UGC (user-generated content) is a video, photo or testimonial made by an ordinary person about your product, with the feel of real use and no commercial-style production. For a business, it works in three ways. It becomes an organic post, an ad creative and proof on your sales page. What decides whether it works is who films it, what the contract says and whether the piece runs where your customer is already buying.
Before getting into the details, a note on scope. This guide covers UGC as marketing material. If you are looking for influencer pricing, fees per follower and campaign briefs, that topic is in another article of ours, on hiring an influencer or UGC creator. Here the focus is the format and how to use it in ads.
What UGC is, and how it differs from influencer content
UGC is any material created by a user or customer rather than by the brand. The difference from an influencer is in what the business buys. With an influencer, you pay for their audience. With UGC, you pay for the material, and it goes out on your profile or in your ad, not on the creator’s page.
In practice, there are two ways to get UGC.
- Organic UGC. A customer tags your business, films an unboxing or writes a review. You ask for permission to reuse it. It costs little, but you don’t control the volume or the angle.
- Commissioned UGC. You hire a creator, send the product and a short brief, and receive finished videos. This is the format agencies call a UGC creator. The creator doesn’t need followers. They need to film well and talk like a customer.
Almost the entire market for UGC ads uses the second type, because you can ask for variations in the hook, angle and length. That is what makes testing possible.
Why UGC works (and what you can’t promise)
It works because the feed and the ad carousel are already full of polished, produced creative. A video shot on a phone by someone who looks like the buyer interrupts scrolling less and feels like real use.
This is not a guarantee of sales. No format makes up for a weak offer, a slow page or a product the customer doesn’t want. And UGC performance data circulating online almost always comes from people who sell UGC. That’s why this article gives no percentage gain. What you can do is measure your own: run the same product with a UGC video and with your usual design, in a side-by-side test, and compare the cost per result.
How much people search and what a click costs
To size up the topic, we checked Google Ads Keyword Planner on October 30, 2026, for Brazil and in Portuguese.
| Search | Monthly volume | Estimated top-of-page bid |
|---|---|---|
| ugc content | 880 | R$7.34 |
| ugc ads | 70 | R$23.55 |
Top of page bid is Google’s estimated bid for the top of the page in October 2026, not what each company pays. It’s the same reading as in our CPC by industry study, covering 103 industries.
What the table tells you. Searches for the general term are low, 880 per month, but there are people searching with intent to hire. And “anúncios ugc” has the higher bid of the two, R$23.55, because the people typing it are almost always businesses that already run ads and want a new creative. The volume is 70 searches, so it’s a niche. It’s not a mass market, it’s a service that supports paid search.
How to hire UGC content in four steps
A short process prevents the most common mistake: receiving twenty videos nobody can use.
- Define the use before the brief. If the video is for ads, ask for vertical, 15 to 30 seconds, with the promise in the first three seconds. If it’s for your profile, the tone can be looser.
- Write a one-page brief. Product, who it’s for, three things the creator must show, two things they can’t say. No word-for-word script, because a script feels stiff and the video loses its natural feel.
- Ask for opening variations. For each video, two or three different first lines. The opening is what changes ad results the most, and it’s cheap to vary.
- Agree on revisions. One round of changes included in the price, with a deadline. Without that, the negotiation turns into an email fight.
If you don’t have a team to check all of this, that’s exactly where an agency comes in. Our page on content creation for social media describes how Ciclicko organizes this work.
What the creator contract should include
A UGC content contract is short, but three clauses decide whether you can use the video as you intend.
Rights assignment and usage period. State where the material can run (organic, ads, website, email) and for how long. Paid ad usage is usually negotiated separately from organic usage. If the contract is silent, you risk paying twice for the same video.
Editing rights. You need to be able to cut, caption and swap the opening. Without that, there is no testing.
Exclusivity. Define whether the creator can film for a direct competitor and for how long. The broader the exclusivity, the more expensive the piece.
Image and voice release. Get it in writing, for the agreed format and period. If the creator uses music, the contract should say who is responsible for the license. In ads, an unlicensed track gets the piece taken down.
A contract is a legal matter. For amounts, assignment periods and specific clauses, confirm with your attorney. The list above is meant to get you to that conversation knowing what to ask.
How to run UGC content in ads without it looking like an ad
The typical mistake is taking the UGC video and adding a logo, commercial-style music and a call to action in huge letters. At that point it stops looking like UGC, which was the reason you bought it.
A few formatting tips that tend to help.
- Keep the phone footage, with ambient sound and natural speech.
- Burned-in captions on screen, because a good part of the audience watches without sound.
- Put the call to action in the ad text and on the button, not painted over the video.
- Show the product in use in the first few seconds, not after an intro.
Ads are the place to test. Upload three or four videos in the same ad set, let them run long enough to gather numbers that actually matter, and turn off the ones that fall behind. If your account has low volume, test fewer assets at a time.
Paid partnerships on Instagram: the official feature
When a creator posts the video on their profile and you want to boost that same post, Instagram has a partnership ads feature, previously called branded content ads. According to the Instagram Help Center, the creator grants permission to use the content. The Instagram help page describes two routes. One is the partnership ad code, which the creator generates for a post and shares with the partner. The other is account-level permission, for long-term partnerships. Permission can be revoked.
For your business, the practical step is to ask the creator in the brief to post with the paid partnership label and to turn on permission. This detail saves a week of back-and-forth messages after the video is ready. Check the current rules in the Help Center itself, because Meta often changes the name and the menu path.
AI-generated UGC
Some people suggest generating the creator with artificial intelligence. From a production standpoint, it’s fast. From a trust standpoint, it’s the opposite of what the format promises. The appeal of UGC is that it looks like a real person sharing a real experience. An invented person describing an experience that never happened is a fake testimonial, and a fake testimonial is a reputation and platform-policy risk that isn’t worth what you save. We discuss where AI helps and where it gets in the way in the article on AI for social media.
For scripts, captions, and organizing your content calendar, the tool helps. For the face and voice of someone who used the product, use real people.
How to measure whether UGC content delivered results
Measure at the business level, not just the individual asset.
- Cost per result for the UGC ad versus the control ad, over the same period and with the same audience.
- Three-second view rate, which shows whether the opening held the viewer’s attention.
- Orders or leads that reached the page, checked in your analytics, and not just the click.
If UGC content gets cheap clicks and the page doesn’t convert, the problem is the page. If it gets few clicks, the problem is the opening. Separating the two saves your test budget.
To choose the right format at each stage, it’s also worth comparing it with carousels or Reels and seeing how much it costs to edit the material in the article about reels editing for businesses.
Frequently asked questions
What is UGC content? It’s content created by an ordinary person, a customer or a hired creator, about a product or service, in the language of real use. The brand uses the material on its profile, in ads and on its website.
Is UGC content the same as an influencer? No. With an influencer, you pay for the reach of their profile. With UGC, you pay for the video or photo, which runs on your profile or in your ad, even if the creator has few followers.
Can I use a video from a customer who tagged me on Instagram? Get written permission before reposting or boosting it. A tag does not equal a transfer of rights.
How much does a UGC video cost? The price varies with the creator, the usage period and exclusivity, and there is no single price list. Ask for a quote with the usage (organic or ad) and the period already defined, so you can compare like-for-like proposals.
Does UGC content work in ads? It depends on the offer, the landing page, and the audience. The way to find out is to test the video against the creative you already use, with the same budget, and compare the cost per result.
Do you need to disclose that the content is an ad? When there is payment, use Instagram’s paid partnership label and make the relationship clear to viewers. Check with your lawyer or with CONAR (Brazil’s advertising self-regulation council) about the ad disclosure rules that apply to your case.
Want a content plan that includes UGC?
Ciclicko puts the calendar, the creator brief, and ad measurement into a single workflow. Learn about our social media content creation service and message us on WhatsApp through the site.