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Instagram Story Ads: Instagram Stories Ads, IG Story Ads and Facebook Stories Ads, from One Vertical Creative

Meta's own developer reference says two things about the Stories placement that sit next to each other and almost never get quoted together: images can be cropped, and videos cannot. Everything advertisers find surprising about how a Story ad looks comes out of that one asymmetry. This page quotes the source, then shows you what to supply so Meta never has to guess. Or start on the right: paste a product page URL and get the vertical cut.

Meta's media requirements, quoted Where letterboxing is fine, said plainly The duration Meta no longer publishes

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The short answer Last updated September 2026

Instagram Story ads are ordinary Meta ads delivered into the full screen vertical Stories placement, and the thing that decides how yours looks is the asset you hand Meta rather than any setting in Ads Manager. Meta's Instagram ads media requirements reference recommends 9:16 for both image and video, sets a minimum width of 600 pixels, and then draws a line most guides miss. For video it says outright that "videos cannot be cropped, so you should provide videos between 1.91:1 and 4:5 or 9:16 and taller." For images it says the opposite: images can be cropped, and if you give no crop spec and your image sits between 4:5 and 9:16, "we crop it to 4:5." So a still you intended as a full screen Story quietly becomes a portrait card, while a video that is the wrong shape is not reframed at all. It is instead transformed into the story format with generated bars above and below, and the only control Meta gives you over those bars is a pair of hex color codes. Supply a true 9:16 video and none of this happens. That is the whole job.

Read this first

You do not upload a Story ad. You upload a source asset, and Meta decides what the Story becomes

Every Story ad involves two creatives. There is the file you approved in the shared drive, and there is the thing a customer's phone actually renders at full screen. Most advertisers assume those are the same object, because in the Feed placement they very nearly are. In Stories they are not, and Meta's developer documentation is unusually direct about why. The reference treats images and video under completely different rules, and the two rules point in opposite directions. Understanding which one applies to your asset tells you in advance what your ad will look like, without opening Ads Manager at all.

What you hand Meta	What Meta does with it	What the customer sees	Control you keep
A true 9:16 video	Nothing. It already fits the surface	Edge to edge full screen, your composition intact	Total
A 1:1 or 16:9 video	Cannot crop it. Transforms it into the story format with generated bars	A letterboxed panel floating in a colored field	Two hex codes, top and bottom
A 9:16 image, no crop spec	Crops it. The stated default for anything between 4:5 and 9:16 is 4:5	A portrait card, not a full screen Story	Only if you send a crop spec
An image wider than 1.91:1	Crops to 1.91:1 when no crop spec is supplied	A wide strip in the middle of the screen	Crop keys 90x160, 100x100, 191x100
Anything under 600px wide	Below Meta's stated minimum width for the placement	Do not find out on a live campaign	None worth having
A carousel	Meta's Stories announcement specifies single image or video only, no carousel	One frame, so the hook has to live in it	Sequence across separate ads instead

The practical read on that table: the only row where you keep full control is the first one. Every other row is Meta making a reasonable decision on your behalf because you did not give it enough information to avoid one. None of those decisions are bugs and none of them are hidden, they are published in the reference. They are just made silently, at delivery time, long after the creative review where somebody would have objected.

Straight from the source

Seven things Meta publishes about Stories ads that almost no Story ads guide quotes

These come from Meta's Instagram ads media requirements reference and its Stories customization guide, both in the developer documentation rather than the business help center. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Rules written for engineers describe constraints that land on media buyers, and because media buyers do not read API references, the rules go unrepeated for years. Each sentence below is Meta's, quoted as written.

1. The asymmetry the whole placement turns on

"Videos cannot be cropped, so you should provide videos between 1.91:1 and 4:5 or 9:16 and taller."

Read it against the image rule two lines further down, which begins "Images can be cropped." One sentence apart, Meta describes two opposite behaviors for the same placement. If you only ever remember one fact from this page, remember that your still images will be reframed without asking and your video will not. That single asymmetry is why a Story ad campaign built from a mixed asset library comes back looking inconsistent in a way nobody can quite explain in the review call.

2. The default that quietly un-full-screens your ad

"If an image ratio is between 4:5 to 9:16 and you do not provide a cropping spec, we crop it to 4:5."

Meta wrote that as a convenience. It saves you from a broken render when you have not thought about crop specs, which is most of the time. Now change one variable, the one you care about, and read it again: the full screen vertical still you designed for Stories is delivered as a portrait card, because you did not tell Meta to leave it alone. It is not an error, so nothing flags it. The ad is live, it is spending, and the format you paid a designer for is not the format running.

3. The wide image rule, same logic

"If an image is wider than 1.91:1 and you provide no crop spec, we crop your image to 1.91:1."

Meta also names the crop keys you can pass instead: 90x160, 100x100 and 191x100. If your creative pipeline talks to the API at all, sending an explicit crop spec is a few lines of work and it removes an entire category of surprise. If you upload manually, the equivalent is checking the placement preview rather than trusting the thumbnail in the asset picker.

4. Meta admits the transform, and offers you two hex codes

"If you transform a non 9:16 ad creative into a full-screen story format, you can also edit the generated background colors."

This is the most useful sentence Meta has published about Stories creative, because it names the thing directly. A non vertical asset is not fitted to the Story, it is transformed into one, and Meta generates the space around it. The controls are real and worth using: "You can edit the background color for the top and bottom above and below your ad creative by using a hex color code," and "You can choose separate colors for the top and bottom." In the API those live under portrait_customizations as top_color and bottom_color, passed as RGB hex strings.

5. One creative, three surfaces, and it is not only Instagram

"This feature works for all stories placements across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger."

Advertisers say "Instagram Story ads" and then buy something broader than that phrase describes. The Stories surface spans Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, so the same vertical asset serves all three and your reporting blends them unless you split it. Meta adds that the customization is "also available for static single image ads, video ads, and ads using placement asset customization," which is the mechanism for giving each surface its own cut if the blended read is hiding something.

6. Two formats where the customization simply is not available

"Not supported for Collection ads and Advantage+ catalog ads."

If you run a catalog, this is the row that applies to you. Advantage+ catalog ads and Collection ads do not get the background color controls, so with those formats the generated field around a non vertical asset is whatever Meta produces. For a catalog advertiser the answer is not to fight the setting, it is to make sure the catalog video assets are natively vertical in the first place, which pushes the problem back to production where it can actually be solved.

7. Selecting Stories can lock out every other placement

"When you select story there are no other placements you can select."

That line comes from Meta's Stories ads announcement for developers, and it explains a structural choice buyers make without noticing. A Stories only buy is exactly that, only Stories. It is not a Stories heavy mix. If you want a clean read on whether vertical creative works for your product, that isolation is precisely what you want. If you want reach efficiency, it is the opposite of what you want, and the honest version of this page has to say both.

What Meta does not publish any more

Almost every Story ads article on the web states a maximum video length of 15 seconds. That figure is real and it is Meta's: the developer announcement for Stories ads says "Video length no longer than 15 seconds." It is also from 2017. The current Instagram ads media requirements reference documents the Stream, Explore and Stories placements and contains no duration limit for Stories at all, no maximum file size and no list of supported formats. So the widely repeated number has a source, the source is nine years old, and Meta's live reference has stopped restating it. We are not going to guess at what replaced it. Build to the length your hook actually needs, confirm it in the Ads Manager placement preview, and treat any spec sheet that states a current Stories duration without citing where it came from, including this one, as unverified. Worth noting for contrast: this is the same reference that has no Reels entry whatsoever, which is why our Instagram Reels ads page publishes no Reels dimensions either.

The second split

"Instagram Story ads" names one surface. Your budget is buying four

The phrase people type is Instagram specific, and the product they end up buying is not. Meta's Stories placement spans Instagram, Facebook and Messenger from a single creative, and the nearest competitor surface, Snapchat, is a separate buy in a separate auction with its own creative expectations. Teams that treat all of this as one line item on a plan get a blended cost per result that cannot be acted on. The table below is the version worth having in a media plan.

Vertical story surface	Bought where	Shares your Meta creative	What it is actually good at
Instagram Stories	Meta Ads Manager	Yes	Full attention for a few seconds from an audience already in a vertical, sound on habit
Facebook Stories	Meta Ads Manager, same ad	Yes	Reaching an older demographic than Instagram with creative you already paid for
Messenger Stories	Meta Ads Manager, same ad	Yes	Incremental vertical inventory, rarely worth a dedicated cut of its own
Instagram Reels	Meta Ads Manager, separate placement	Same ratio, different behavior	Scroll depth and discovery rather than the short burst of a Story
Snapchat Stories	Snapchat Ads Manager, separate buy	Only if you re-upload it	A younger audience and a lower cost auction, at the price of running a second platform

The row worth arguing about is Reels. It is the same 9:16 frame and it is not the same job. A Story arrives inside a sequence somebody chose to watch, and it is dismissed with a tap, so the first second decides everything. A Reel arrives in a feed the viewer is scrolling, and it competes with the next swipe for as long as it runs. That is why the same creative can perform very differently across the two, and why a blended vertical report tells you almost nothing. If you are working out which placement to build for first, the placement mechanics on Instagram Reels ads cover the other half of this question, including what changes when the ad runs from a creator's handle instead of yours.

The order that avoids the failures above

How to create an Instagram Story ad without letting Meta pick your composition

Decide the ratio before you decide the message

This inverts the usual order deliberately. If the asset is going to be a true 9:16 video, every downstream rule on this page stops applying and you can spend your energy on the hook. If it is going to be repurposed from a 16:9 shoot, you have already chosen letterboxing, and the honest thing is to design for it rather than discover it. Make that call in the brief.

Build the vertical cut natively, at 1080 wide or more

Meta's stated floor is 600 pixels of width, which is a floor and not a target. Shoot vertical, generate vertical, or reframe in the edit with the subject repositioned rather than the frame scaled. Keep the top and bottom of the frame free of anything load bearing, because the profile row and the call to action sit there in the live interface no matter what your file looks like flat.

Send a crop spec for every image, or accept the 4:5 default

If you build ads through the API, pass the crop key. Meta names 90x160, 100x100 and 191x100. If you upload in Ads Manager, the equivalent step is opening the placement preview for Stories specifically rather than glancing at the summary. This is a thirty second check that catches the single most common silent failure on the placement.

Set the background colors if anything non vertical is going to run

Meta lets you set separate hex values for the top and bottom of the generated field. A brand color there reads as a design decision. The default reads as an accident. If you are running Collection or Advantage+ catalog ads, the control is not available to you, so the vertical asset has to come out of production already correct.

Split Stories out of the blended report before you judge it

Automatic placements will happily serve one asset into Feed, Reels, Stories and Messenger and hand you an average. If Stories is underperforming because the creative was never vertical, that average hides it. Break the placement out, look at the Stories only numbers for a week, and you will know whether you have a placement problem or a creative problem. They need completely different fixes.

Budget

Instagram Story ads cost, with the unsourceable parts labelled as unsourceable

There are two costs and only one of them is yours to control. Media cost is set by an auction, and Meta publishes no rate card, so every CPM figure you find in a "Story ads cost" article is a report from somebody else's account with a different product, offer and audience. It is a data point, not a price. There is no published surcharge for choosing the Stories placement. What you actually decide is the second number: what it costs to have a vertical asset in the first place, which is a production question with genuinely different answers.

Route to a vertical Story creative	Typical US cost per asset	Turnaround	Honest caveat
Reuse the 16:9 you already have	Nothing new	Immediate	Meta will not crop video, so this is a letterbox decision whether or not you make it consciously
Reframe in the edit	An editor's hourly rate, commonly quoted in the $60 to $150 range	Hours	Only works when the original framing has room to lose on the sides. Often it does not
Hire a UGC creator for a vertical shoot	Marketplace rates, plus a separate fee for paid usage rights	One to three weeks	The most credible output on this list. Also the one with a person and a contract in the critical path
Shoot it properly with a crew	Vendor published day rates commonly start around $3,000	Weeks	These are vendor marketing figures, not a published rate card. Treat as estimates
Generate the vertical cut	From $49 a month on our Starter plan	Minutes	A generated presenter is not a real customer and should never be labelled as one

Our own pricing, since we are on the list: Starter $49 a month, Plus $149, Pro $499. The free tier is watermarked and outputs a static image rather than motion video, so if you want a Story ad you can actually run, you want a paid plan. Saying that plainly here is cheaper for both of us than letting you find out after signing up. Every competitor rate on our AI UGC pricing page is checked against the vendor's own published page rather than a roundup.

What we will not do

Generate the vertical. Do not stretch the horizontal

There is a request we get regularly and decline, and it is worth writing down because declining it is the whole point of the page. Somebody has a finished 16:9 hero film, a Stories budget, and a deadline, and they want a tool to make the film vertical. No tool can do that honestly. You have exactly three options and none of them is a conversion. You can letterbox it, which Meta will do for you and let you pick the bar colors. You can crop into it, which throws away the sides of a frame that was composed to use them, and usually removes the product or the face. Or you can make a vertical asset, which means shooting or generating one.

We do the third thing. We generate vertical creative natively at 9:16 with a presenter, voiceover and burned in captions, so Meta never has to transform anything. What we do not do is set your portrait_customizations, pass your crop specs or touch your ad account. Those stay in Ads Manager or in your own API integration, and any vendor telling you otherwise is describing a permission you should think twice about granting. We also will not generate a presenter and let you present them as a verified customer. An AI presenter delivering a script is an ad with an actor in it, which is entirely normal, and calling it a real testimonial is not.

Against our own argument

The cropping point is convenient for us, so here is where it fails

We have spent a page arguing that non vertical assets get handled in ways you did not choose, which is exactly the argument a company selling vertical creative would want to make. It needs its counterweight, stated as plainly as the claim.

First, the silent crop is mostly an API story. If your team uploads through Ads Manager, Meta shows you a placement preview and generally flags a ratio problem before you publish. The default we quoted describes what happens when no crop spec is supplied programmatically, which is the normal case for automated creative pipelines and the unusual case for a person clicking through the flow. If you are a small advertiser uploading by hand, the risk here is real but smaller than the documentation makes it sound.

Second, letterboxing is not automatically bad. Meta built the background color control on purpose, and a well chosen brand color behind a centered product film can look completely deliberate. Some very good advertisers letterbox Stories intentionally, because a bordered panel signals "ad" clearly and they would rather be honest about that than fake an organic Story badly. Our position is that the choice should be made, not that one answer is always right.

Third, and most importantly for a small budget: Advantage+ and automatic placements usually do lower blended cost per result. Letting Meta serve one asset everywhere is a genuinely rational trade when your production capacity is one asset. The per placement discipline we are advocating costs time, and for an advertiser spending a few thousand a month it may not pay for itself yet. It starts paying when Stories and Reels are a large enough share of your impressions that a weak vertical creative is dragging down an account average you cannot see. That threshold arrives sooner every year, which is the actual argument, rather than the claim that automatic placements are a mistake.

Fourth, on our own evidence: two of the seven quotes above come from a 2017 developer announcement. We flagged the 15 second duration as dated for exactly that reason, and intellectual consistency means flagging the placement exclusivity line from the same document too. It matched Ads Manager behavior for years, but a 2017 statement about a 2026 placement picker deserves a check in your own account before you build a plan on it.

Who this is for

Four teams typing "instagram story ads", and what each one actually needs

The DTC brand with one hero film

You paid for a beautiful 16:9 spot and Stories is eating it alive. Your fastest fix is not a better crop, it is a second asset built vertically from the same script. Generate three versions with different opening lines, run them Stories only for a week, and you will learn more about your hook than the hero film has told you in a quarter.

The agency media buyer inheriting an account

Before you touch targeting, break placements out and look at Stories in isolation. In a surprising number of inherited accounts the vertical placements have never had a purpose built asset, which means there is a clean, cheap win sitting there that looks like a targeting problem on the surface.

The catalog advertiser

Meta's background color controls are not supported for Collection and Advantage+ catalog ads, so your only lever is the source asset. That makes vertical a production requirement rather than a formatting step, and it makes generating per product vertical cuts at volume the difference between covering ten SKUs and covering the catalog. Our bulk UGC content workflow exists for exactly this shape of problem.

The team about to brief a creator

Put the ratio in the brief as a deliverable, in the same line as the talking points, and put paid usage rights next to it. A creator who films 4:5 because it looks good on their own grid has handed you an asset Meta will crop, and you will find out at delivery. The rights question is covered on our UGC creator marketplace page.

Instagram Story ads questions, answered

What are Instagram Story ads?

Instagram Story ads are ordinary Meta ads delivered into the full screen vertical Stories placement, between the Stories a person chose to watch. There is no separate Story ads campaign type. You build an ad, Stories is one of the placements it can serve into, and what you control is whether the creative was built vertically for that surface.

How do I create an Instagram Story ad?

Create a campaign in Meta Ads Manager, then either leave placements automatic or select the Stories placement. Upload a full screen 9:16 asset, open the placement preview to see how it renders with the live interface on top, and publish. Nothing has to be enabled first, which is why many accounts already serve into Stories without having planned for it.

What size should an Instagram Story ad be?

Meta recommends 9:16 for both image and video, and states a minimum image or video width of 600 pixels. The reference also supports 1.91:1 and 4:5 and anything between them, but 9:16 is the only ratio that fills the surface without Meta transforming or cropping your asset. In practice, build at 1080 by 1920.

How long can an Instagram Story ad be?

Meta's current Instagram ads media requirements reference publishes no duration limit for Stories. The widely quoted 15 second figure traces to Meta's 2017 developer announcement, which says video length no longer than 15 seconds, and that document is nine years old. Check the current limit in Ads Manager rather than trusting any spec sheet, including this one.

Can you run ads on Facebook Stories?

Yes, and usually with the same ad. Meta states that its Stories customization works for all stories placements across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, so one vertical creative serves all three surfaces. Your reporting blends them by default, so break the placements out before deciding whether Facebook Stories is working for you.

Why does my Instagram Story ad look cropped?

Almost always because it is an image and no crop spec was supplied. Meta states that if an image ratio is between 4:5 and 9:16 and you do not provide a cropping spec, it crops to 4:5, and that an image wider than 1.91:1 is cropped to 1.91:1. Pass a crop key, or check the Stories placement preview before publishing.

Can I use a horizontal video for an Instagram Story ad?

You can run it, but it will not be cropped to fit. Meta states plainly that videos cannot be cropped, so a horizontal video is instead transformed into the full screen story format with generated background bars above and below it. You can set the color of those bars with a hex code, and that is the extent of the control.

Do Instagram Story ads have to be 9:16?

No, but 9:16 is the only ratio that runs untouched. Meta supports 1.91:1 and 4:5 and the ratios between them in the Stories placement. Anything that is not 9:16 either gets cropped, if it is an image, or gets a generated background field around it, if it is a video. The choice is really between deciding the framing and letting Meta decide it.

How much do Instagram Story ads cost?

Media cost is set by the auction and by your budget, and Meta publishes no rate card, so any CPM you read is a report from somebody else's account rather than a price. There is no published surcharge for the Stories placement. Your controllable cost is producing the vertical asset, which ranges from an editor's hourly rate to a full crew day.

What happens if I select only the Stories placement?

Meta's Stories ads developer announcement states that when you select story there are no other placements you can select. A Stories only buy is genuinely isolated, which is exactly what you want for a clean read on whether vertical creative works for your product, and the opposite of what you want if you are optimizing for reach efficiency.

Can I change the background color behind a Story ad?

Yes, when Meta has transformed a non 9:16 creative into the story format. Meta lets you edit the background color for the top and bottom using a hex code, and choose separate colors for each. In the API these are top_color and bottom_color under portrait_customizations. It is not supported for Collection ads or Advantage+ catalog ads.

What is the difference between Instagram Story ads and Reels ads?

Same 9:16 frame, different viewing behavior. A Story arrives inside a sequence someone chose to watch and is dismissed with a tap, so the first second carries the ad. A Reel arrives in a feed being scrolled and competes with the next swipe throughout. They are separate placements in Ads Manager and deserve separate creative and separate reporting.

Can I use an AI generated video as an Instagram Story ad?

Yes. A generated vertical video is a normal video asset and serves in the Stories placement like any other. Build it natively at 9:16 so Meta does not have to transform it, disclose AI presenters honestly, and never present a synthetic presenter as a real customer or a verified testimonial.

Are Instagram Story ads worth it for ecommerce?

They are worth it when you have creative built for the surface, and frequently not worth it when you do not. The common failure is judging the placement using an asset that was designed for the Feed and adapted automatically. Run Stories with a purpose built vertical cut for a week before concluding anything about the placement itself.

How do I promote an Instagram Story?

Boosting from the app promotes existing content with limited controls, which is fine for a quick test. Building the same thing in Ads Manager gives you the full objective, audience and placement options and is what you want for anything with a real budget behind it. If the Story belongs to a creator rather than your brand, you need their permission first.

Give Meta a 9:16 asset and there is nothing left for it to decide

Paste a product page URL or your own script, pick a presenter, and get a UGC style video with voiceover and burned in captions, built vertically for Stories and Reels, plus 1:1 and 16:9 for everywhere else. Free to start with your account, no credit card needed.

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