If you are a Facebook marketer, one of the most annoying messages to receive from Facebook is:

Your Ad Was Not Approved!

UGH – here you probably just spend a good amount of time putting your ad together (or paying your virtual assistant or outsourcer to put the ad together) and now you have to make changes to it and practically do it all over again. Annoying! (There’s one reason to save your source files right?!?!)

I learned this the hard way but now my ads don’t get rejected anymore. The main reason why my ads were getting rejected was because there was too much text in the ad. I was confused about this because I was seeing other ads that had just as much text as I did and didn’t quite understand why mine were getting rejected!

Here’s what Facebook sent me:

I finally got help from a helpful marketer so now I am going to help you so you never get that horrible rejected message ever again.

Here’s One Simple Rule To Follow When Doing Your Ads

There is a very simple rule that you have to follow and that is: Say what you want to say, just say it smaller.

It is a natural instinct to want the call to action on our ad to be big so that people can see it and actually do what we want people to do when they see our ad. We want to shout it from the mountains and the rooftops!

Calls to action like:

• Click Here
• Click For More Details
• Only 5 More Hours Left – Don’t Miss Out

I can go on and on with my favorite calls to action….

But here’s the thing – your ad cannot be more than 20% text in your image. The sample ad below would get rejected very quickly by Facebook because the text takes up more than 20%….and that’s a no no.

See This Example Ad  That Will Definitely Get Rejected:

The text in this ad takes up too much space and that’s a big fat no no according to Almighty Facebook!

So how do you get around this? Well, write smaller text in your ad. Easily done.

You can still have your call to action but you need to strategically place them inside your ad in a certain way and size.

Here’s How It’s Done

You need to use this special tool that will save your ass from having to redo your ads.

The tool is located here:

 https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay

Now, I know what you are thinking……

What If People Miss My Message?

Don’t worry – this won’t happen if you follow this simple rule – Just make sure that you Don’t Clutter Your Ad! Study successful marketer’s ads. Study the big names – you know who they are! You will see that they have a simple call to action that fits the 20% rule and then they have some sort of picture. Don’t try to stuff your images with too much because then people will miss your message for sure!  I don’t want to get too much into conversion because that is for another article but if you just stick to text (call to action) + picture, then you should be A-OK! Don’t complicate your ads and make them simple enough that you can easily split test to see which ads perform better.

Here’s How To Use This Magic Tool

1) Upload your ad to this page:  https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay

2) Make sure your text only takes up 5 boxes:

 

As you can see, my ad above takes up 10 boxes and that is how I automatically know that it will get rejected.

I can quickly change my ad to look like this:

 

And now my text only takes up 4 boxes! (I could probably even add one more small word if I wanted to….like “Hurry”)

So now you know how to ensure that your ads won’t be rejected because of the 20% text rule.  Be sure to follow this and you should be OK!

==> Are there any other “rules of thumb” that you use to generate your Facebook ads to avoid them getting disapproved? Please share them below!