Facebook Video Ads — The Ultimate Guide & Best Practices
What is Facebook Video Ads?
Do you like watching videos on Facebook? Chances are rather high that the video you consume on Facebook either on web or app, is Facebook Video Advertisements. Indeed, online users love watching videos that provide interesting ideas, giving good value, providing learning opportunities and entertainment.
Moreover, we had seen numerous studies highlighting the importance of videos on social media:
- 100 million hours of videos are watched each day on Facebook. (TechCrunch)
- 500 million people watch Facebook videos every day. (Tubular Insights)
- Facebook videos receive 135% more organic reach on average than a Facebook photo. (Socialbakers)
Facebook video ads are getting more and more important. If you still rely on only images for your existing Facebook Ads, we highly recommend you to try Facebook Video Ads now.
Benefits of Facebook Video Ads
Cheaper Cost
Compared to other Facebook Ads objectives, such as Website Click or Conversion, Video ads generally require very minimal cost in order to reach a huge audience. Depending on the configuration, your ads can be as cheap as RM0.01 per view. This is useful for campaigns with brand awareness as objective.
If you already have a corporate video, we suggest you to launch it as a video ad to increase your brand exposure. Let your target audience know about you on social media.
Engagement Custom Audience from Video Views
When we deploy Video advertisements on Facebook, thanks to the various updates, we can also create engagement custom audience from video views.
The created custom audiences are useful for future remarketing campaigns since we can filter the high quality viewers. From here, you can identify how many are your warm audiences. You can check the size at Custom Audience panel to know the size of your pool.
Targeting Flexibility
As videos becoming a boom on social media, Facebook continues to add enhancement to improve the targeting option for video campaigns. The latest update includes the “2-Second Continuous Video Views” optimization for Ad Delivery option.
While there is not a single formula to prove which combination of interest, demographic or other settings in your video campaigns can generate the best result, being able to have extra new configuration is a good place to start with.
A videos tells a better story & message!
The emotional impact of video ads is significant. You make a more solid personal relationship when you’re storytelling through sight and sound, connecting a viewer’s emotions to your product or service.
Because they incorporate audio and visual elements that appeal to multiple senses, video ads perform greatly for educational tools. They’re especially effective when used for product demonstrations or How-To guides, as viewers can actually see how certain things work and learn a new skill.
Users love videos
Online videos will account for more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2020.
Since the introduction of videos to social media platforms, the increase in the number of video views has been exponential .
Even LinkedIn, the largest professional networking social media platform finally followed the trend and introduced the video feature now. Besides, not to forget Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories — more and more users are choosing to share short videos and the engagement is impressive.
If you’re still hesitant to launch any video ads on Facebook, you should know online videos are the trend now.
What is the best size & spec for Facebook Video Ads?
To reduce the time and effort when creating videos, especially for Facebook Ads, we need to understand the optimum size, format and recommendation for videos.
Depending on your objective, target audience and video format, the final delivery format might only need one dimension of video or multiple sizes of video to cater different needs.
3 Major Elements To Decide For Facebook Video Ads
1. Aspect Rations
When it comes to choosing the perfect aspect ratio, always design by giving priority to mobile. If you check your Google Analytics devices usage, chances are mobile occupies half (or more) of your traffic.
Vertical videos would be the top choice (for example, 4:5, 2:3); fullscreen 9:16 format would be good. Most people still hold their phone upright when viewing videos, thus vertical videos with 4:5 aspect ratio would be suitable for Facebook newsfeed.
You may think the square ratio (1:1) is the most popular format right now, but it can make you miss the extra space at the top and bottom. Designing and utilizing a vertical video will give better user experience to users.
2. Length
No idea how long your video should be? Start with a short video with 15–20 seconds first.
If the video is not interesting, nobody would even want to watch the first 3–5 seconds. So, focus on the first section of the video.
As a general rule, your video should convey the message to your audience directly. Overly fancy design or style might not be necessary.
Keep in mind the maximum video length of Instagram feed is 60 seconds. Instagram Story has only 15 seconds. In fact, 15 seconds is considered the perfect video length if you want to advertise on both Facebook and Instagram.
Placement & Video Length
- Facebook Feed: 240 minutes max.
- Facebook Feed with link: 240 minutes max.
- Instant Articles: 240 minutes max.
- Facebook in-stream: 5–15 seconds
- Instagram feed: 1–60 seconds
- Instagram Stories: 1–15 seconds
- Audience Network: Native, Banner, Interstitial 1–120 seconds
- Audience Network: In-stream 10–120 seconds
Source: Video Requirement for Facebook Apps and Services
3. Sound
Always design the video like a “silent film”. Design for sound off but delight with sound on.
While Facebook in-stream placement requires sound within the video, the other placement is not necessary.
Many news publishers design their videos using huge titles, descriptions, point forms and text to capture the attention. In fact, the overlay text will deliver the message clearly and well and keep the target audience continue watching the whole video.
Moreover, it is a plus if your video has subtitles in multiple languages, and make full use of the built-in caption function. Most of the placements support this feature. Let’s discuss more in the following section.
Best Practices for Facebook Video Ads
85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. (Digiday)
15% of viewers believe a video ad should be no more than 15 seconds in length. (Marketing Land)
Add Subtitles/Captions
Depending on user settings for desktop and smartphone,
a large portion of Facebook users turn the video autoplay function on by default. Besides, those videos are consumed with the sound off.
In order to provide the best viewing experience, adding subtitles and captions are highly recommended.
If you check the Insight tab and select your posted video on Facebook page, you can check the data for sound on vs sound off.
The first 3–5 seconds decide everything!
Bring your story to life quickly, consider showing the most important content in the first 3 to 5 seconds. If you cannot capture the audience attention at the beginning, chances are the video can become a failure and further adjustment is needed.
Many advertisers show their animated logo at the beginning of video or have a too lengthy introduction video — this actually distracts your viewers and motivate them to scroll away from your video.
Quick tip: Focus on the benefits your videos bring at the beginning, straight to the point. Be precise.
You will be able to check the video average watch time to identify the exact second/scene in the video. Just hover your mouse over the chart and you will know the scene most viewers choose to stop watching.
Make use of the CTA button
When configuring your video ads campaign in Facebook Ads Manager, don’t forget to enable the build-in Call-To-Action (CTA) button. This additional button can increase the conversion rate for your video ads campaign.
You can choose Watch More, Book Now, Download, Get Showtimes, Learn More, Listen Now, Send Message, Shop Now and Sign Up for the CTA button.
Headlines & Copywriting
Great videos have a good headline and copywriting at the description, and it should arouse curiosity, compassion, emotion to connect with people.
While anything with motion will attract attention, don’t forget the existing headlines, titles, descriptions too. Giving users some basic introduction about the video will greatly increase the watch rate.
After drafting your headline, ask yourself, does it grab your attention? If it doesn’t, keep thinking, rewriting and enhancing the headline. More often than not, the shorter the better.
Video Thumbnail
Don’t forget about video thumbnail as well. Many advertisers just choose from the 10 auto-generated thumbnails which might not be the best.
It is good to have one customized video thumbnail that is catchy enough to attract your viewers’ attention.
Feel free to insert a few keywords or title at the video thumbnail too.
Important note: Please make sure the text only consists of 20% of the total thumbnail. You may upload your thumbnail at Image Text Check to identify the rating.
Professional and good design
The truth is, you don’t have to create long videos that cost you thousands of Ringgit. In order to have high watch time rate, shorter videos usually work the best. The sweet spot is between 15–30 seconds. Except for some special cases, most of the time viewers do not prefer long videos.
No idea how to start? Do some research first, we recommend you read Learn From Facebook Ad Examples for Free and refer to some of the industry example videos. Focus on the stories and how the message is conveyed to the target audience.
We all have our mobile phone with us which is capable to record, edit and export high quality videos for Facebook. Many video editing free apps can bring your videos to the next level.
Facebook Mobile Studio provides some of the simple yet mighty tools to start your Facebook video advertisements. Try to use multiple apps to make your videos even more visually engaging.
Now, it’s your turn
If you need more resources and methods for video adverts on Facebook, we highly recommend Tips for Your Facebook Video Adverts from Facebook Business. It’s time to stand out and attract the attention of your target audience with motion.
Hope you learned something useful from this blog post.
Which tips and tricks are your favourite? Feel free to comment below and share!
“A minutes of videos is worth 1.8 million words”— Dr. James McQuivey
*original published at https://www.exabytes.digital/blog/facebook-video-ads-the-ultimate-guide-best-practices
