The only ad size guide you need: five platforms, exact dimensions, and what gets cropped

Getting ad dimensions wrong is the least interesting way to waste a media budget, and one of the most common. The platform accepts your upload, shows you a preview that looks fine, and then crops it differently in the placement that actually gets the impressions.

Here are the sizes worth building against, why each one is what it is, and where the platform will quietly cover part of your artwork with its own interface.

Instagram: square feed post

1080 × 1080 · 1:1

The square remains the most reliable Instagram format. It occupies more vertical space in the feed than a landscape image, and unlike the 4:5 portrait it is safe to reuse in almost every other placement without recomposition.

• Keep meaningful content inside a centre region of roughly 950 × 950, since profile chrome and interaction icons overlay the edges in some contexts.
• Avoid placing your headline in the bottom sixth: the caption preview sits directly beneath and the two compete.
• If you also need Stories, generate a 1080 × 1920 version rather than letting Instagram pillarbox the square.

Facebook: link and feed banner

1200 × 628 · 1.91:1

This is the standard link-share and single-image ad size, and it is unforgiving. The aspect ratio is wide enough that a centred composition leaves a lot of dead space on either side, so it rewards asymmetric layouts: subject on one side, type on the other.

YouTube: video thumbnail

1280 × 720 · 16:9

A thumbnail is the highest-contrast job on this list, because it is displayed at genuinely small sizes in a grid of competitors doing the same thing. On a phone, a sidebar thumbnail is often under 200 pixels wide.

• Three or four words maximum, set very large.
• Reserve the bottom-right corner: the duration badge is drawn there and will cover whatever you put underneath.
• A face or a single clear object outperforms a busy scene at this size, consistently.

X (Twitter): summary card image

1200 × 675 · 16:9

X crops link preview images to 16:9 in the timeline. Supplying a square and hoping for the best means the top and bottom of your composition are removed without warning.

Because the card sits directly under your post text, treat the image as the visual and the post as the copy. Duplicating your headline in both is wasted space.

LinkedIn: sponsored content banner

1200 × 627 · 1.91:1

Nearly identical to the Facebook banner, but the context is different enough to change the creative. LinkedIn feeds are denser with text and lighter on imagery, so a clean, high-contrast graphic stands out more than it would elsewhere, and overtly consumer-style creative tends to read as out of place.

The rule that covers all five

Generate at the destination size, every time. Resizing after the fact is not a shortcut; it is a decision to let an algorithm recompose your ad on your behalf, and it does not know what the subject is.

If you only take one thing from this: never let the platform decide the crop. It will always choose worse than you would.

VizDrop generates natively at each of these dimensions, so a campaign across all five placements is one run rather than five rounds of manual recomposition.