Andrew Kingston

Friday Facebook Ads Tip #22: Facebook’s 20% Text Rule

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When it comes to ad policies and approving ads, Facebook’s focus is always on user experience. Anything that detracts from the experience of users on Facebook and Instagram is not good for the company and is precisely the reasoning behind recent changes around privacy and transparency.

Ad campaigns are at the mercy of this goal, and there are a number of things that Facebook knows will negatively affect user experience.

One such thing is using an image which contains a lot of text. As users of the platforms ourselves, we can understand how that makes sense. It goes against the flow to see images full of text in our news feeds, and when it’s not what we are accustomed to, it upsets the experience.

If you are going to use text on the images in your ads, then it is advisable to work within Facebook’s guidelines. To do this, use their text overlay tool (https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay) to check the amount of text that Facebook sees in your image.

Video Transcription:

There was a time before when Facebook wouldn't approve an ad if you had more than 20% of the image taken up with text. So they got rid of that rule a while back, but they actually still take it into account and they say that if your image contains a lot of text, then they won't show it to as many people.

So what you need to do is you need to use their text overlay tool to check the amount of text in your image. So I'll put a link to that below or you can just search "Facebook text overlay tool" and upload your image and check to make sure that the text is okay before you set up your ad.

All the best and see you again next week.

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Copyright ® Kingfisher Ads 2026

Copyright ® Kingfisher Ads 2026