Facebook Pulls the Trigger on Its 20% Rule
It’s happening… It’s really, REALLY happening…
Sure, they’ve teased us before, saying, “oh, yeah, don’t worry about the 20% rule anymore…” But it turned out they were limiting where your ads would run if they had greater than 20% text in the ad. The rule was being bent, but not done away with altogether.
Now Facebook is officially saying, “Fine, let them eat cake!”
Matt Navarra, social media expert, recently shared that Facebook is contacting advertisers directly to inform them of the update, explaining that:
“…we will no longer penalize ads with higher amounts of image text in auctions and delivery.”
What does this mean for advertising companies?
- NO MORE GRID TOOLS!
- NO MORE FACEBOOK WARNINGS!
- Assurance all ads will serve across Facebook’s full network!
- No more explaining to clients what’s going on when an ad is unexpectedly triggered as >20%!
We’ll miss you, Facebook Ad Text Checker tool, that we grew to love and depend on so much…
We liked you even more than Facebook’s tool (too wordy). Which, BTW, now just redirects to the Facebook Creative Hub…
What does this mean for our clients?
Well, let’s face it… have you ever had a client say, “no, no, please – leave that white space. It adds a nice balance…” or have you heard them say, “less is more, we don’t need to jam more copy into this ad or make our logo bigger to fill space…”
You likely haven’t heard that if you’re an agency because most clients don’t say that.
They say things like, “Carolyn worked really hard on that copy and we want to use all 4 pages. Also, Carl our CEO says we need to absolutely include these 10 paragraphs because ‘that’s what our company is all about…'”
Ads that run with 20% or less text will still perform better than ads with less text.
Rule or no rule.
Statistically speaking, ads with less text over the image get 6-7% greater click through rates. Ads with less text will be viewed by a human more often and not glossed over or drive banner blindness. Ads with less text are more impactful, interruptive, and better.
Hootsuite did a fascinating experiment a few years back that demonstrated the “less is more” statistical success of Facebook ads.
Ads with 5 words in the headline did way better than headlines with more words than that…
Link descriptions with 14 words did way better than those using more words than that…
Granted, you still need that compelling visual and a strong creative concept, but the point remains that all other things being equal… less is more.
Enjoy your cake.
The cake is a lie.
