Social media image sizes: current guide for 2021

Dimensions of VK advertising formats - all parameters. VKontakte advertising is a powerful engine for diversified trade. But the key to success is not always only relevant creativity. Therefore, we recommend keeping our cheat sheet of VK advertising formats close to you.

The social network VKontakte is one of the most recognizable platforms in the world. On average, about 97 million people visit it per month. The monthly coverage of the VKontakte application covers 77% of the audience. About 55% enter it daily.

Based on these statistics, most Russian companies turn to the social network to conduct their own advertising and promotions.

You can promote your content on a social network in the following ways:

1. Posts and publications from the profile.
2. Hidden VKontakte posts.
3. Placing and selling your own products.
4. Publication of texts and images.

Further in the article, each of the methods will be discussed in detail, indicating the settings.

Design of advertising publications through posts

This function allows users to post any type of content and promote it on the social network, even without using personal account settings.

Tips for creating a VKontakte publication

This method allows you to use any type of attachment for a total of up to 10 images, videos, messages, surveys.

Images:

• The size should start from a resolution of 510X510 pixels.
• If the photo is rectangular then the sides should be 3:2.
• The maximum image resolution is up to 1000x700 pixels.
• It is better to take a picture for the cover of a publication with a size of 510x286 pixels.
• The snippet has an image size with an external link of 537X240 pixels.
• The photo must be extremely compressed to 1280X1024 pixels.
• For pictures, use only JPG or PNG and GIF formats.

Rollers:

• The maximum permissible video size is up to 5 Gigabytes.
• Almost all available video format codecs are supported.
• It is better to use a video resolution of 1280x720 pixels. The quality can be higher. The main thing is that the volume does not exceed the recommended one.

Article:

• Minimize the number of emoticons in a message to 5.
• The post must be no more than 16 thousand characters.

Collection of applications

A relatively new format is the lead form. Provides the opportunity to collect applications for events, consultations, and participation in promotions. That is, we drive traffic from ads to the lead form. We create and fill out the form ourselves. When creating, you will need a link to your privacy policy. If it is not there, take VKontakte, just paste the link into the appropriate section:

Quote from VKontakte:

It is convenient for interested clients to fill out the form. It is adapted for mobile devices and does not require manual data entry for some fields. First name, patronymic, last name, city, age, phone number and e-mail are filled in automatically if this information is specified on the user’s VKontakte page.

Watch a two-minute video on how to create a lead form:

How to create a lead form

Collecting applications works well in promotion through a free lesson. For example, to a language school.

Interesting observation:

If you put a link to the lead form in the button, the advertising office analytics calculates the CPL (cost of lead). If the link comes from the text, there is a transition and an application, but the CPL is not considered. Perhaps this bug will be fixed soon, but for now it’s like this, so don’t rush to scold the targetologist.

Hidden posts and advertising carousel on VKontakte

Two types of settings are available:

1. Carousel.
2. Record with a button.

VKontakte advertising carousel

There are several objects located in the carousel. Each card can contain editable data. For each product in the carousel, it is possible to set prices in pairs for more convenient display of discounts.

• It is better to add up to 10 cards to the carousel at once.
• All photos added to the carousel must be at least 400 pixels wide and square.
• The maximum text size is up to 220 characters.
• The title should not contain more than 25 characters.
• Almost any price can be set. Either all prices on the cards are filled in or none are indicated.

Universal recording

This is the standard post you see on the news. Go to the news feed and look - this format is everywhere. How is it different? You can write a lot of text, a link to your product is indicated in the text, a wide selection of picture sizes.

Universal recording allows you to write great storytelling, which works quite well in some niches. Plus you describe all the benefits in detail. I believe this format is underrated and needs to be tested in all niches.

Maximum number of characters in a universal record: 16,384 including punctuation marks and spaces.

Publishing texts and images

This type of content is located on the left side of the screen. You can view it only by logging into your VKontakte profile through a browser on your PC.

Tips for customizing content

• The image must be 148x85 pixels in size.
• The file size should not be more than 5 megabytes.
• Almost all graphic formats are available.
• The maximum header length is 33 characters.
• The description must be no more than 70 characters long.

Teasers (side advertising)

Teasers are rectangular advertisements that loom on the left on the computer version of VKontakte. There were times when for only 1000 rubles. the targetologist attracted 500 subscribers for 2 rubles. Now the bets have warmed up and a subscriber of 12 rubles is considered a good result. if everything is set up well. Let's look at the pros and cons of such advertising.

Pros:

1. Teaser advertising is cheaper than promotional posts.
2. Only teasers can be configured on a personal page.
3. Teasers catch users who do not scroll through the feed (I wonder if there are such things?).
4. Teasers are fun:

Minuses:

1. Teasers are only visible in the web version, so 80% of the audience will not see them, because people are on mobile devices.
2. Limiting the amount of text reduces the message and results in less informed clicks. Hence the problem: there are a lot of clicks, but the conversion rate is low.
3. If the user has Adblock or other blocking extensions, he will not see your teasers even from his computer.
4. Sometimes the display is cut off, like this:

I hope I didn’t scare you too much and that you haven’t changed your mind about using teasers yet. Let's take a closer look at them.

Teasers come in three types:

1. Application.
2. Community.
3. External site.

Each view has its own display options, here are the main ones:

Image and text

Image size 145x85 pixels. Two blocks of text: title up to 33 characters and description up to 70 characters

Use text on the image if it takes up less than 50% of the image area.

Community promotion

Image size 145x145 pixels. It differs in that the name of your community is automatically inserted into the title, which can only be abbreviated. The rest of the settings are the same as everywhere else.

Large image

An image with a format of 145×165 pixels with a title, but without a description block.

You can also use text on an image on less than 50% of the image area.

My favorite format, because it’s the most convenient for creativity. For example, making “caricatures” is a great option for promoting a personality while targeting your subscribers. These are contrasting and funny images that do not go unnoticed, even if the audience is not familiar with you.

Speaking of headlines...

And a little more about the features of the format

Let's list the main features:

• It works both in the mobile version and in the desktop version (unlike teasers - they are only available on the desktop).
• Can be used for various advertising “purposes” - both to attract traffic to the site and to promote the community.
• Practice shows that when you use the format to attract traffic to the site, you still get additional profit - an increase in subscribers in the group.
• When promoting a community, this format is more effective than the standard format for promoting a VKontakte community (teaser format).

Efficiency of carousels

In our experience, with medium and large budgets, placing carousels allows you to increase CTR, reduce the cost of a click and the cost of a targeted action. The difference in efficiency between carousels and other VKontakte formats is clearly shown by the results of a test that we conducted together with the online furniture hypermarket HomeMe.ru.

We launched three advertising campaigns: with TGB, promotional posts and carousels. Each campaign used similar creatives and the same targeting. The average CTR for carousels was 1.8 times higher than for promotional posts. The conversion rate for promotional posts and carousels was approximately the same, but the latter significantly benefited due to the cost of the click. As a result, orders attracted through carousels were cheaper than those brought by promotional posts.

Now is the time to talk about the different types of carousels and which one is right for you. Inside the agency, we conditionally divide all carousels into product and information ones.

Grocery carousels

What is this?

Ads with cards to which the advertiser’s products are added: individual products or entire categories. Product carousels are divided into two groups: category and product. A category carousel is a carousel whose cards show categories of goods or services, and links lead to pages of the corresponding categories on the site. If the cards contain products and the links lead to product pages, we are dealing with a product carousel.

What industries are they suitable for?

Online trading, cars, real estate, tourism and travel, any other business with a wide range of goods or services.

How to format them correctly?

While working with food carousels, we developed three golden rules:

1. The more, the better.

The product photo or illustration must fill out the entire card. The carousel takes up quite a lot of space in the news feed, but the cards themselves are not that big. Don't make users stare painfully at what you're advertising.

2. It’s even better if it’s the same amount.

The sizes of the goods in the photo should match: such advertisements look more aesthetically pleasing and show better results.

3. A single style is simply super.

Photos and illustrations in all cards must be designed in the same style. A mix of sofas on a white background, against a gray wall and under a carpet is unlikely to lead you to success.

When to use category carousels?

They work especially well when you first launch an advertising campaign - when you don’t yet know what exactly your products or services are of interest to users. By showing products from different categories in one ad, you can collect valuable statistics about the real demand for your product range. These carousels are also suitable when advertising is shown to a wide audience. For example, if you target ads from an online furniture store to users with an interest in “home improvement.” Another working option is additional sales. Users who have already ordered something on the site can be shown cards with categories from which they have not yet purchased products.

When to use product carousels?

The most obvious case is when your website has only one category of goods or services. A less obvious option is to run product carousels that target a narrow audience (so narrow that they are interested in products from a specific category). If, say, you managed to gather an audience of users interested in buying table lamps, a product carousel will help show them specific offers.

When launching product carousels, you must check the correctness of the ads. Most often, errors in them appear due to irrelevant prices or products that are out of stock. This problem is solved by the “advanced” version of product carousels - dynamic retargeting. Ads in this format are generated automatically, and relevant information is pulled into cards from the product feed.

Case: interaction of category and product carousels

Product and category carousels complement each other perfectly and increase the overall effectiveness of advertising. Therefore, in practice, we often use different types of carousels within one campaign.

We recently conducted an advertising campaign for a large developer selling apartments in Moscow and the Moscow region. At the first stage, category carousels were shown to a wide audience (users interested in purchasing real estate). The cards displayed different residential complexes of the same class, and links led to the landing pages of these objects.

We collected users who went to the site, but did not leave a request or call, into a separate database. And then they were shown product carousels with specific apartments or layouts - exactly those that they had recently viewed on the residential complex website (dynamic retargeting, mentioned above, came in handy here). The applications that the developer received as part of this campaign cost him half as much: the CPO was 52% lower than when placing promotional posts.

Information carousels

What is this?

Ads aimed at promoting a single product or service. The cards in them convey to the audience the main advantages or USP of the product.

What industries are they suitable for?

Financial services, insurance, b2b, consulting services.

When to use?

When working with a complex product, when potential customers need a lot of information and one advertising message is clearly not enough to interest them.

The effectiveness of such carousels largely depends on the order in which cards with key benefits or main messages are arranged. The key to success is to collect the most popular questions that people ask when deciding to buy a product or order a service. And then put the answers to these questions on the first three cards of the carousel.

The fact is that it is the third card that users click on most often (it accounts for 34% of all clicks). The next most popular are the first and second cards (19 and 17% of clicks, respectively). We obtained this data by summarizing the annual statistics of carousels placed for fifteen clients.

Case: working with a complex financial service

Refinancing consumer loans is a complex financial product, and the target audience usually knows very little about it. As a result, the user does not trust such offers too much, and it is problematic to promote them using a regular advertisement. So when the Zenit Bank team came to us with the task of increasing the number of applications for refinancing from VKontakte, the first thing we thought about was information carousels.

At the application stage, people are usually interested in three things: loan amount, rate and term. We have arranged all this information on cards in descending order of its importance to consumers. Carousels were launched instead of promotional posts, which by that time had been posted for three months; We did not change targeting or other campaign settings.

Three months later, the cost of a lead from VKontakte (a completed form on a social network or an application on a website) decreased by 26%, while the volume of attracted leads increased by 10%. The dream of any advertiser has come true: we have increased the number of conversions and at the same time reduced their cost!

Active link

An active link that will take potential clients to the landing page should be placed in the post itself (if the format allows it). And it's better to shorten the link if it's too long. To do this, I recommend using the internal service vk.com/ss. When using third-party link shortening services, VKontakte may block the link and the transition to this site, considering them malicious.

We must remember that users of social networks can be so inattentive that they often simply do not see where the link is and where to point. Therefore, the call to action and the link itself should not be the last line in your ad. So they can simply get lost. It’s better to write a couple more lines after the link. I saw how Olga Yurkovskaya repeated the link in her advertising post 3 times in a row. You definitely won't miss this link.

How to make and launch a promotional post on VKontakte

To create a promotional post, you need to have your own public page or VK group with normal design and minimal content. Previously, the requirements for communities allowed to use this tool were very strict, a minimum of 5,000 subscribers and a budget in the advertising account of 1,000 rubles, but now these requirements do not exist.

There are two types of promotional posts:

• Promoting an existing post in a group;
• Promoting a hidden post on behalf of the group (subscribers will not see it, only your target audience to whom the advertisement is running will see it in their feed).

To create a promotional post, go to the VKontakte advertising booth at https://vk.com/ads, click “Create an ad”, then select “Post in the community” and copy the link of the post from your group that you want to advertise in the VKontakte users’ news feed . To copy the link of the desired post, right-click on the date and time the post was posted and select “Copy link”.

You can also create a new post in your advertising account; in this case, your subscribers will not see it and it will not be in the group, but in the users’ news feed it will be shown on behalf of your group. This can be useful if you want to test a large number of similar posts, or to create different promotional posts for different audiences.

You can find examples of ready-made promotional posts for your topic in the Publer service. It saves promotional posts that have already been shown, you can find interesting ideas for advertising and look at competitors’ ads.

Now we’ll tell you and share our observations on how to make a promotional post as effective as possible:

Life hack first: video format or gifs

About 90% of the feed consists of various pictures and photographs, so videos or gifs will attract more attention - such posts are still new to people.

And if the video is not just downloaded from the Internet, but also cut using video editors (for example, SonyVegas or Camtasia), then there will be no price for it.

On average, at the moment, a video or GIF format converts 1.5 times better than an image (although, of course, it all depends on the creative itself in the first place).

Lifehack two: user-generated content

So-called “user-generated content” is very effective. That is, not professionally taken photos or videos, but taken, say, on a smartphone:

Such techniques increase the trust of the audience: people have always liked to “spy” on what other users are doing. This also explains the demand for vloggers.

However, this method has not yet gained widespread popularity - we spotted this idea at one of the conferences

Life hack three: “useful” content

Another good idea would be a post with some kind of culinary recipe, inviting you to subscribe to a group on a relevant topic or, for example, a music selection:

Or attract people’s attention with new interesting information, as, for example, was done in this promotional post:

Advertising “on the forehead” with a large inscription BUY-BUY has not evoked the response we need from the audience for a long time, because such offers have been pouring in on users like from a cornucopia for at least a decade. Our task is to interest the client, and then carefully offer him the product. This scheme can be successfully pulled off with the help of well-made promotional posts.