Customize Meta Ad Creative by Placement

When you create a Meta ad campaignThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you'll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More, are you making sure that your image, video, and text all look the way they should in each placementA placement is a location where your ad is shown. Examples include Facebook's mobile Feed, Messenger, Instagram feed, Audience Network, right-hand column, and more. More? Many advertisers forget to optimize Meta ad creative by placement — or they don’t know that they can.

Let’s fix that in this post.

Upload Your Image or Video

Once you’ve uploaded an image or video for your ad, you’ll be prompted to select, crop, or replace the creative for different placement groups. Each placement group has a different ideal aspect ratio (square, tall, or wide).

Once you’ve adjusted your creative for each placement group, click to move on.

You’ll be prompted with Advantage+ Creative optimizations.

Whether you accept or reject these optimizations will be a topic for another day. Let’s focus on customizing creative by placement today.

Ad Placement Previews

Once you’ve finished creating your ad with primary text, headline, description, and URL, you’ll see a quick preview of your ad on the right.

Click the “Advanced Preview” option at the top right. You can now see the previews of all placements.

This also includes customizations, if you’ve made any. For example, if you’ve provided multiple primary text options…

Or headline options…

When selected, the relevant previews will display.

Look for any previews that aren’t cropped or positioned properly. This example appears to be cropped incorrectly, but note that it’s an image that was converted to a video for the In-Stream Video placement. When played, it’s in the process of zooming out.

Also look for the way text is displayed. Primary text may get cut off sooner in some placements than others. You may want to make adjustments.

Customize Image Creative by Placement Group

Close out the preview, and go to the ad creative section. There, you’ll see placements grouped together, like what we saw when we first uploaded the creative.

Hover over the top line and you can edit the entire group.

At the top, it will show you that you are editing multiple placements at once (in this case, 12).

If an image, you can turn it into a video…

You can change or crop the image for the entire placement group…

You can edit the primary text, headline, or destination for the group. This includes editing the multiple text options, if you provided them (these only apply to feeds).

You can also add product tags, if applicable.

Customize Video Creative Options

For videos, you’ll have the ability to customize the thumbnail, allowing it to be selected automatically or choosing one manually…

You can automatically generate or manually upload captions if your video doesn’t already include them…

You can add a poll to your video…

Add and customize a text overlay…

Or overlay a logo at specific moments of the video…

Customize by Individual Placement

Note that you can also customize by specific placements, rather than placement groups. Hover over a placement in the media list and click to edit.

Note at the top that we are only editing one placement.

We can now make any of the changes we discussed before when editing placement groups, but it will only apply to the selected placement.

What to Look For

When it comes to images and videos, the first step is most important. Make sure that you provide square, tall, and side images for each placement group.

Beyond that, be most aware of how the text looks in each placement. If it’s shortened, does your ad get its message across? You may need to make some edits to that specific placement.

There are also some nice options for videos that you won’t see elsewhere (polls, text overlays, and logo overlays). Take advantage of these, too!