Meta ad specs: dimensions, placements and safe zones

You do not need fourteen exports. You need four, and in practice two of them do most of the work.

Upload at 1080px on the short edge as a minimum. Meta compresses everything, so sending a larger, cleaner source gives the compression more to work with; sending a 720px file guarantees a soft ad on a modern phone.

Placements group into four families, and each family wants a different piece of thinking rather than a different crop.

• Feeds - Facebook and Instagram feed, Marketplace, Explore. Use 4:5. Sound off by default, thumb moving fast, the first frame does the work.
• Stories and Reels - Instagram and Facebook. Use 9:16, full bleed, sound on, native pacing. Ads built for the feed and stretched here look exactly like ads built for the feed and stretched here.
• In-stream and search - video breaks, Facebook search results. 16:9 or 1:1; treat as coverage, not as a place to art-direct.
• Right column and audience network - 1.91:1, tiny render, brand mark and one legible word if anything at all.

Advantage+ placements is usually correct for delivery efficiency; the mistake is enabling it while supplying one asset. Enable broad placements and supply per-ratio assets, so breadth does not cost you craft.

In vertical placements the interface sits on top of your creative. Profile name and progress bars at the top, caption, CTA button and system gestures at the bottom. Anything you place there will be obscured on some devices and fine on others, which is the worst kind of failure because it is invisible in your own review.

Work to roughly the top fourteen percent and the bottom twenty percent of a 9:16 frame being unusable for critical content - about 250px top and 380px bottom on a 1080 x 1920 canvas. Backgrounds, texture and imagery run full bleed. Logos, headlines, prices, offers, dates, phone numbers and legal text stay inside the middle band. In feed 4:5 the equivalent discipline is keeping type away from the extreme edges so that thumbnail crops and Explore grids do not clip it.

Copy fields truncate rather than wrap, and the truncation point moves by placement. Write for the short version and let the long version reward the curious.

• Primary text. Assume the first 125 characters are all most people see. Put the offer and the reason in the first line, not the third.
• Headline. Around 27 to 40 characters before truncation depending on placement. Short, concrete, no cleverness that only works complete.
• Description. Shown inconsistently. Never carry essential information here.
• Text on the image. The old twenty percent rule is retired as a hard rejection, but heavy text still suppresses delivery and reads as an advertisement rather than content. Keep on-image text to a headline and a qualifier.

• Images. JPG or PNG, sRGB, 1080px minimum on the short edge. PNG for flat graphics and type, JPG for photography.
• Video. MP4 or MOV, H.264, AAC audio, 30fps, 1080p. Feed video up to around 60 minutes technically; effective feed video is 15 seconds or less and effective Reels are 15 to 30 seconds.
• Captions. Burn them in. Most feed viewing is silent and captions are not decoration, they are the audio track.
• Carousels. 1:1 across all cards, consistent treatment, 2 to 10 cards. Mixed ratios inside one carousel look like an accident because they are.
• Catalogue imagery. Square, consistent framing and background across the feed. Inconsistent product shots are why dynamic ads look cheap.

The cost of Meta creative is rarely the design; it is the endless re-cropping of approved work. Fix it at the studio end. Build the master concept vertically at 1080 x 1920 with a documented safe zone, then derive 4:5, 1:1 and 1.91:1 from the same layout system rather than squeezing the vertical into a square.

Then standardise the delivery: a named asset kit per campaign, one folder, four ratios, static and video, captions burned in, naming that encodes campaign, concept and ratio. Media buyers stop improvising crops at midnight, and the brand arrives in the feed the way it was designed. That is the same discipline we apply to content production generally: design the system once, produce against it forever.

• Do design for silence first and reward sound second.
• Do put the brand in the first two seconds of video, not the last.
• Do supply per-ratio assets when broad placements are enabled.
• Do not letterbox a horizontal video into 9:16 with white bars. It reads as a mistake in the one placement that demands native craft.
• Do not use the platform's automatic cropping on typographic work. Automatic cropping does not know which word matters.
• Do not place price, date or legal text in the bottom fifth of a vertical frame.
• Do not upload a 72dpi web export from a deck. Compression is applied on top of whatever you send.

Specifications are not the interesting part of advertising, and that is precisely why they are worth systematising: get them right once and the argument returns to the idea, where it belongs.