Industry Update

Facebook Removed 20% Text Rule

Sanne Kruis

The Marketing Manager of The Next Ad.

Jun 13, 2016

Previously, if 20% of an ad image was text, it wouldn’t be approved to run on Facebook or Instagram. This policy is widely know as the 20% text rule of Facebook. While ads with minimal text are still preferred, Facebook has adopted a new system that allows you to run ads that would’ve been rejected under their old policy.

Facebook Removed 20% Text Rule

Previously, if 20% of an ad image was text, it wouldn’t be approved to run on Facebook or Instagram. This policy is widely known as the 20% text rule of Facebook. While ads with minimal text are still preferred, Facebook has adopted a new system that allows you to run ads that would’ve been rejected under their old policy. With this new system, ads with higher amounts of text will receive less or no delivery at all. This feature will be rolling out gradually, so it may not be available to you yet.

The amount of text in your ad will influence the amount of reach resulting in 4 ratings:

Visual examples

These ads are considered ideal because all the copy used for these ads is in the text box, instead of directly in the image.

These ads are considered to have moderate text. Each of these ads has most of their copy in the text box, but there’s still some copy directly on the images in each of them.

These ads are considered to have heavy text. Each of these ads has about half of their copy in the text box and about half of their copy on the images used in their ads. The delivery for these ads will likely be severely limited.

These ads are considered to have too much text. These ads will likely not deliver.

Relevancy wins, always

It’s good to keep in mind that too much text in your ad COULD influence the performance of your campaign. And your ad’s reach MAY BE slightly lower or MAY not run at all. This means that it’s possible that too much text will not influence your results at all. Relevancy is still the most important ingredient for the performance of all campaigns.

New text overlay tool

To check if your image includes too much text, Facebook has its own “text overlay tool“. Before this new system you could upload your visual in the text overlay tool and select the areas that contained text within your visual. This tool would give you the percentage of text in your ad. If the percentage was 20% or lower your ad will be delivered. If the percentage was higher than 20% your ad wouldn’t be delivered via Facebook.

With the new system Facebook just launched comes a new text overlay tool to check in which category your visual belongs. Now you only have to upload your visual and the text overlay tool will automatically detect the amount of text and rates your ad based on the image text ratings (OK, LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH).

Tips

• To keep you text in your image ad short and simple, use a smaller font size and fewer words
• Consider putting most of your text in the text area of your ad instead of on the ad image
• Avoid spreading text all over the image
• Share the “text overlay tool” with your creative department if you’re not creating your own ad images
• Less text = higher delivery