Now that the restriction on text has been lifted, that doesn’t mean that we should go crazy with text on images. What does this announcement mean for advertisers? You might have a message that you need to get across quickly in an image format but the text goes over the limit.

The 20% rule does have its problems though: you might have the perfect ad that goes over the rule by just 1% and gets rejected. The tool had its faults, being based on a grid based system that, as we already mentioned, allowed people to play the system, but it was always useful to have. You simply upload your image and it would determine whether your ad would run normally, whether your ad might have a lower reach due to the level of text, or whether it would simply not run at all. Not to worry, we advertisers had the text overlay tool. Facebook had to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere was 20%. An ad covered in words is likely to make users scroll on, and often just looks spammy. Our news feeds are already totally saturated, and getting people to stop scrolling on your post, let alone your ad, is hard enough. The plain and simple truth is that Facebook limited the ratio of text to image size as they know what works best – they know how to get their own users engaging with ads, clicking through and converting, and wordy ads just aren’t that. We’ve never been fans of these workarounds though. And even though we’ve always been mindful about sticking to the maximum 20% text guideline, there were ways to game the system such as aligning the text with grid lines, or using a wordy thumbnail on a video ad. Of course, there are always those ads that slip through the net. This meant never having more than 20% of your image covered by text, or it wouldn’t get approved. Advertisers are still encouraged to reduce the amount of text with images, as we have found that images with less than 20% text generally perform better.” What was the 20% text rule on Facebook?Īny seasoned Facebook marketer knows and either loved or hated the 20% rule. “Please note, advertisers will still need to abide by our ad policies regarding the content of the text. “As of Sept 7th, we will begin gradually removing external material and sources that indicate that we enforce high levels of text in images.

“As part of this review, we will no longer penalize ads with higher amounts of text in auctions and delivery. One of the ways is revisiting the effectiveness and impact of existing ad quality checks. “At Facebook, we are constantly improving and refining the best ways to improve the quality of ads on our platform. In a pretty significant move for advertisers, Facebook has removed the 20% text rule on images used for ads.įacebook confirmed this themselves, stating:

Facebook ads text in image