Why Did Facebook Introduce the 20% Text Rule for Ads?

Intro

If you’ve run Facebook ads long enough, you remember the dread: upload a creative, run it through the grid tool, and pray that fewer than five squares contained text.

That was the 20% text rule — Facebook’s long-standing policy that limited how much text could appear in your ad image. Ads that broke the rule could be disapproved outright or throttled so hard they might as well not exist.

The rule was officially retired in 2020, but the logic behind it still shapes performance today. Let’s unpack why the rule existed, why Facebook killed it, and what it means for your creative strategy in 2025.

The Original Problem: Noisy, Spammy News Feeds

When Facebook first rolled out the 20% rule, News Feed real estate was precious. The platform worried that:

• Too much on-image text would make the feed look like a chaotic billboard

• Users would feel overwhelmed and tune out or even leave

• Low-quality “shouty” ads would drown out more thoughtful creative

The 20% rule gave them a simple heuristic: if text covered more than one-fifth of the image, odds were high it would feel like “banner spam.”

So they enforced it bluntly:

• Ads with more than 20% text could be disapproved

• Or they’d be served with heavily reduced reach relative to others

The infamous grid tool — a 5×5 overlay where you counted squares with text — turned this aesthetic preference into a hard technical limit.

Why Facebook Eventually Removed the Rule

Over time, reality got messy:

• Some formats needed text — event posters, app UI screenshots, book covers, infographics

• Advertisers had to jump through hoops to be whitelisted or appeal disapprovals

• The rule wasn’t perfect at distinguishing ugly text spam from thoughtful, text-forward creative

By 2020, Facebook quietly began phasing out the strict enforcement. Several reports and official communications confirmed that:

• Ads would no longer be disapproved purely for having >20% text

• The text overlay tool was deprecated

• The rule shifted from a hard policy to a performance “guideline”

Today, the official stance is softer: Facebook still recommends using less text because ads with lighter text loads tend to perform better on average — but they no longer auto-punish heavier creatives.

Why Text Still Impacts Your Results

Even without a strict rule, the underlying dynamic hasn’t changed:

• Users scroll quickly and process visuals faster than dense text

• Overloaded images can be harder to decode at a glance

• The algorithm rewards creatives that drive higher engagement and better outcomes

In other words, the auction punishes bad text use naturally, even without a 20% rule.

Best practice now is more nuanced:

• Use text to highlight one clear message — the hook, benefit, or offer

• Let the primary story live in the image or video itself

• Save the longer explanation for your headline and primary text

Think of on-image text as a subtitle, not a paragraph.

What the 20% Rule Era Taught Performance Marketers

If you survived years of text-policing, you probably came away with three habits that are still valuable:

1. Clarity matters more than copy density. A clean visual and a short, sharp promise usually beat a busy collage of slogans.

2. Testing beats assumptions. Many advertisers discovered that “designs the brand team loves” weren’t the ones that actually converted.

3. Constraints can be good. Being forced to fit your core value prop into a small visual space made you better at prioritizing what really sells.

Those habits still give you an edge today — they just operate via performance data instead of blacklist rules.

Don’t Forget the Budget and Payment Side

While the 20% rule was about creative, the same period also taught media buyers another painful lesson: if you’re not careful with budgets and billing, creative experiments can get expensive fast.

Managing multiple ad accounts, tests, and teams from a single brand card exposes you to:

• Overspend when a creative unexpectedly hits

• Chaos when banks randomly decline international charges

• Confusion when you try to match ad spend to results across campaigns

It’s why many growth teams now segment spend using specialized tools — for example, assigning a Finup card for fb to a specific account or campaign cluster, with a hard cap and separate transaction log. That way, if a test goes sideways or you scale a winning creative aggressively, you’re not risking your entire corporate card or making finance guess what happened.

Creative rules come and go. The discipline of pairing strong ads with tight financial control should stick around.

Practical Takeaways for Creatives and Growth Teams

Even though the 20% text rule is gone, here’s how to treat on-image text now:

• Default to less text unless you’re in a format that logically needs more

• Keep one main idea per creative — don’t stack CTAs, offers, and disclaimers on top of each other

• Test “clean visual + strong primary text” against “more text-heavy” variants and let data decide

• Build a feedback loop between designers, copy, and performance so everyone sees how changes impact CTR and CPA

Facebook’s grid might be history, but the spirit of the rule is alive in the auction: ads that respect attention usually win. The ones that shout rarely do — no matter what the official policy says.