platform and Placement Type?

As a largely visual culture, consumers respond more favorably to eye-catching, well-designed marketing messages that use static images and bold copy in unexpected ways. However, marketers underestimate the importance of tailoring ads for each social platform and by ad objective, even within a given platform like Facebook. For best results, it is important to tweak copy and redesign or resize every image to meet platform-specific guidelines that keep changing often. However, modifying ad copy, sizing and design to suit your campaign objective and the intended placement is also important to boost CTR, improve recall and better influence your target audience. 

Advertising On Facebook

Though Facebook has lost some of its shine for younger audiences who have gravitated towards Instagram and newer platforms like TikTok, it remains a massively powerful social tool, with 1.62 billion daily active users in 2019. It has a sophisticated advertising system that is super competitive. According to eMarketer forecasts, brands and companies will spend $32.6 billion on Facebook ads by 2020. This is why it becomes necessary to ensure that your banner ads are designed to stand out, and meet Facebook ad size specifications. 

A Guide To Choosing the Correct Placement for Your Facebook Ad

Facebook offers marketers a number of choices depending on their campaign objective. Determine your campaign objective by deciding if your image-based ad is intended to improve awareness, consideration or recall. Learn more about creating ads to suit your objectives here. 

Source: https://adespresso.com/guides/facebook-ads-optimization/campaign-objective/#_

Correct placement of your ads and adherence to Facebook ad size is critical, you may want to use a different placement if you want to push up conversions, target new audiences, drive app installs, increase in-store visits, or retarget past consumers, and, ideally, you want to optimize your design for each placement. 

For instance, newsfeed ads that appear on the desktop are great for engagement, generating sales and leads, because you can use longer copy and add link descriptions. Whereas a mobile newsfeed ad copy is a lot shorter, Facebook only shows customers three lines of copy even in the news feed before it cuts it off, so you want to lead with the most important information first. Desktop Right Columns are priced lower and text is less readable owing to its placement. Using an eye-catching image with very little text may work better if you are running a right column ad, to retarget customers who are already familiar with your brand. 

Leveraging The Power of Single Image Ads 

The most straightforward in design, these simple ad formats feature a single image with or without a link, a small amount of copy and a headline, They’re easy to set up and work with every type of ad objective. Facebook encourages you to use very little text, and keep the amount of text under 20% of the entire creation. Book and album covers, product images that aren’t zoomed in, information-heavy event posters and game ads are some exceptions. Read more about using less text and more image-heavy ads here. 

Customize Your Ad Creative for different kinds of placements with Rocketium’s Image Builder.

Facebook Ad Size by Placement. 

Facebook accepts single image ads and panoramic or 360 image led ads, for a number of marketing objectives, including, reach, brand awareness, traffic, engagement, page likes, event responses, and app installs and offers a wide variety of options to communicate your call to action. Design guidelines differ by placement. Placement options on Facebook include Newsfeed ads, Right Column Ads, Instant Articles, Marketplace, Stories and Search Results. You can also leverage the FB Messenger services to push stories and images, create sponsored messages and more. However, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on telling you about design Facebook ad size pertaining to the six key categories outlined above. 

1. Recommended Facebook Ad Size for Newsfeeds

Supported file types: jpg and png

Image ratio: 1.91:1 to 4:5 

Recommended image size: Upload the highest resolution image available (keep the text under the 20% limit) 

Description text: 125 characters 

Minimum Facebook ad size: 400×500

With Link

Image ratio: 1.91:1 to 1:1

Recommended resolution: at least 1,080 x 1,080px

Dimensions: Minimum Width: 476 pixels; Minimum Height: 249 pixels

Minimum Facebook ad size : 100×100; Maximum Facebook ad size: 191×100

Ad headline: 25 characters

Link description: 30 characters

Mobile Newsfeed ad

Minimum Facebook ad Size: 400×500

For Mobile Ads With Link

Dimension: Minimum Width: 320 pixels

Aspect Ratio: Minimum: 100×100; Maximum: 191×100

Facebook ads that contain images with little to no image text tend to cost less and reach more people than ads with image text. Irrespective of their placement, Facebook prefers images with less than 20% text. In the beginning, to the dismay of some advertisers, the platform would reject outright ads that flouted these rules but nowadays, if your ad image contains more than 20% text, the ad is still allowed to run but may reach fewer people, depending on the rating your creative receives from the Facebook Text Overlay Tool.

Source: https://www.thenextad.com/blog/facebooks-20-rule-explained/ 360 Photo Ads or Panorama Ads On Newsfeed

A 360 photo ad can make viewers feel like they’re immersed in the action. Audiences can interact with the ad and see what they want, how they want. This highly engaging format is already gaining traction amongst advertisers in the auto industry and in the travel industry.

Ads containing panoramic images are tagged by Facebook as it scan pictures and processes camera-specific metadata found in photos taken using 360-ready devices. They may appear on Facebook as an interactive image. Learn more about how to distribute 360 ads here.

source: https://www.omnivirt.com/blog/distribute-360-videos-ads-facebook-sites/ 2. Recommended Facebook Ad Size for Right Column

Right Column ads are a desktop-only format used to generate traffic, push up conversions and increase catalog sales. These ads most commonly appear in the right-hand column of Facebook pages, but they may appear in other areas of the site. The Facebook right column is one of the least used placements but it can be used for remarketing campaigns to improve top-of-mind recall of your product or service. 

Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/image/facebook-right-hand-column Source: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-ad-placements-for-marketers-how-to-make-right-choices/ Design Recommendations

File type: jpg or png

Image ratio: 16:9 to 1:1

Facebook ad size: Min Width: 254 pixels, Min Height: 133 pixels

Maximum Aspect Ratio: 191×100

Recommended resolution: Upload the highest resolution image available.

Text: 125 characters

Recommended resolution: at least 1,200 x 1,200px

Headline: 25 characters

Link Description: 30 characters

Single Image Ad With Link

Facebook ad size: MinWidth : 254 pixels ; Min Height : 133 pixels

Image Aspect Ratio: Min: 100×100; Max : 191×100

3. Recommended Facebook Ad Size for Instant Articles

Facebook first launched Instant Articles in 2015, allowing news content to rest inside its app to make articles load faster for distribution across its network. It was intended as a mobile-optimized strategy that would let publishers monetize their articles in a speedy and hassle-free way. Approved publishers are allowed to place ads within their Instant Articles or choose Instant Articles as a placement option, which will then insert selected ads to be shown to audiences who click on these articles. 

Source: https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-publish-content-with-facebook-instant-articles–cms-28972

But after unexpected changes to its algorithm, by late 2017, many publishers who had hoped to leverage Facebook’s reach to increase readership had largely abandoned this feature. Read more about it here to evaluate if this strategy will work for your business. 

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/24/facebooks-news-not-yours/ Mobile Optimized Design Recommendations: 

File type: jpg or png

Image ratio: 9:16 to 16:9

Recommended resolution: Upload the highest resolution image available.

With Link

Images cropped to 1:1

Recommended resolution: at least 1,200 x 1,200px

Headline: 25 characters

Link Description: 30 characters

Minimum Facebook ad size: 191×100

4. Recommended Ad Size for Marketplace Ads

Facebook Marketplace began in 2016 as an online garage sale, giving competition to Craigslist. Instead of buying and selling through ad-hoc Facebook groups, with Marketplace, anyone can now list a product and connect directly with potential customers in their locality. Over the past few years, Facebook Marketplace has become very popular and is used by 800 million people in 70 countries, every month. 

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/06/facebook-marketplace-ads/

For small businesses, Marketplace ads provide greater access to local markets. Users in nearby areas can see your ads and choose to come to your store, visit your online store or just engage with your social media channels. Facebook automatically optimizes its ads to generate more clicks when a user clicks on your ad, Facebook shows them to other potential customers who have similar demographics, improving the discoverability of your product or service, rapidly. 

Design Recommendations

File type: jpg or png

Image ratio: 9:16 to 16:9

Recommended resolution: Upload the highest resolution image available.

Text: 125 characters

With Link

Images may be cropped to 1:1

Recommended Facebook ad size: at least 1,200 x 1,200px

Headline: 25 characters

Link Description: 30 characters

5. Recommended Facebook Ad Size for Stories

As per a Techcrunch article, one-third of Facebook’s 1.56 billion daily users are posting or watching Stories each day. COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that 3 million advertisers have now bought Stories ads across Facebook’s family of apps, and those figures are just for the early part of 2019. Almost a year on, Stories have become way more popular and increasingly more effective in building brand awareness and improving brand recall along with conversions. Facebook now allows marketers to add customer links to their Facebook Stories, so they can drive audiences back to their site and grow traffic. All you need to get started are vertical, full-screen, mobile-friendly creatives. 

With easy-to-use features, a prime viewing location on Facebook’s News Feed, and ample opportunity to promote their brand, more and more businesses are buying Stories-led ads. These ads appear in between user-generated Stories. Photo Stories are visible for 5 seconds or until the user swipes out of the story. 

Facebook recommends that advertisers leave roughly 14% (250 pixels) of the top and bottom of the image free from text and logos to avoid covering these key elements with the profile icon or call-to-action. This means, if your video is 1080×1920, ensure key elements appear within a 1080×1420 title-safe area.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/facebook-stories-500-million/

Image ratios: 1.91 to 9:16

Keep text to under 20% of the entire creative

For Mobile Single Image Driven Stories

Minimum width: 500 pixels

Facebook ad size: Minimum: 90×160; Max: 191×100

Aspect Ratio Tolerance: 0.01

6. Recommended Facebook Ad Size for Search Results

Want to drive traffic, increase catalog sales and conversions for your business? Explore Facebook Search Results Ads. A relatively new offering, this is an additional placement option when creating news feed campaigns. Facebook search ads, like newsfeed ads, are clearly labeled with a “Sponsored” tag, but unlike Google ads, currently, there is no option for advertisers to target specific keywords or phrases with these ads. They appear as a static image or as part of a carousel ad when a user’s search terms are related to your business offerings. One way to optimize for better reach is to make sure the various keywords appear somewhere on your business’s Facebook Page. 

Design Recommendations

File type: jpg or png

Image ratio: 1.91:1

Minimum Image Width in Pixels: 600

Minimum Image Height in Pixels: 600

Recommended resolution: Upload the highest resolution image available.

Headline: 25 characters

Link Description: 30 characters

Text: 125 characters

With Link

Recommended Facebook ad size: at least 1,080 x 1,080px

Explore Rocketium’s automated Image Builder to quickly generate stunning banner ads, and modify one creative to suit different ad placements, and meet Facebook’s guidelines. We hope that you found this guide useful to understand Facebook’s ad inventory better. Now, you can design more effective ad creatives and pick placement options that are optimized to suit your campaign objectives. Comment to share your own tips on how you pick the right placement to suit your business and share this article with your network. 

Originally posted on Rocketium.