Video Ads Overview
Video ads can help you engage your audience and take your brand to the next level.
Full Video ad requirements chart by placements (PDF download)
"Video consumption on Facebook and Instagram are growing at a staggering rate. People are living with their phones, and going back to them over and over again. In fact, 73% of people in the US say their phone is always with them; and nearly half say that they check their phone more than 30 times a day, with that percentage increasing to 62% for millennials." – Facebook Blue Print course on Video Ads
What formats of video ad files can I upload?
We recommend that you check Facebook's Video ad specifications for the latest requirements on video ads. Do note the recommended specifications may vary depending on your campaign Objective.
Call-to-action buttons
The specs for the Call-to-action (CTA) button at the end of the video can be added in Call-to-action link URL and Call-to-action caption fields. There is also a preview of how this CTA looks below the normal preview:
Video link ads with CTA buttons
Video link ads are similar to Video ads, with an exception that Video link ads have a call-to-action button visible below the video together with title and description, similarly to a Link post with a picture.
To create Video link ads choose either website clicks or website conversions as the campaign Facebook objective. These campaign objective alternatives will make the video ad appear with Link Title, Description and Call-to-action button as shown below. Message, Call-to-action, and Call-to-action link URL are mandatory fields for Video link ads.
Note: The CTA button will be automatically translated based on the language settings of the person in your audience who receives the ad.
Note: CTA buttons with videos are for paid ad impressions only.
- Facebook will automatically remove CTA button from the creative if the creative is created with the option to Publish as a public post on the page.
- View post on Facebook link points to the unpublished post contained in the ad, not to the ad. After viewing this unpublished post is not a paid impression the preview will not show the CTA button.
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- In order to get an accurate preview of the ad, you can use the "Facebook Ad Preview" feature in Smartly.io by accessing through your Ad's Creative or check the ad preview in Ads Manager.
Adding subtitles or captions
Note: If the captions dialog is not visible after adding a video, please see troubleshooting below.
Note on Permissions: To upload SRT subtitles or captions, your user account must be authorized on account. This can be done by going to the User Settings > You > Authentication, then selecting the Connect button to authorize your FB account.
You can add subtitles and captions to a video in the ad creative's video input.
After selecting the video you can see the existing captions for the video and upload new captions. You can upload multiple captions in different languages for a single video. The uploaded captions must be in SRT file format and the caption file must include the captions locale using the naming convention file_name.LOCALE.srt, e.g. captions.en_US.srt.
The naming convention for SubRip (.srt) files is:
filename.[language code]_[country code].srt
Listed below are valid language and country code combinations. Learn how to use a .srt file to add captions to your video or your Page's video.
af_ZA (Afrikaans)
ar_AR (Arabic)
ay_BO (Aymara)
az_AZ (Azerbaijani)
be_BY (Belarusian)
bg_BG (Bulgarian)
bn_IN (Bengali)
bs_BA (Bosnian)
ca_ES (Catalan)
ck_US (Cherokee)
cs_CZ (Czech)
cx_PH (Cebuano)
cy_GB (Welsh)
da_DK (Danish)
de_DE (German)
el_GR (Greek)
en_GB (English - UK)
en_IN (English - India)
en_US (English - US)
eo_EO (Esperanto)
es_CL (Spanish - Chile)
es_CO (Spanish - Colombia)
es_ES (Spanish - Spain)
es_LA (Spanish)
es_MX (Spanish - Mexico)
es_VE (Spanish - Venezuela)
et_EE (Estonian)
eu_ES (Basque)
fa_IR (Persian)
fi_FI (Finnish)
fo_FO (Faroese)
fr_CA (French - Canada)
fr_FR (French - France)
fy_NL (Frisian)
ga_IE (Irish)
gl_ES (Galician)
gn_PY (Guarani)
gu_IN (Gujarati)
gx_GR (Classical Greek)
he_IL (Hebrew)
hi_IN (Hindi)
hr_HR (Croatian)
hu_HU (Hungarian)
hy_AM (Armenian)
id_ID (Indonesian)
is_IS (Icelandic)
it_IT (Italian)
ja_JP (Japanese)
jv_ID (Javanese)
ka_GE (Georgian)
kk_KZ (Kazakh)
km_KH (Khmer)
kn_IN (Kannada)
ko_KR (Korean)
ku_TR (Kurdish)
la_VA (Latin)
li_NL (Limburgish)
lt_LT (Lithuanian)
lv_LV (Latvian)
mg_MG (Malagasy)
mk_MK (Macedonian)
ml_IN (Malayalam)
mn_MN (Mongolian)
mr_IN (Marathi)
ms_MY (Malay)
mt_MT (Maltese)
nb_NO (Norwegian - Bokmal)
ne_NP (Nepali)
nl_BE (Dutch - Belgium)
nl_NL (Dutch)
nn_NO (Norwegian - Nynorsk)
pa_IN (Punjabi)
pl_PL (Polish)
ps_AF (Pashto)
pt_BR (Portuguese - Brazil)
pt_PT (Portuguese - Portugal)
qu_PE (Quechua)
rm_CH (Romansh)
ro_RO (Romanian)
ru_RU (Russian)
sa_IN (Sanskrit)
se_NO (Northern Sami)
sk_SK (Slovak)
sl_SI (Slovenian)
so_SO (Somali)
sq_AL (Albanian)
sr_RS (Serbian)
sv_SE (Swedish)
sw_KE (Swahili)
sy_SY (Syriac)
ta_IN (Tamil)
te_IN (Telugu)
tg_TJ (Tajik)
th_TH (Thai)
tl_PH (Filipino)
tr_TR (Turkish)
tt_RU (Tatar)
uk_UA (Ukrainian)
ur_PK (Urdu)
uz_UZ (Uzbek)
vi_VN (Vietnamese)
xh_ZA (Xhosa)
yi_DE (Yiddish)
zh_CN (Simplified Chinese - China)
zh_HK (Traditional Chinese - Hong Kong)
zh_TW (Traditional Chinese - Taiwan)
zu_ZA (Zulu)
Cost per view bidding (CPV)
For campaigns that are using video views as a Facebook objective, you can bid for a video view (10-second-view or more). This is effectively the same as CPA bidding for any other campaign objective.
Video ad specs
You can find the up-to-date video ad specs in the Facebook Ads Product Guide.
Videos with 2:3 aspect ratio (Vertical video)
Videos with 2:3 aspect ratio will show on a mobile ad as full-width video. This will work automatically on the mobile app (no need to enable it separately).
Editing video ads
You can edit video ads just like any other ads. However, you'll need to reselect the video for the creative.
Using text in your videos
Avoid putting too much text in your video's thumbnail, as it will limit delivery. You can read more about using text in ad images here.
Autoplay
Desktop and mobile news feed videos are always on autoplay, but in right-hand column, the video is clicked to play. Individual Facebook users can take the autoplay option away, but you cannot define if autoplay is on or not.
Note: There may be various circumstances in which videos for some viewers will not autoplay, notably the following:
- If people have turned autoplay videos off in their settings
- If people are experiencing a bad internet connection
- Some devices may not support autoplay videos
- Some browsers may not support autoplay videos
360 videos
There are 2 kinds of 360 videos: those that have the 360 metadata built in, and those that don't. Some cameras save the metadata automatically. If the video file has the metadata, you can upload it normally via Smartly.io by creating a Video creative.
If the video file does not have 360 metadata, there is a workaround. See this article on how to upload a video as a 360 video on a Page (published or unpublished). After that, you can create an ad in Smartly.io by selecting the video as an existing post. For inspiration, see stunning 360 videos on the Facebook 360 Page.
Note: The 360 video ad format is still under development in Facebook's end, so you might encounter some strange behavior. Currently, we know that 360 videos should not be created as unpublished posts – otherwise Facebook validation will pause them.
Video Looping
All videos on Facebook that are 30 seconds or shorter will loop continuously. This includes videos shared organically as well as video ads. Looping means that your video will replay once it reaches the end. Videos will loop continuously up to approximately 90 seconds on Facebook.
Read more here: Video Looping Help article in Facebook Help