How the Stories placement works
Stories are the vertical, full-screen posts that sit above the feed on Facebook and Instagram and expire after a day. People tap through them one at a time rather than scrolling. An ad is slipped in between two organic Stories, arriving in the same shape and at the same size as the content around it, and it holds the entire screen while it runs.
Because the viewer is tapping forward rather than scrolling past, the ad has the screen to itself, but only for as long as the person tolerates it. A tap moves to the next Story and a swipe leaves the account altogether. The call to action sits along the bottom edge as a button or swipe-up, so anything you place low in the frame is competing with it for space.
Why the Stories placement matters
It is one of the few placements where your ad is not sharing a screen with anything else — no surrounding posts, no comment counts, no competing thumbnails. When a message needs a few uninterrupted seconds, such as a demonstration or an offer with a condition attached to it, that undivided screen is worth buying.
Stories are also watched almost entirely on phones, held upright, often in short gaps during the day. For markets like Nepal, where most people meet a business on a mobile screen before they ever see it on a desktop, that matches how the audience actually behaves rather than how a desktop mock-up looks in a proposal.
Common mistakes with Stories
Recycling a square or landscape asset is the frequent one. Meta will pad it out with a coloured background and the ad still runs, but it surrenders the full-screen advantage that made the placement worth having in the first place. The related mistake is ignoring the safe zone: the strips at the top and bottom of the frame are covered by the profile row, the progress bar and the call-to-action button, so a headline placed there is cropped or unreadable.
The third is depending on sound. Plenty of people watch with the volume off, so a point that exists only in the audio track never lands. Burnt-in captions or on-screen text carry it instead, and they cost almost nothing to add.
Getting it right
Build for the full vertical frame from the start rather than cropping down at the end, keep every word that matters inside the safe area, and make the point in the opening moment instead of building towards it. An image Story holds the screen for a short fixed moment before advancing, so a still needs to work at a glance.
Give Stories its own cut of the video where you can, using placement asset customisation, so one campaign can feed both a vertical placement and a square feed placement without either being padded. Then read cost per result by placement rather than reach — Stories can accumulate views quickly and still be the wrong place for a considered decision. Where the vertical asset does the heavy lifting, that is a Meta ad creative decision, not a targeting one.