How text amounts affect the performance of your messages

The following article consists of our team's interpretation of actual data. We analyze real-life marketing, advertising, and sales data using Confect's proprietary AI engine. Below, we're breaking down our findings and sharing our results so you can supercharge your future sales efforts. Click here to learn more about Confect.

People love looking at eye-catching images and product photos. 

But an image itself doesn't offer any pertinent details or information your viewers might want.  

And before deciding whether or not to make a purchase, they need specific details to help them make an informed decision. 

This is where text or ad copy comes into play. 

But how much text should you include in an ad? Are more details and information better? Or is it better to keep text to a minimum?

You may have heard some say that text should never be included in ads and others who believe that you should always include it. 

But the truth is, it depends entirely on the category and message of your ad. 

Below, we've dug through a mountain of real-life data to find out! 

Let's look at how the amount of text you use can affect the performance of your ad messages.

If you're more interested in how text affects lead generation instead of purchases, click here to find out. There are also many other ways to edit and customize your catalog ads to include relevant information that can boost your performance like you never thought imaginable!

High text amount performed on average 53% better than no text

We started by comparing ads with no text and low, medium, and high amounts of text. And when we say high amounts of text, we're referring to advertisements with more than 20% of the design covered in text.

Surprisingly, we found that ads with high text amounts performed, on average, 53% better than those without any text.

Even ads with medium amounts of text performed better than ads with no and only a low amount of text. 

Advertisers often worry that including too much text will harm the performance of their ads. 

But we can see that the real problem is using too little text. 

Ads with more text perform better because they offer concise information about what you're selling or offering. 

When reaching users that don't have much information about your brand and products, text can be particularly useful.

Note that you don't necessarily need to include a higher character or word count. 

You can also use more text by using a larger font size.

Doing so can make your ad's copy more legible and eye-catching. 

It also enables you to share all the pertinent information your viewers need without an overwhelming wall of text. 

So we know that more text performs better than less text. 

But when should you include more or less text?

Shipping, Sale and Other messages perform better with a high text amount

While more text generally performed better, we also found that not all ad messages performed the same when we included similar amounts of text. 

So when deciding on how much text to use, you must consider your ad's specific message and context. 

Message categories such as shipping, sale, and other messages performed better with higher amounts of text.

We found that shipping messages performed as much as 69% better when used with higher amounts of text. 

More text means you're providing viewers with necessary information, such as shipping costs and delivery times. 

This also helps you avoid having customers abandon their carts when they find out the actual cost of shipping or delivery times later on. 

Similarly, sale ads performed 38% better when we used higher amounts of text.

Again, more text means you'll give potential customers the information they want and need to make an informed decision.

They are generally the best-performing message overall, so it's important to optimize all aspects of a sale campaign.

This translates to fewer surprises for the potential customer and a higher conversion rate for you! 

For News, Competitions and Free categories, it is best to include less text

On the other hand, message categories like news, competitions, and free are best served by including less text since users already understand what these messages entail and don't require as much explanation.

When displaying an ad about a new product or collection being launched, we found that including high amounts of text caused a 13% decrease in performance. 

In this case, viewers will likely already be curious about the product, so they'll want to click through and learn more. 

Including too many details can diminish the excitement and kill the mystery and intrigue of stumbling upon something new. 

But the real kicker is that when displaying ads about competitions or that include the word "free," higher amounts of text decreased performance by 20% and a whopping 54%, respectively.  

The truth is that these ad messages are already straightforward to understand. 

Therefore, the viewer can understand the context of the ad without additional information. 

At the same time, when displaying any of these messages, more information might make it seem like there are strings attached or that the offer is too good to be true. 

The Impact Text Amounts Can Have During Your Next Ad Campaign

As you can see, there is no one-size-fits-all approach when deciding whether to include text in an ad message – it depends entirely on various factors, such as the message of your ad and what you want your viewer to do after seeing it. 

When sharing messages about shipping and sales, the added information that comes with higher amounts of text can boost performance. 

But if you're advertising anything related to a new product or collection, a competition, or offering anything for free, it's better to use less text.  

Ultimately, it's essential to keep testing different variations of your ads to determine which ones work best for your specific audience. 

With effective A/B testing and an understanding of how much text should be included in an ad message, you can maximize the performance of your next advertising campaign!

Dataset

The dataset from this article is based on 7.1B impressions and 59.1K pieces of individual content on Meta (Facebook) platforms. It takes into account data from all countries and industries, with the campaign objective of Conversions. The period is from 1. September 2021 - 16. September 2022.

Numbers are looking at correlation only, not causation. Remember to check your own data: numbers for different brands, industries, and contexts will vary.

If you were intrigued about a specific insight, you can go in-depth into the various dimensions and how data can be segmented in Confect, here.