The complete guide to Facebook video specs

Odds are, whether you’re an ecomm giant or a tiny mom and pop, you know about the value (and necessity) of Facebook advertising these days. With new ad formats popping up on the reg, it can be confusing to keep up.

We’ve put together this ultimate guide to Facebook video specs and advertising specs to make it even easier for you to know what Facebook’s requirements are, advice from the experts, plus key metrics you need to know to measure your success with Facebook advertising.

With worrying about pixels and video lengths off your mind, you can spend your time making punchy, dynamic Facebook ads that show off your biz and drive revenue.

Let’s get started.

Here’s everything you need to know about Facebook video

When it comes to video ads, Facebook recommends a length of 15 seconds or less. While captions and sound are both optional, they’re highly encouraged. Plus, sound and closed captions make your content more accessible, allowing more people to enjoy the videos you’ve created. 

What are the types of Facebook video ads?

For all of Facebook’s video ad formats, you can choose between a dropdown of objectives (like brand awareness or conversion) and calls-to-action (like “buy now” or “learn more”).

Facebook Feed video

A Facebook Feed video shows up in your main newsfeed and includes a callout that your ad is sponsored. Use video here to highlight a product and how it works, or tell the story of your business or company.

Recommended Facebook Feed video ad specs:

• File Type: MP4, MOV or GIF 
• Video Duration: 1 second to 241 minutes
• Maximum File Size: 4GB
• Ratio: 4:5 
• Video Settings: H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan and stereo AAC audio compression at 128kbps+
• Resolution: At least 1080 x 1080 pixels 
• Captions and sound: optional but recommended

Facebook Stories 

Like Instagram’s namesake Stories, Facebook Stories are also vertical ads that play for a maximum of 15 seconds per frame. Facebook specifies that their Stories appear between organic Stories, and they recommend leaving 250 pixels of the top and bottom of the video free so that your creative doesn’t cut into your CTA.

Recommended Facebook Stories video ad specs:

• File Type: MP4, MOV or GIF 
• Video Duration: 1 second to 2 minutes 
• Maximum File Size: 4GB
• Minimum Width: 500 pixels
• Ratio: 9:16 
• Video Settings: H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan and stereo AAC audio compression at 128kbps+
• Resolution: At least 1080 x 1080 pixels

Facebook Instant Articles

For approved publishers, Facebook Instant Articles is a way to place ads promoting an article. Some users lean on Instant Articles to share editorial content related to their products and services. Movement and sound is encouraged for Instant Articles to capture audience attention quickly.

Recommended Facebook Instant Article video ad specs:

• File Type: MP4, MOV or GIF 
• Video Duration: 1 second to 241 minutes
• Ratio: 16:9 
• Video Settings: H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan and stereo AAC audio compression at 128kbps+
• Resolution: At least 1080 x 1080 pixels 
• Captions: Not currently supported by Facebook

Facebook In-Stream video 

Facebook created In-Stream video as a way to share video ads with users who are already watching video on Facebook and Facebook Live streams. In-stream videos are mobile-only ads, and videos of 15 seconds or less get played to completion. After 15 seconds, a “Continue Watching” CTA will appear on your In Stream video.

Recommended Facebook In-Stream video ad specs:

• File Type: MP4, MOV or GIF 
• Video Duration: 5 seconds to 10 minutes
• Max file size: 4 GB
• Ratio: 16:9 or 1:1 
• Video Settings: H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan and stereo AAC audio compression at 128kbps+
• Resolution: At least 1080 x 1080 pixels 

Facebook Marketplace video 

Stand out on Facebook Marketplace by using video to sell your goods and services. Ecommerce businesses and small businesses can create their own sponsored ads to appeal to shoppers while they’re already using Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Marketplace videos follow a lot of the same constraints of other ad formats. Sound, captions, and dynamic movement is highly encouraged.

Recommended Facebook Marketplace video ad specs:

• File Type: MP4, MOV or GIF 
• Video Duration: 1 second to 241 minutes
• Maximum File Size: 4GB
• Ratio: 4:5 
• Video Settings: H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan and stereo AAC audio compression at 128kbps+
• Resolution: At least 1080 x 1080 pixels 

Facebook ad templates we love

Show off your brand with an introductory video to who you are, what you do, and the mission that drives you. Customizable ratios mean you can use templates for Facebook Stories or create in-feed videos.  

If you’re an up-and-coming ecomm brand, use this fun, animated Facebook template to show off your business.

Use organic Facebook videos to amplify the voices of other creators, like this template we love. Sometimes, it’s the free content you create that will resonate most with your audience.

Simply swap out creative with your own (or use our limitless stock library!) to advertise your store, whether your goal is brand awareness or conversion, like how this template promotes a new product arrival or hyped-up launch.

Create a Facebook Carousel video advertising your products with dynamic motion and sound, like this product ad template.

You can also use a guided template to speed up the video-making process even more. Answer a few short questions, upload media, and voila — our AI-powered software will create an impactful Facebook video ad that follows all of Facebook’s guidelines.

Tips for your next Facebook ad campaign from the experts

Unsure how to create a meaningful, high-performing ad campaign on Facebook? Don’t worry — we asked the experts for you. We interviewed digital marketers from early career social media managers to the C-suite for their insights on creating Facebook ad campaigns that work.

Facebook advertising tips from a Digital Marketing Strategist

“Test everything from the creative imagery and copy to the targeting and placement options. Without data, it’s very easy to rely on your own assumptions about who the audience is, what they will respond to, and when they will interact.”

Shelby Cunningham, Digital Marketing Strategist, Sprout Social

Shelby Cunningham, a B2B marketer at Sprout Social, recommends placing a Facebook pixel on your ads to monitor traffic and open the door for audience retargeting. In digital marketing, showing your work is key to getting more resources and proving your value.

As a small business owner wearing many (or all) hats, Shelby mentions how difficult it can be dedicate time to a social strategy, which is why paid is a great way to extend the reach of organic efforts. Shelby recommends the following three-prong approach

1. Set up a regular publishing cadence on Facebook.
2. Supplement your efforts with boosting posts to increase visibility on your organic content strategy.
3. Reference organic performance to guide the content of ads. For example, if there is high audience engagement with organic posts of behind-the-scenes or educational content that knowledge can be used as inspiration for an ad on the same topic.

Facebook advertising tips from a VP of Marketing

“Don’t forget to include a call-to-action (CTA). Don’t just say how great your product or service is. Ask them to come in, test drive, try a new menu item, support a local business.”

Cathy McPhillips, VP of Marketing at Content Marketing Institute

Cathy McPhillips, VP of Marketing at Content Marketing Institute, has some advice for small business owners running their own Facebook strategy. McPhillips emphasizes the critical importance of keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of FB ads, including its “new rules and limitations…even if there are others who have [a] hand in targeting strategy and creative.”

In other words, even if you’re a VP, you should keep a pulse on what’s going on in the world of Facebook advertising.

Facebook advertising tips from a dedicated FB strategist

Monica Louie knows Facebook Ads. She’s founder of her own company that analyzes and maximizes your Facebook ad performance. Monica stresses the importance of patience as you enter the wide world of Facebook advertising.

“The Facebook algorithm is powerful, but you need to give it some time to work, so have patience while you run your tests and let an ad run (without touching it!) for at least 3-4 days. We typically see that costs start higher but decrease over time as the algorithm acquires more data about who is engaging with your ad.”

Monica Louie, Facebook and Instagram Strategist

What are Boosted Posts, and how do I use them?

It is easy to confuse Boosted Posts with regular Facebook Ads and “Promoted Posts.” They look extremely similar, just like your average Facebook update tagged with the word “sponsored.”

The main difference between a Boosted Post and an in-feed Facebook Ad is that a Boosted Post exists first on your page and appears higher up on your audience’s News Feed (when paid for). You can boost a post to three main audiences:

• Boost to only your Fans
• Boost a post to your Fans and their Friends
• Boost a post to a selected audience through targeting

When you natively upload your video content and activate it to go live on your company Facebook page, you also have the opportunity to boost your video post.

With Facebook Ads you can only create and activate this level of content from the Facebook Ads Manager (an entirely different screen, page and price point for advertising) and the content does not have to be something that is organic to your page and natively uploaded, it can be taken from another source, shared, re-shared content.

The cost of your post depends on how many people you want your ‘boost’ to reach. You can boost and change the amount of your campaign depending on your marketing goals and how many impressions (views, shares, comments, likes) you want your post to receive.

Key metrics to consider when analyzing your Facebook ad results

When you run ads on Facebook, you of course have to look at the basic indicators such as the number of likes, shares, comments, reach and so on, but also what happened after your target audience interacted with your ad by tracking the action on your website or app, like the number of email signups or installs, purchases, and leads.

That’s where Facebook’s ad metrics can get confusing and overwhelming. These seven metrics are relevant to most businesses. Understanding these will help you get a pulse on your Facebook ad performance (so you can continually optimize and lower your ad costs)!

Impressions

Impressions correspond to the amount of times your ad has been seen. Impressions are equal or higher than reach, which gives you the number of how many people were exposed to your message.

The number of impressions is a key metric when it comes to brand awareness campaigns as it directly gives you the amount of times your message has been spread out there on social media.

As a general rule: the bigger and the more central your ad is, the more expensive it is. That’s why advertising in the news feed on Facebook will have a higher CPM (cost per mille, or the cost for a thousand impression), than other ad placements.

Even if your primary goal is to drive conversions, or email signups, keeping an eye on total impressions in relation to your global reach will indicate how frequently your ad appears.

When the frequency is higher than one, that means people have been exposed to your ad multiple times. If people get exposed multiple times to your ads (a frequency higher than 1.3) that probably means that your targeted audience is rather small.

Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS is your revenue divided by your total ad spend. It gives you a pretty good idea of how profitable your ad was.

A ratio of 100% means that you broke even. Below that means that you spent more on ads than they generated, and more than 100% means that you got more money than the amount you spent.

This is only a relevant metric to track if you are running a campaign that is directly selling something. Of course, if you are advertising your brand or just raising awareness, you may not have ROAS of a 100% or more.

ROAS might not be a metric to look at if you are running an ad for email signups or lead acquisition. Though email signups might not be an immediate source of revenue for your business, you can assume if an ad would be profitable or not depending on the lifetime value of a subscriber.

For example, if you spent $100 on an ad and got 4 new leads, and these leads will end up spending $40 each on your products during the year, we can say that the ROAS is above 100%. However, if you looked at it right after your ad ended, the ROAS you saw was 0%.

And that’s what ROAS is for most marketers. However, it is very unlikely that Facebook ads are the only cost of your business. That means that not only your ads should generate more than what they cost, but they should also create more value than what your business cost to run.

That means that your actual ROAS can be calculated by dividing your revenue by the sum of your total ad spend and all your other costs (think of softwares, employees, stocks, products to buy, freelancers and so on).

But the result is roughly the same: if it gives you a ratio of more than a 100%, you’re profitable.

Lifetime value (LTV)

LTV is not directly provided by Facebook, but it is an estimate calculated by multiplying the average customer value with the average customer lifespan.The lifetime value of a customer is the projected revenue that the customer will generate during their lifetime.

It is the average value that a customer would generate from the moment they become a lead, to the moment they either stop being a customer, or exit your funnel.

It is quite hard and complex to come up with a specific formula to calculate the lifetime value of a customer as it highly depends on your business model and on the sort of product that you are selling (subscription base, one-time purchase, e-commerce, etc.).

By understanding and by knowing the lifetime value of your leads, you can get a better understanding of your ROAS with lead generation campaigns as that ratio will become relevant. If the lifetime value of a lead is $140 and generating that lead cost you $100, then your ad should be profitable – as the lifetime value is an average and/or an estimate.

It is, of course, always crucial to work on improving the lifetime value of your customers. However, if that value reaches a plateau, you can always work on getting more customers to increase the revenue of your company.

There’s a limited amount of things your customers can buy and if your conversion rates are already good and optimized, there might not be a lot of leeway that you can play with to improve that average value per customer.

Cost per Purchase

Cost per purchase is calculated per ad and it will give you the amount of money you spent on an ad to get a purchase. If you have the Facebook pixel installed on your site or app SDK implemented (which we highly recommend you do), this metric is tracked automatically.

A successful ad is one that yields a cost less than the price of the product itself. For example, let’s take an ad that spent $200 and generated 10 purchases. To get the cost per purchase, divide the amount of ad spent by the number of purchases, and get a cost per purchase of $20. If each purchase generated a revenue of $50, then this specific ad will generate a $50 revenue for every $20 spent, on average.

The cost per purchase is useful to understand if a specific ad is profitable or not, or if running it is making you lose money. However, keep in mind that the ad might not be the only cost you have to put in to make a sale.

Take dropshipping for example. In that business model, you’ll still have to buy the product from a retailer and send it to your customer. If your cost per purchase is pretty close to the price of the product, your ad might not be profitable in the end!

The cost per purchase will help you understand however how much an ad is costing you to run and generate sales: if that cost is greater than the price of the product that you’re selling, put it in perspective using the LTV if a purchase isn’t made immediately.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is an indicator of how engaging your ad is. It is the number of impressions divided by the number of interactions that your content got. Specifically, Facebook gives you two types of CTR on their business manager:

1. The link CTR, which is the number of link clicks on your ad
2. The CTR (All) is any interaction made with your ads — aka engagement! That includes link clicks, of course, but also likes, comments, shares, swiping the carousel

If your CTR is all high but your link CTR is low, that means that your ad itself is engaging, but that your audience is not interested enough to click, or that your call to action is not clear enough.

If both of your CTRs are quite close to each other, that means that your ad is performing great and that you’re converting almost all engagements into link clicks.

Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics are tracked by the Facebook pixel on your site, or the App Events implemented in your app’s Facebook SDK. You’ll be able to track any action taken on your website, such as an email signup, someone contacting you through your contact page, adding a product to their cart, a purchase, or pretty much any conversion action.

Depending on the objective of your campaign and the settings you selected, you can calculate the conversion rate which is the number of conversions divided by the number of views.

Cost per action (CPA)

CPA will give you the average cost of a conversion. You can calculate it by taking the total ad spend and dividing it by the number of conversions, giving you the average cost of a single conversion. Your CPR can vary largely depending on your campaign objective, your ad placement, your targeting, your product and so on.

There aren’t really specific numbers that you should aim for as every industry, every ad, every campaign is different. But putting the CPA in context with other metrics — like your ROAS or customer LTV — can really help you understand if an ad is profitable or not in the long run.

More Facebook how-tos

• How to make a video ad for Facebook
• How to make a Facebook cover video

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