Have you ever been scrolling through your Facebook timeline and come across posts for pages you don’t follow? How many times have you seen a Facebook post with the word “sponsored” under the page name? These are all Facebook Ads. While one may think advertising on Facebook is easy (and Facebook does make it a simple process), there is a lot more thought that goes into each individual ad than one may think. Facebook gives advertisers guidelines and recommendations to help each ad gain the most traction and reach the most people.
Facebook’s business information pages offer great information on how to advertise on both Facebook and their sister platform, Instagram. In terms of Facebook ads, they give design recommendations so that your ad will look the best it possibly can. For a stellar image ad on Facebook, the company recommends the following design parameters:
Where businesses can tend to fall short is with image text. Image text refers to the text you see on the actual image or creative in the ad. Facebook studies have found that photo-only ads will consistently outperform other ad formats in driving unique traffic. In addition, ads that contain images with less text tend to cost less, a plus for your business! To avoid using too much text in your ad images, Facebook offers these tips:
Check out these examples of text in ads. The following 4 examples show how the amount of image text affects how many people see your ad:
As you can see, the more text on the image, the more cluttered the ad seems. This not only causes Facebook to either not run your ad or not reach as many people, but if it does reach people, they may scroll past your ad because it isn’t eye-catching. Image text makes your ad seem messy, and even if people see the ad, there is less of a chance they will interact with it. We want your ads to perform to the best of their ability. Following the “less text is more” rule is a step in the right direction for your business and ads to reach the most eyes and receive more business!
*Examples from https://www.facebook.com/business/help/980593475366490
