Your Ad should contain only 20% Text...

If there's a single most-common reason that my ads get denied, it's because I forget to check text coverage on images for my sponsored organic posts.

Whether you're promoting organic Facebook posts on your page's feed or running pure ads, Facebook is very picky about how much text you can display inside of your ad creative.

This is Facebook's way of making sure that your ad images aren't covered in obnoxious calls-to-action, over-sized logos, and other excessively commercial elements.

Official 20% Rule Page:https://www.facebook.com/business/help/468870969814641

Facebook provides a tool for checking how much of your image is covered in text, which you can test for yourself at https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay. When you click the grid cells that contain text after uploading your image, you can see the percentage of the image that contains text.

Here's an example of two image variations you might test, but only the option on the right would be usable in a campaign:

The fastest way to avoid the 20% rule is to automatically produce all of your social media imagery with the 20% rule in mind — or produce a separate set of images just for Facebook.

When we create social media graphics, we have a transparent grid saved as a PNG file that we paste into a layer of the image we're working on. You can copy & paste the image below, or download templates for Illustrator, InDesign, Powerpoint, and Photoshop from our blog: Facebook Ads 20% Text Grid Templates.

There are a ton of Facebook Ad targeting options available — that's where the power in Facebook Ads comes from. We put together an enormous Facebook targeting guide if you want to see all of the options available.

But, sometimes the targeting options don't act the way you think they'd act, and they're changing as I write this post.

The most common targeting mistake I see when someone runs their first Facebook Ad is thinking that when you target 2 interests, you'll only reach people who like both of those topics.

Historically, that type of interest overlap is difficult to target, and Facebook's functionality only allowed you to target users who like Topic 1 OR Topic 2, but not Topic 1 AND Topic 2.

Here's how Facebook targeting has worked for the past few years: