Facebook ad copy character limits by placement

Say you wrote four good lines of copy and the offer is in the last one. In the preview the feed shows the first line and a bit of the second, then a See more link, and the offer sits behind it.

That cut is what the Facebook ad copy character limit is really about, and Meta answers it halfway. It recommends 50 to 150 characters of primary text for a Facebook Feed ad and 125 for Instagram Feed. Its ads guide names neither a hard maximum nor the character where your own text gets cut, and that gap decides how to write the first line.

The Facebook ad copy character limit, placement by placement

Meta's ads guide recommends 50 to 150 characters of primary text and 27 of headline for a Facebook Feed image ad, and 125 and 40 for Instagram Feed. Reels are shorter, at 44 characters of primary text on Instagram and 40 on Facebook. All of these are recommended lengths, not caps.

The table comes from Meta's image ad pages and counts characters. Not listed means that placement's page gives no number for the field. The Facebook Feed numbers are the same on Meta's sales, traffic, awareness, engagement and leads pages, and the Facebook Feed video page gives the same two.

The carousel page for Facebook Feed lists 80 for primary text, 20 for headline and 18 for description. Ads on Facebook Reels, the overlay on a reel, are listed at 60 for primary text and 10 for headline.

What Meta does not publish

On the pages we read, Meta gives no hard maximum for these fields and no point where the text is cut. The ads guide's front page says it holds character limits, but each placement page files its counts under Text recommendations. Under that same heading Instagram Feed lists a maximum of 30 hashtags, so Meta uses the word when it means a cap.

Meta's help page on text in ads gives one general figure: 125 characters of primary text, 40 of headline and 25 of description for most placements. It says longer text may be truncated, and it still words the figures as a recommended length.

The cut is not published either. Meta's help page on ad previews says a published ad can differ slightly from its preview in the text, including where it is cut off, and that the preview does not show every phone or computer an ad may appear on. Its advice is to preview on your own phone, and to keep text short, particularly for Stories.

So the cut is something to look at rather than look up. Open the advanced preview in Ads Manager, step through its Placements tab, and see where your own text stops.

What belongs before the cut

Meta does not say what the first line should hold. It does say that telling people what you want them to do, at a glance, is the most important goal of an ad, and that primary text should span two to three lines at most, in its guidance for tailored campaigns.

What follows is our judgment, built on one test: the part you can see has to work if it is all anyone reads.

• The reason to buy goes first. Say you sell candles and this week's offer is free delivery. "Free delivery on every candle this week" is the offer and survives if everything after it is hidden. "Welcome to our autumn range" spends the visible part on nothing.
• A price or an offer belongs there too, when you have one. Meta's page on effective text options pairs a line about low prices with the same line stating a price.
• One promise. Two in the visible part compete, and the second may be the one that is cut.
• Leave out the greeting and the long lead-in.

To see what others put first, read a competitor's live Meta ads: the headline, the hook and the offer are all on view. If an AI tool wrote your line, check the words before an AI ad runs, because the price and the delivery promise should match the store as it is today.

Facebook ad copy length when one ad runs in several placements

Write the first line of your ad copy to fit the shortest recommended primary text of any placement you run in, which is 40 characters on Facebook Reels and 44 on Instagram Reels, then put the detail after it for the placements with room, up to 150 in Facebook Feed. Meta's advanced preview shows how one ad may appear in different placements, and each row of the table has its own length.

Description is the field to trust least. The ads guide lists a description length for some placements, such as Marketplace and the Facebook Feed carousel, and none for a single image or video ad in Facebook Feed or Instagram Feed. Write each ad as if it had no description.

Copy for another market, written again rather than translated comes out a different length, so count the new words against the same table.

What counting characters will not tell you

A line inside the numbers can still be a weak ad: the count says whether it fits, never whether it sells. None of the pages we read says how Meta counts spaces, line breaks or emoji, so leave yourself some room under the number rather than writing to it exactly.

Text inside the picture is a separate matter. Meta's help centre says an ad image no longer has a limit on how much text it holds. Its tailored campaigns guidance still tells advertisers not to put too much text on an image.

Where Nomi helps with the first line

Nomi helps with the decision that comes before the count. Ask it for a campaign and it plans the angle and the hook before anything is drawn, then writes the copy in the same session, from what it read on your site about what you sell and how you sound.