Best Practices for Successful Facebook Video Ads

It seems like every time you open up your Facebook feed, you’re faced with a stream of video content, whether it’s Facebook Live stream videos, meme videos or the latest BuzzFeed Food recipe. In fact, video is so popular on the platform that it’s even made its way onto its very own tab on the smartphone app.

So it should come as no surprise that video is also a powerful advertising format on Facebook. Not only is video an engaging form of marketing, but 64% of users are more likely to buy a product from a business after viewing one of its videos.

Facebook advertising as a whole is an incredibly important digital marketing strategy all businesses should invest in, but read on to find out more about Facebook video ads and how to create them.

Why Use Facebook Video Ads

There are several reasons why Facebook video ads can be valuable to your business.

1. People are consuming a lot of video content.

What could possibly be bad about creating and publishing something people love? Absolutely nothing!

Statistics show that Facebook sees over 8 billion average daily views and 100 million hours of video watched on the platform, and your business definitely wants to take advantage of numbers like that. 

2. Video is the most engaging format of Facebook content.

When a certain post type is getting strong organic reach on Facebook, you know it’s doing something right. And video is doing something right.

Last spring, the average video post received nearly double the reach of links and triple the reach of text status updates. At 12.05%, video posts just beat out photo posts (11.63% of the total Page audience), with these popular post types also seeing the highest engagement rates.

These statistics tell us that while they can still appreciate other types of content, people want video. Why deny the people what they want?

3. The world is going mobile. And mobile users love video.

How often do you find yourself scrolling through videos on your smartphone? Suffice it to say, you’re not the only one.

In fact, 90% (the overwhelming majority) of consumers watch video on mobile devices. And users are five times more likely to watch Facebook video via their phone.

When you consider the fact that 75% of all Facebook users are accessing the platform from their mobile app, and Facebook has over 2.25 billion monthly active users, people are watching a lot of video on smartphones.

Convinced yet? Good! Let’s start creating your next Facebook video ad.

How to Create Facebook Video Ads

If you’ve never created a Facebook ad before, my friend Chelse’s Facebook ads glossary is a great place to start. But we’re going to do a basic runthrough right here as well.

1. Getting started.

Facebook makes it incredibly easy for you to get started with your ad creation. There’s a great little Create button at the top of your Facebook navigation that gives everyone easy access to creating new Facebook Pages, groups, ads, and more.

Click Ad to get started.

2. Choose your objective.

Facebook has an ad objective for nearly everything, like carousel ads to show off multiple products within your business or lead generation ads to grow your email list and sales leads. You can see all the available options in this list below:

We’re creating a Facebook video ad, so you want to center your ad around Video views. 

You’ll then have the option to name your video ad before clicking Continue.

(While you’re still getting comfortable with video ads, leave the other options unchecked – as you become more familiar with the process, you can begin playing with A/B testing and budget optimization throughout your Facebook ads.)

3. Set your audience.

The next step is to set your audience. Who is going to see your video?

This step is incredibly important. If you create a great video and spend money to get it in front of an audience, you want it to be full of people who actually care about your product or service and are potential customers or clients. Otherwise your ad has been a complete waste of money.

You have a couple of different options for choosing your audience.

1. Try custom audience retargeting.

If you have previously placed a Facebook pixel on your website, it has been gathering data on your website visitors, what their demographics are, and what they like.

You can then use this information in a Facebook ad audience in one of two ways:

• By retargeting the exact people who have already visited your website and are aware of your business
• By creating a lookalike audience of brand new people who have similarities to the people who have already shown an interest in your business.

2. Create a custom audience.

Facebook has some pretty stellar targeting options when you really dive in. Although privacy issues have caused the platform to remove some helpful demographic targeting features, there are still plenty of ways to find your specific audience.

Start by choosing your geo-location, especially if your audience is local. You don’t want to target people who can’t even access your business. Add an age range and gender if necessary, then dive into your detailed targeting.

Because you’re paying based on the amount of people you’re reaching, you want to make sure you’re as specific and granular with your audience as possible. Choose specific likes and interests that your ideal customer has. Creating a buyer or social media persona can help you to determine these qualities.

3. Select video watches at 25%.

Facebook’s default setting that triggers a “video view” is 3 seconds long. As we know, this is easily accomplished – even without meaning to! Sometimes we accidentally “watch” videos while reading other posts on the feed, or opening a chat message.

Be sure to optimize what counts as a video watch conversion by simply selecting “25% Watched” so that you are only paying for a true view. To get even more granular, you can set your settings to 50% or 100% watched, or determine a specific amount of seconds someone has to watch before Facebook charges you.

4. Set your placements.

Facebook and Instagram collectively offer over a dozen different ad placements throughout the two platforms. This means you’ve got a lot of options to choose from. However, when you’re just starting out with Facebook ads, you always have the option to have Facebook choose the best placements for you.

5. Set your budget.

How much of your overall ad budget are you putting towards this video ad? Be sure to set a daily or lifetime budget based on this figure.

When you focus your ad on video views, you have the option to choose between Impression and Video Views (whether it’s 2-seconds, 10-seconds, or a fully watched video), but others allow you to choose bidding based on clicks (i.e., if you’re creating a video ad focused on traffic and generating clicks to a landing page).

You always want to choose Impression bidding over bidding per Click, otherwise Facebook will require viewers to click to play your video instead of seeing it auto-play in their feeds. Getting an actual click to play is much harder than catching someone’s attention by automatically starting the first few seconds of your video.

6. Create your ad.

It’s finally time to get started on your ad creative! Upload your video according to the Facebook recommendations and specs to ensure you have no issues.

Add in your compelling copy and call to action before you finally…

Go live!

Best Practices For Your Facebook Video Ads

Although creating your Facebook video ads is a task that should not be taken lightly, it’s essential to remember the most important part: your video! Here are a few tips to keep in mind when creating your video content.

1. Don’t require sound.

85% of Facebook video viewers are watching with the sound turned off. If you’re requiring people to turn on their sound to watch your video, you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential viewers and, more importantly, potential customers.

Instead, create a video with background music that focuses on visuals over audio, or simply add captions or text to the video so that viewers can easily follow along.

2. Grab viewer attention early.

The attention span of the average internet user keeps getting shorter and shorter. Some studies are showing that you need to grab viewer attention as early as 10 seconds in to really capture their focus and reel them into watching your entire video.

You can do this in a few ways:

• Tease the end result of a how-to or tutorial
• Work with someone your audience recognizes
• Tell an engaging story
• Delay your logo and branding appearance so you can focus on the hook in the first few seconds
• Show off a desirable lifestyle that comes from your product or service

3. Keep it short and sweet.

Facebook itself recommends uploading a video ad of no more than 15 seconds. If you have more information you want to include inside of your ad, you can certainly create longer videos (all the way up to four hours in length!), as long as you ensure the most important information lives within that first 15 seconds.

And if you’re using the in-stream ads placement (video ads within longer Facebook Watch videos), Facebook actually requires those to be between 5-15 seconds. So the shorter and sweeter you can make your video, the more ad placement options you have, and the more full views you’ll be able to attract.

4. Create vertical or square videos.

Although most cameras still shoot in horizontal form, it’s a good idea to test square or vertical video types. Vertical video is becoming more and more popular with Instagram and Facebook Stories, as well as the launch of IGTV.

However, the reason to try to create more vertical and square video for your Facebook video ads is because they take up more screen space than horizontal videos — especially on mobile — increasing the likelihood that your video catches someone’s eye.

5. Add in several calls to action.

Don’t create one single call-to-action at the end of your video. A lower percentage of consumers who view your video will end up watching the entire thing, so including multiple calls to action in several places throughout your video is a great way to ensure that more eyes see it.

Of course, you don’t want to make this sound like a ‘90s infomercial. Don’t be too salesy with it. Instead, overlay a small caption telling viewers what to do next in a few different places within your video ad.

Create Your Own Facebook Video Ads

First step: Create your video. Second step: Create your ad. Third step: Greatness.