Open your Meta ads manager and look at an ad you are currently paying to run. Somewhere in that form are three separate boxes for words: primary text, headline, description. Most small business accounts we audit have one of them filled in with a paragraph, one filled in with the company name, and one left exactly as it was when somebody clicked through the form eighteen months ago.
That is not a copywriting problem. It is a plumbing problem, and it is costing you clicks from people who were genuinely interested.
We have written a lot on this blog about the machinery around the ad: how the auction works, how much to spend, how to test, why Meta starves your new creative. This one is about the sentences inside it. Not the strategy of the ad. The actual words a stranger reads on a phone at 9pm.
Your Ad Has Three Text Boxes. You Are Writing One.
Here is what each field actually does.
Primary text is the block that sits above your image or video on Facebook, and below it on Instagram. It is the long one, the one with the "See more" link when it runs past a couple of lines. This is where almost everyone puts almost everything.
Headline is the short bold line underneath the creative, sitting next to your call-to-action button. On a lot of placements it is the second thing a person's eye lands on after the image itself.
Description is the smaller, greyer line under the headline. It is the field most people have never deliberately filled in.
Three boxes, three different jobs, three different amounts of space. The reason this matters is not tidiness. Meta's algorithm reads what you write and uses it to work out who should see the ad, which is the argument we made in full in You Don't Pick Your Meta Audience Anymore. Your Ad Does. That post covers why the words do the targeting. This one covers how to actually write them.
Meta Recommends 150 Characters. You Wrote 600.
Go to Meta's own ads guide, the spec page for a Facebook Feed image ad, and read the numbers they publish for advertisers. Primary text: 50 to 150 characters. Headline: 27 characters.
Not 150 words. 150 characters. This paragraph you are reading right now is already longer than the entire primary text Meta recommends.
Nearly every ad-copy tutorial on the internet teaches you to write substantially more than that, and you should understand why before you decide who to believe. Long copy genuinely works in specific situations, and we will get to those. But Meta publishes those numbers because of a physical fact about the feed: on a phone, your primary text gets cut off after a couple of lines and folded behind a "See more" link. Everything past the fold is read by the small fraction of people who tap.
So the first line is not the opening of your ad.
This single realization changes how you write. If you open with "At Miller Plumbing, we've been proudly serving the greater Portland area since 2004," you have spent your entire visible ad on a sentence that could belong to any plumber in any city in any year. Nobody stopped scrolling for that.
Compare it to opening with "Your water heater is making that noise for a reason." Same business, same offer, same ad spend. One of them survives the fold.
The practical move: write your primary text, then look at it on an actual phone, and find where it cuts. Everything before that cut has to work standing alone. If it does not, rewrite the front of it until it does.
Write to Where They Are, Not to What You Sell
The most useful idea in the ad-copy world is not a formula. It is the recognition that the person reading is somewhere on a ladder of awareness, and where they are on that ladder decides what your first line has to do.
At the top of the ladder is somebody who already knows you, already trusts you, and is waiting for a reason to move. Your copy for that person is almost insultingly short. State the offer. That is the whole ad. Adding a paragraph explaining what a chiropractor does is a waste of their time and your money.
Below that is somebody who knows the kind of thing you sell but not you specifically. Now the copy has a job: say what makes yours different, in a concrete way. Not "quality service." Something a competitor could not honestly copy and paste.
Further down is somebody who has the problem and does not know a solution exists. This copy has to name the problem first, in their words, before it introduces anything you sell. "You do not need four different products to keep ticks off your dog" works because it starts inside their experience.
At the bottom is somebody who is not even thinking about the problem today. This is the only place where genuinely long copy earns its keep, and it is why you occasionally see an ad that opens plainly, gets a "See more" tap, and unfolds into a long story. That format works because the reader chose to keep going. They opted in at the fold.
This is also the honest answer to "how long should my ad copy be," which is a question with no fixed answer. Copy length follows the awareness stage. A most-aware ad that runs long is padding. An unaware ad that runs short has not earned anything yet.
One more thing worth knowing: if your creative is a video, the video is doing the selling. Primary text on a video ad should generally be shorter, because it is a caption, not the pitch.
Twenty-Seven Characters Is Not a Typo
Meta's recommendation for the headline field is 27 characters. Most ad-copy advice you will find online tells you to write 40 or 45. We checked both against the source, and the number Meta publishes on its own spec page is 27.
Twenty-seven characters is brutal. "Free Estimate This Week" is 23. "Same-Day Emergency Repair" is 25. "Portland's Trusted Plumbing Professionals Since 2004" is 51, which means it either gets truncated or crowds out everything else on a smaller placement.
The headline is not a place for your company name. Your company name is already on the ad, at the top, next to your profile picture. Repeating it in the headline spends your scarcest real estate on information the reader already has.
Put one of two things there. Either the offer, stated plainly, or the outcome the person actually wants. Nothing else fits.
The Description Is a Trapdoor
Here is something you can verify yourself in about a minute. Open Meta's ads guide, look at the Facebook Feed spec pages for image ads, and try to find the recommended character count for the description field.
There is not one. Meta gives you a number for primary text and a number for the headline, and says nothing about the description on those pages.
That absence tells you what you need to know. The description does not reliably render. Depending on the placement, the format and the device, it may simply not appear. Which means anything load-bearing you put there, your guarantee, your phone number, your actual offer, is information you are gambling will show up.
This is the fastest fix in this entire article. Go through your live ads and check whether anything essential is sitting in the description. If it is, move it up.
Confusing Beats Boring, and Both Lose
The most common failure in small business ad copy is not that it is dull. It is that a stranger cannot tell what you are selling.
We have watched ads that spend nineteen seconds and three sentences before revealing the product category. The advertiser knows what the ad is about, so the ambiguity is invisible to them. To the person scrolling, the ad is noise. They are not confused enough to investigate. They are confused enough to keep moving, which takes a fraction of a second and costs them nothing.
Two rules fix most of it.
Write at roughly a fifth-grade reading level. This is not about talking down to people. It is about a person reading one-handed on a phone with the television on. Short words survive that environment. "We help homeowners avoid costly water damage" gets through. "We deliver comprehensive preventative solutions for residential water infrastructure" does not, and it says less.
And use specific nouns. "Solutions," "services," "options" and "offerings" are words that describe nothing. Roof. Root canal. Water heater. Tax return. The specific noun does two jobs at once: it tells the reader what this is, and it tells Meta's system who to show it to.
Read your own ad and ask the only question that matters: could a stranger say what I sell after one second? Not after reading it twice. After one second.
You Wrote It. Meta May Rewrite It.
This is the part almost nobody tells small business owners, so read it carefully.
Inside Advantage+ creative there is an enhancement called text improvements. In Meta's own words, when it is on, "keywords and phrases will be taken from your original ad copy and displayed directly or adjusted to fit better on or around your ad creative, such as text overlays, footers, prominent headlines and more."
And in the same help document, this sentence: "You'll see that Text improvements is turned on by default."
On by default. So the sentences you carefully wrote may be pulled apart, adjusted, and stamped onto your image as an overlay you never designed and never approved.
Sometimes that is fine and it lifts performance. Meta is optimizing toward getting your key selling point in front of people faster, which is a reasonable goal. But there are businesses where it is not fine at all. If your copy is precise because it has to be, because you are in a regulated field, because a claim has to be worded a particular way, or because "up to 50% off" and "50% off" are legally different sentences, then handing that wording to an automated rewrite is a real risk.
Worth knowing: Meta says access to its generative AI features is limited for certain verticals including financial services and health, and for ads in special categories such as housing, employment and credit. So depending on your industry you may have fewer of these features than the ads manager suggests.
You can turn it off. It lives with the other Advantage+ creative enhancements at the ad level, during ad creation. Our default position: turn it off while you are testing copy, because you cannot learn which words worked if the words changed underneath you. Once you know what performs, you can decide whether to let it run.
Copy Is the Twenty Percent. Test It Like It
Experienced media buyers will tell you that copy is a minority of what moves performance and the creative is the majority. That is a practitioner's estimate rather than a published platform number, but it matches what we see: swapping an image usually moves results more than swapping a sentence.
That does not make copy unimportant. It makes it the wrong thing to test first, and the wrong thing to change casually.
There is one decision rule here that is worth more than any headline formula. Before you write new copy for a new ad, ask whether the new creative is aimed at the same awareness stage, the same person, and the same desire as an ad you already have running.
If the answer is yes, do not write anything. Take the primary text from your proven ad and paste it in. It is already working on exactly this person.
If the answer is no, if you have shifted to a different audience or a different problem or a different season, then write fresh copy, and do not feel bad that your best-performing primary text is not attached to it. It was written for somebody else.
When you do test copy deliberately, change one field at a time. Duplicate the ad, swap only the primary text, and leave the creative, the headline and the audience alone. Otherwise you learn nothing about which change did the work. And give the test enough room to mean something, which is its own subject and one we covered in Meta Won't Give Your New Ad a Fair Shot. Here's How to Force One.
What to Do Monday Morning
Four things, and you can do all of them before lunch.
Pull up your live ads on your phone, not your desktop. Desktop shows you more text than most of your audience gets. Find where each ad truncates, and read only the part above the fold. If that fragment does not make you want to know more, you have found your problem.
Count the characters in every headline. If you are over 27, cut it down to the offer or the outcome and delete your company name.
Check every description field. Move anything essential out of it.
Open one ad in the ads manager and look at the Advantage+ creative enhancements. Decide, deliberately, whether text improvements stays on. Right now that decision has probably been made for you.
None of this requires a bigger budget or a new creative shoot. It is the cheapest work available in a Meta account, and it is sitting in three text boxes you have been filling in on autopilot.
We do this all day, on accounts of every size, and we are happy to look at yours and tell you what we would change. If you would rather hand the whole thing over and get back to running your business, that is what we do. Either way, go read your own ads on your phone tonight. You will find something.
