"Avoid too much text on the image itself. We've found that images with less than 20% text perform better, though there is no limit on the amount of text that can exist in your ad image."
I'm so glad they changed this rule from a blanket prohibition, since it precluded my company from effectively advertising on FB. We have developed a novel way to display text on screen that makes it easier and faster to read, and improves accessibility for people with dyslexia and ADHD.
With a screenshot of text, it's super easy to understand how our tech works and whether it is useful for a particular person. But FB wouldn't let us boost posts that had images of our product in use.
I'd be curious to hear from others how much FB penalizes advertisers in terms of cost/reach if they have lots of text.
The policy recently changed and now officially allowable. They used to even have a tool to test the old 20% rule [1]
But still their algo doesn't promote heavy text as much. It's a black box; ads aren't as simple as highest bidder, FB takes engagement on a per user basis into account and evidently heavy text lowers.
Which is ironic given they added those text only posts & the takeover of Memes which at least for me drove my personal browsing to IG only. And now that's starting to go the same way. maybe meme-ification is humanly inherent lol. I'm starting to unfollow friends who only post those inspirational memes and crap. I just want photos, inspiring content from creators/athletes that are relevant to me, and family updates.
FB uses a rather obscure and proprietary internal scoring system. You may be able to publish an ad campaign with lots of text once or twice, but it will make your ads account score go down and at some point it will likely be disabled - temporarily first, after one or two more incidents forever.
The recommended amount of text on the image is less than 20%. Their system also doesn't like text because of potential "circumventions of policy" with putting text in images. Weird fonts that are not machine-readable will likely get the account banned fast.
This actually matches with my experience. My product is text-related and I ran a couple ads with allowable amounts of text (back when there were limits). The ads performed just fine, but FB decided to stop running them, claiming they were low-quality.
Where can this rule be found? That seems like a really odd rule, and https://www.facebook.com/business/help/388369961318508?id=12... says the opposite:
"Avoid too much text on the image itself. We've found that images with less than 20% text perform better, though there is no limit on the amount of text that can exist in your ad image."