TikTok and Meta safe zones for app install ads

A vertical ad is not shown on a blank screen. The platform draws its own interface on top of yours — caption, profile, action buttons, the CTA — and anything you put underneath is simply gone. Not cropped, not shrunk: covered.

The numbers are larger than most people assume, and the mistake is almost always the same one.

The bottom third is not yours

The figure that surprises people is the bottom one. TikTok reserves the bottom 36.8% of the frame and Meta 35%. That is more than a third of your creative, occupied by someone else’s interface.

Design convention fights you here. Lower-third captions are how television has framed speech for decades, and most editing tools default to placing subtitles around 15–20% up from the bottom. On a 9:16 feed ad, that puts them inside the reserved band — competing with the platform’s own caption text, which is rendered on top and wins.

Where captions actually belong

Clearing the larger of the two reserves means sitting at about 38% from the bottom of the frame — the lower-middle, higher than instinct suggests.

This is also, not coincidentally, where captions sit in most native TikTok content. Creators learned it by watching their own words get covered. It reads as normal to the audience precisely because everyone who has been doing it a while has already converged on it.

The right-hand column is the other one people miss

TikTok’s action column — like, comment, share, the spinning audio disc — takes 22.4% of the width on the right. Meta only reserves 6% a side.

If your creative centres its subject, this rarely bites. It bites when you put a logo, a price, or a product shot in the right-hand third, which is a natural place to put things in a landscape-trained design habit. On TikTok that entire strip is buttons.

Three rules that cover most of it

• Nothing you need read goes below 38%. Captions, CTA text, price, logo. Above that line or nowhere.
• Keep the right 22% clear on TikTok. Centre your subject rather than composing to one side.
• Your hook lives in the top half. Between TikTok’s top 13.2% and its bottom 36.8%, the genuinely uncontested area is roughly the middle 50% of the frame. Compose for that, not for the full canvas.

These are reference zones, not guarantees

Real interface chrome moves. A long caption pushes the text block higher, a CTA variant takes more room, and the specs change between platform versions. Treat these figures as the documented reference they are, and check a real clip against the real placement before a campaign scales — not after.

That habit is worth more than the numbers. A clip whose captions are buried has no error state and no failed status; it plays perfectly in your review tool and fails only in the feed. It belongs with the other defects that ship silently.

Method

Percentages are from TikTok’s In-Feed ad specs and Meta’s 2026 unified Reels/Stories safe-zone guidance, expressed as a share of frame height and width so they hold at any export resolution. Current as of September 2026.