When you submit an ad for approval on Facebook or Instagram, it either gets “approved” or “rejected” based on a number of factors. If you’re new to the world of paid social media ads, there’s one factor you should be aware of that could make or break your next campaign.

Wanna know what it is?

To get a better idea, let’s pretend we’re working on an ad campaign for a new product to sell online. We’ll use pedicure kits for this scenario.

At this point, we’ve gotten some amazing product photos for our website and social media pages and we’ve already added the products to our website for purchase.

Now we’re working on getting the word out about our new products. We’ve spent a few hours in Canva working on some promo graphics and we’re ready to start advertising.

We decide to run a paid social media ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram. We’ve put together the perfect headline and caption and even decided on our budget and ideal audience. We upload the Canva graphic, submit the ad for approval and hope for the best.

After hours of anxiously waiting, we get a message saying that our ad had been rejected. Now it’s back to the drawing board to figure out what needs to be fixed.

I’ve been working with social media ads since 2014 and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. Nothing stings worse than working hard on ad campaign visuals, only to have them rejected by the social media gods.

What if I told you there’s one rule you can use to help speed up and improve your chances of getting an ad approved to run?

It’s called the 20 percent rule, and it will save you a lot of future headaches.

The 20 Percent Rule:

To preserve the quality of content that appears on Facebook and Instagram user’s feeds, brands can only advertise with visuals featuring 20 percent overlaid text or less. Ads with more than 20 percent overlaid text are more likely to get rejected in the submission process.

Before you run your next paid social media ad, keep this rule in mind and things will go a lot smoother for you.

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