Short or Long Primary Text?

Over the weekend I was talking with my sister and her husband, who live in Brisbane, Australia, and are just as fascinated (and a little obsessed) with Facebook/Meta Ads as I am.

When we start talking about Ads, we don't stop for at least 2 hours.

Anyway, amongst the many topics we talked about, one that came up was the length of Primary Text used in our Ads.

Which is better, short or long?

All three of us have tested short and long Primary Text and we all came to the same unanimous conclusion...

Long Primary Text works better.

Why do we think this is?

It all comes down to data points and giving Meta enough information to find our ideal readers on their platform.

If you write a short, but compelling, piece of Primary Text, that consists of 15-20 words, Meta doesn't have many data points to find your ideal readers.

Naturally, Meta will also look at the image/video, the headline, and crawl the URL you're sending people to to help them build the audience for your Ad.

But...

What if you wrote a 500-700 word piece of Primary Text instead?

Primary Text that speaks to the desires of your ideal readers, in detail?

How many more data points will Meta have to work with then?

The other thing to mention about long Primary Text is the "See More" button, as highlighted in the image below.

The "See More" button, when clicked by users, is a green flag to Meta that this Ad is engaging people on their platform.

Short Primary Text that isn't long enough for the "See More" button to be shown, as you can see on the Ad on the left, above, won't even have the opportunity for people to engage with it using the "See More" button.

This immediately puts the short Primary Text Ad at a disadvantage.

I'm not saying short Primary Text doesn't work. It does.

But, to prove to Meta that your Ad is engaging, having the "See More" button allows them to identify Ad engagement easier than when the "See More" button isn't visible.

It also allows you to do more "pre-selling" of your book in the Ad, rather than leaving it all to your book product page.

This means fewer irrelevant clicks and better, cleaner data for the algorithm.

The question then becomes, how do you entice your ideal readers to click the "See More" button?

That is a topic for another day...

For now, though, I encourage you to test writing longer-form Primary Text and see how it performs for you.

To Your Success
– Matt