Facebook ad creative best practices from Meta's pages

Every list of Facebook ad creative best practices you have read this month repeats the last one. Few of them say where a rule came from, so you cannot tell Meta's advice from one agency's habit.

Meta does publish its own, spread over its help centre, its ads guide and its business pages. Read together, they come down to six habits: build for a phone held upright, say the main thing in the first three seconds, keep one message per ad, keep text and logos inside the safe zone, make video work with the sound off, and run ads that differ from each other.

Each one is below with the page it comes from, and with the point where it stops helping.

The Facebook ad creative best practices Meta publishes

Every line traces to a Meta page linked further down.

• Fit the frame to the placement: 4:5 for an image in Facebook Feed, 9:16 for Stories and Reels.
• Put the most important message in the first three seconds of a video.
• Say one thing. An ad usually has one call to action, so it carries one message.
• Keep text and logos away from the edges the app covers with its own buttons.
• Make a video that tells its story with no sound, then give it sound for the people who have it on.
• Run several ads that differ in format, picture and reason to buy, not one ad with the headline changed.
• Use a clear picture of good quality. Meta says a strong visual makes an ad more relevant, which helps it in the auction.

Fit the ad to the screen it plays on

Most people see your ad on a phone, and the frame decides how much of the screen it takes. Meta's ads guide for Facebook Feed recommends a 4:5 image at 1440 by 1800 pixels, with 50 to 150 characters of primary text and a headline of 27.

Stories and Reels fill the screen at 9:16. If you run one picture everywhere, a square cut for Feed sits small in a Reel, and a tall one gets cropped in places it was not made for. The full list of sizes per placement is in its own post.

Meta's page on expanding your ad creative also recommends selecting six or more placements. More placements only help if the ad was made to look right in each of them.

Say the main thing in the first three seconds

The same Meta page gives one rule for video ads: capture attention in the first three seconds, with the most important message early. Your product, your offer and your name belong at the start, not after an intro.

An older Meta for Business post, with data from 2016, gives the reason. It says 65 per cent of people who watch the first three seconds of a video watch at least ten. The figure is a decade old and from feed video, so treat it as a rough guide and plan with your own numbers.

For a still image the first three seconds is the first glance. The picture has to say what the ad is about before anybody reads the words under it, which is also why the copy around the picture should say the same thing as the picture.

Facebook ad design best practices for text and the safe zone

Facebook ad design best practices from Meta are about legibility and space: a modern, clean font, large enough, in a colour that contrasts with the picture, carrying one message, and kept away from the edges where the app draws its own buttons. That last part is what Meta calls the safe zone.

Meta's help page on the safe zone is specific. For 9:16 ads in Stories, Reels and Feed, keep the top, bottom and sides free of key elements, text and logos. For a 1:1 or 4:5 ad in Instagram Feed, keep the bottom and the sides clear.

The same page warns about tall phones. On a screen taller than 9:16, Meta may zoom the ad to fill it, which crops anything outside the safe zone. If your Reels ad carries a disclaimer, it asks you to leave the bottom 40 per cent free.

The page gives no percentage for how much of a picture text may cover. Its advice is to avoid saying too many things, because an ad usually has one call to action.

Make video work with the sound off, and better with it on

Meta's 2016 post said most video ads in a mobile feed were watched without sound, and that in one study 41 per cent of video ads made almost no sense without it. Captions, the logo and the product on screen were its fix. Those numbers are old, but a muted feed has not gone away.

Reels changed the other half. Meta's page on Reels ads says Reels play with the sound on unless the person has turned it off. It reports that, across 15 split tests, Reels ads built as 9:16 video with audio and key elements in the safe zone had a 34.5 per cent lower cost per result than image ads on Reels.

That is Meta's own analysis of its own placement, from advertisers in ecommerce, retail and packaged goods. It tells you what to try first in Reels. It does not promise your account the same result.

Run ads that differ from each other

The last habit applies to the whole set of ads you run. Meta's page for small businesses on creative variety says that when ads look too similar, its system may not recognise them as different and may show them to the same people, which ends in a Creative limited or Creative fatigue status.

It names three ways to differ. Use different formats, from static ads and carousels to Reels and catalogue ads. Make the pictures look distinct, with the product in different settings, polished and lo-fi. And give different reasons to care: price, performance, ease of use.

For Advantage+ shopping campaigns, Meta's guidance on creative diversification recommends at least 20 diversified ads and 20 to 30 per cent of the budget on testing new ones. That number is for one campaign type. What Andromeda means for your ads covers how to scale it down to a small budget.

What makes a good Facebook ad, and what Meta cannot tell you

What makes a good Facebook ad, by Meta's own measures, is that people find it relevant: Meta's ad relevance diagnostics rank each ad's quality, expected engagement and expected conversion rate against ads competing for the same audience. The checklist above helps an ad get there. It cannot make an offer people do not want sell.

Meta's help page on ad relevance diagnostics says the three rankings appear only after an ad has 500 impressions, and that they are not inputs into the auction. Use them to find out why an ad is not working, not to score one before it runs.

None of Meta's pages tells you which reason to buy your customers care about. The habits remove the reasons an ad fails to be seen. Whether it sells is the offer, the price and the product page.

The part Nomi does

The habits are easy to follow once you know what each ad is going to say. The work is finding several different reasons to buy, and then making an ad for each in every shape you run.

Nomi starts there. Ask it for a campaign and it reads your brand, the product and the ads running in your market, and comes back with the angle before it draws anything. When it makes a tall story or reel, it keeps the text and the call to action out of the bands the platform covers with its own buttons.