Facebook and Instagram Ads Checklist

There are many things to consider when advertising online on Facebook and Instagram. Click here to see a useful checklist.

Steps

  1. What is the goal of your campaign?

    • Brand awareness/reach: to display the ad without a specific call-to-action)
    • Website traffic: to click or view page views
    • Engagement: to allow people to leave a comment or like, share, or follow the website)
    • Lead generation: a newsletter subscription, email capture etc.
    • Conversions: subscriptions, downloads, etc.

  2. How long do you want to run your ad? Or is it an ongoing ad campaign (that has no end date)?

  3. Who is your target group?

    If you have more than one target group, please provide details for each of them.

    • Age group
    • Location (country, region, city ...)
    • Demographic information (level of education, job title, relationship status etc.)
    • Interests and hobbies
    • Connections (either include or exclude people who follow Radboud University)
    • Custom target group (website or visitors to specific web pages, contact list) g) Similar audience (people who you don’t know but who have the same interests as a custom audience)

  4. Where would you like your ad to be displayed?

    • Automatic (Facebook will decide where to display your ad on the basis of the best performance)
    • Facebook news feed and other locations
    • Instagram feed
    • Instagram Stories
    • Public network (websites and apps that use Facebook ads, similar to Google display ads)

  5. What is your budget?

    • You can set a budget for the entire campaign (e.g., €300.00 from x date to y date)
    • You can set a budget for each target group (e.g., €100.00 for target group A and €200.00 for target group B)
    • Or if you don’t have a specific campaign end date, you can set a daily budget

    Think about how your budget will relate to the time for which the ad will be displayed. We do not recommend running an ad that is designed to reach a large audience (i.e., more than 100,000 people) if your budget is less than €10.00 per day. The minimum daily budget for Facebook and Instagram is €1.00 per day.

  6. What does your ad look like and to what will it be linked?

    • Creative
    • Title: 40 characters
    • Text: 125 characters
    • Link and link description (20 characters)

  7. Will you provide the image(s) yourself in the correct format or will you need help with this?

    • Image
    • Video
    • Carousel
    • Stories format

Creative guidelines

Images

  • Minimum width: 500 pixels (the wider the better)
  • Format: JPG or PNG
  • The image may not include more than 20% text. Check whether your ad complies with this rule in the Facebook guidelines.
  • If the ads are going to be displayed on multiple social media channels (Facebook + Instagram Stories), you will need to have different formats of the same image. See below for more details.

 

Aspect ratio

  • Facebook 1.91:1 or 1200 x 628 pixels (landscape)
  • Instagram 1:1 (square) or 4:5 (portrait)
  • Instagram Stories: 9:16 or 1080 x 1920 pixels (portrait)

 

Videos

  • Length: 3 seconds to 1 minute
  • Aspect ratio: 16:9 (landscape) or 1:1 (square)
  • Maximum size: 4GB
  • Type: MP4 or MOV
  • Subtitles are recommended if the video contains speech.

 

Carousel (image or video)

  • There is a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 10 images or videos
  • Minimum width: 500 pixels (the wider the better)
  • Format: JPG, PNG, MOV or MP4
  • Maximum video length: 15 seconds
  • The image may not include more than 20% text. Check whether your ad complies with this rule in the Facebook guidelines.
  • Aspect ratio: square: 1080 x 1080 pixels

See all formats and requirements here.

Downloads
Manual Advertising on Radboud social media channels
pdf 261.23 KB