Reference
Most UGC gets formatted for the editing timeline it was cut on, not the phone it will be watched on. Here is what each placement actually needs — and which part of your frame the app is going to cover up.
Formatting is the least interesting part of running video ads and one of the cheapest places to lose money. A working hook gets thrown away because its on-screen text sat behind a caption. A product shot gets cropped out of the feed version. An upload gets rejected the afternoon a campaign was meant to launch.
None of that is a creative problem. It is a delivery problem, and it is entirely avoidable. This page covers the specs themselves, then the thing that matters more than any of them: where on the screen your video is safe to put anything important.
Exact specs change, and they change without announcement — durations, file ceilings, supported ratios and safe-zone dimensions have all moved more than once. TikTok Ads Manager and Meta's own ad specs pages are the authority, and they are the only authority. Everything below is stated as a range and is current at the time of writing. Where the platforms publish exact pixel templates for safe zones, download those rather than trusting a figure you read anywhere — including here.
Ranges, not rules. The duration column is what performs, not what the platform permits — the permitted maximum is longer nearly everywhere.
| Placement | Aspect ratio | Duration that works | What the app draws over your video |
|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok In-Feed / Spark Ads | 9:16 | Roughly 10-35 seconds | Handle and caption bottom-left, action buttons right rail, CTA button low |
| Instagram Reels | 9:16 | Roughly 7-30 seconds | Handle and caption bottom-left, action buttons right rail, CTA bar low |
| Instagram / Facebook Stories | 9:16 | Under 15 seconds per card | Profile bar and progress bar at the very top, swipe-up CTA at the bottom |
| Facebook Feed | 4:5 or 1:1 | Roughly 15-45 seconds | Little overlay on the video; headline and CTA sit below it in the post |
| Instagram Feed | 4:5 or 1:1 | Roughly 15-45 seconds | Little overlay; the caption is truncated below the video |
Common technical requirements across all of the above: MP4 or MOV container, H.264 video, AAC audio, 1080 x 1920 for vertical (720p is the practical floor), and a frame rate of 30fps unless you have a reason to shoot otherwise. File size ceilings are generous — hundreds of megabytes on TikTok, gigabytes on Meta — and are almost never the binding constraint. If you are close to one, you have a bitrate problem rather than a length problem.
Shoot and deliver 9:16 vertical at 1080 x 1920. That is TikTok, Reels, Stories and every other full-screen placement, and it is where UGC is watched. If you only ever produce one version of an ad, produce this one.
The exception is the Facebook and Instagram feed, where the post sits in a scrolling column rather than filling the screen. There, a 9:16 video is either letterboxed or shown small, and you give up screen area to whitespace. 4:5 is the tallest ratio the feed displays at full width, which makes it the sensible feed format; 1:1 is the safer, more conservative option that also holds up in a few older placements. Neither is a replacement for the vertical master — they are a crop of it.
Which is why framing is decided at the shoot, not the export. A shot composed to the edges of a 9:16 frame cannot be cropped to 4:5 without losing something. Keep the subject and the product in the center of the frame and every downstream crop is a two-minute job instead of a reshoot.
Think of a 9:16 video as a sandwich. The platform owns the top and bottom slices. You own the middle.
Reserved for app chrome: the Following/For You tabs on TikTok, the Reels label on Instagram, the progress bars in Stories. Text here is at best competing with UI and at worst directly behind it. Keep it empty.
Everything that has to be seen lives here: the speaker's face, the product, your on-screen hook text, the price, the before-and-after. This band is what you are actually designing. It is narrower than the video, and that is the whole point.
The busiest region on the screen: username, caption, music ticker, and in ads the CTA bar, which is opaque and tall. This is the most common place people put their key message and the worst place to put it.
Assume the app will cover the top and bottom of your video and that you cannot control by how much, because it varies by placement, by device, and by whatever the platform shipped last month. Design accordingly.
Burn your captions into the video. Platform auto-captions exist, but they are inconsistently displayed, the viewer can turn them off, and they sit wherever the app decides — which is usually the bottom band you just spent effort keeping clear. Burned-in captions are always on, always where you put them, and always styled the way you chose.
Style them the way social video already is: large, high contrast, one to four words per line, sitting in the lower half of the middle band rather than at the bottom of the frame. Word-by-word highlighting is optional; legible at a glance in daylight on a cracked screen is not.
Keep the hook text separate from the captions in your thinking. Captions transcribe what is said. Hook text is a designed element in the first seconds that states the promise — and it should be the largest, cleanest thing in the frame. Do not let it collide with the caption track.
A large share of feed viewing starts with sound off, so an ad that only works with audio has already failed for those viewers — captions and visual pacing have to carry it alone. That is an argument for redundancy, not for silence. Always deliver a real audio track: clear spoken voice, mixed loud enough to be intelligible on a phone speaker, with music low underneath if it is there at all. Sound-on viewers convert too, and a video with no audio track reads as a lower-quality asset. Every Yuugc video ships with spoken audio and caption variants for this reason.
You have two workable approaches and the right one depends on how much you are spending, not on which is technically better.
The one-master approach is a single 9:16 export, composed inside the safe zones, uploaded everywhere and cropped automatically where the placement is not vertical. It costs nothing extra and it is the right call while testing — producing four crops of an ad that will be switched off in five days is wasted effort.
The per-placement approach builds a purpose-made export for each: 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Stories, a 4:5 for the feed with the framing re-balanced rather than merely cropped, and caption positions adjusted because the safe zones differ. It costs real editing time, and it is worth spending on an ad that has already won and will run for months at meaningful budget.
The sequence, then, is simple: test on one master, then invest in crops for the winners only. This is the same logic that governs how many variations you can honestly test — spend on certainty after you have found something, not before.
Sixty seconds of checks that prevent most of the problems on this page.
The video itself has the same requirements, because a Spark Ad is a real organic TikTok post being promoted rather than a separate creative upload. What differs is the process: the post has to exist on a TikTok account first, and the account holder generates an authorization code that lets your ad account run it. That means the specs you have to hit are TikTok's organic posting specs, and the caption and handle shown are the real post's. The Spark Ads guide covers the authorization flow itself.
You can, provided it is posted to a TikTok account you control — your own brand account works and needs no authorization code from anyone else. What Yuugc cannot give you is a real creator's account with a real following, because our creators are AI and have no audience of their own. If the specific thing you want from Spark Ads is borrowed credibility from an established creator profile, that requires a real creator. If what you want is the native organic look and the ability to promote a post from an account, your own account does the job. AI UGC vs real UGC sets out the rest of that boundary plainly.
Long enough to make one point and no longer. In practice most direct-response UGC lands somewhere between ten and thirty-five seconds, and the platforms permit considerably more than that. Length is not the variable that decides performance — the first two seconds are — so pick the length the script needs rather than padding toward a target.
No. Bars read instantly as repurposed content, which is the opposite of what UGC is for, and they waste the screen area you are paying for. If all you have is horizontal footage, punch in and re-frame it vertically, accepting the resolution loss, or reshoot. Do not pad it.
Usually not for the video itself, since both are 9:16 with broadly similar safe zones. What is worth varying is the caption and, on TikTok, whether the audio track is something the platform recognizes. Reels-specific guidance covers the differences that actually matter.
Vertical masters at 1080 x 1920, framed inside the safe zones, with caption variants and full commercial rights. Back in 48 hours, around $50 a video.
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