Facebook is changing the aspect ratio of posts and ads on its mobile News Feeds. The changes come into effect on August 19, essentially making mobile ads shorter on the platform and this means advertisers will need to revise their ad text and optimise images/video for the new aspect ratio.
This could involve quite a lot of work for advertisers who have a lot of ads running, especially if video plays a crucial role in campaigns. So here’s a lot at what’s about to change and what this means for your Facebook advertising strategy.
What exactly is changing next month?
You can read the Facebook announcement in full here but there are only two things actually changing:
- Fewer lines of primary text will show on mobile News Feed. Now only 3 lines of primary text will show on Facebook mobile News Feed, after which people will be prompted to click to view additional text.
- Maximum media height for photos and videos will reduce to 4:5 on mobile News Feed. The tallest supported aspect ratio for images without links and for videos is now vertical (4:5). Media taller than 4:5 will be masked on Facebook mobile News Feed.
As you can see in the image above, this all amounts to shorter ads with less space for text and a shorter aspect ratio for images and video content. Facebook says the shorter format will make ad text more scannable and put greater emphasis on the images or videos in News Feed ads.
This all makes perfect sense and the end result for users probably will be a better experience overall. The problem for advertisers is these changes will apply to all ads after August 2019 and this could result in a backlog of optimisation work.
How to optimise for shorter News Feed ads
Obviously, next month’s changes mean you’re going to have less space for ad text and you’re going to have to work harder on creating more concise messages. You’ll also need to make sure your images and videos are worthy of taking the lead and capturing users’ attention visually will be all the more important now.
Facebook says the changes will have a positive impact on ad performance and we suspect this will, in fact, be the case. After all, users are bombarded with countless ads on a daily basis, forcing them to scroll past ad text – or, at best, skim through it. So a shift towards less text and more visuals makes sense, especially when we’re talking about a highly visual platform like Facebook.
Moving forward, these changes will require a slightly different approach to creating ad copy and visuals but what about the ads you’re already running?
Optimising ad copy
Reworking the ad copy of your existing ads is probably the simplest part of this but there’s a good chance it will also be the most time consuming. The problem is, you’re going to have to go through your ads manually to check how many lines they’re using and reduce them to a maximum of three lines.
If there’s a lot of info in that copy, you’re going to have to reprioritise what’s most important to get a cross.
Remember, you can include additional information to display under the “See More” tab so the goal here is to capture user interest. More importantly, Facebook is pushing advertisers to put more emphasis on their visuals so the best overall approach may be rethinking your visual elements altogether.
Optimising your ad images
Shifting from a 2:3 aspect ratio to 4:5 isn’t an extreme change but it is more than you’ll be able to crop for a lot of images. If you’re lucky enough to have some dead space at the top and bottom of your images, you might get away with batch cropping them and leaving it at that.
If your images are all shorter than the current maximum 2:3 ratio, this will also help.
There’s a good chance you’ll also have to crop, resize or edit images individually, though. If you find yourself in this situation, it might be worth taking the opportunity to create new images from scratch and optimise them for the greater emphasis on visual elements in ads after the changes come in.
Finally, if you’re not doing so already, it’s always a good idea to save editable versions of images that make it easier to adapt to any aspect ratio changes in the future.
Optimising your ad videos
Optimising videos for a new aspect ratio is more technically challenging than images but the good news is Facebook recently released a tool to make this process much easier. The Video Creation Kit is designed to help you optimise videos for multiple aspect ratios and placements, which will come in very handy for adapting video to 4:5.
This tool isn’t as advanced as professional video editing software but it’s priceless if you’ve already had footage produced/edited by a third-party company and you’ve only got the finished video to work with.
Again, you might be lucky enough to get away with bulk cropping multiple videos in an editing suite like Adobe Premier or Movavi, as long as you can afford to trim some space at the top and/or bottom.
Reshooting video is no joke – especially, if you’ve paid up for some professional footage – so it’s all about finding the most cost/time-effective solution.
Are you ready for the new Facebook News Feed ad formats? Let us know what you think on social media and don’t forget you can always reach out to us if you need a hand with optimising your ad strategy for the changes.