Facebook Ad Character Limits: Text, Headline, Description

The Facebook ad character limit that matters is not the field maximum — it is the point at which each field is truncated in the feed. Meta's own recommendations are far shorter than what the fields accept: around 125 characters of primary text, about 40 for the headline and about 30 for the description (Meta Business Help).

The description row is the one that surprises people: on several placements it is not displayed, so anything essential placed there is invisible to most of the audience.

The counter shows all three fields against their truncation points at once, with the cut drawn in place rather than reported as a number.

Primary text. The first sentence carries the offer. Assume the rest is read only by people already interested — which is a reasonable assumption and a useful discipline.

Headline. This is the strongest element on most placements after the image. Forty characters is a short phrase, so it should be the benefit rather than the brand.

Description. Treat it as optional reinforcement. Never put the offer, the price or the deadline there alone.

Ad copy competes with an image that is read first and faster. Getting the image right matters more than any of the character counts above:

Sizes are in Facebook image sizes. Meta no longer enforces a hard limit on text within an image, but the underlying behaviour has not changed — text-heavy images perform worse in a feed, and a paragraph inside an image is unreadable, untranslatable and inaccessible.

Nothing here transfers to an organic Facebook post, which has no equivalent structure and its own fold. Nor to any other platform: Instagram caption length, where LinkedIn puts See more, and the Twitter character limit are three different systems with three different answers.

Check what the ad actually looks like, rather than what the form shows. The two most common launch-day discoveries are a headline cut mid-word and a link card pulling the wrong image from the destination page — the second of which is fixed on the page, not in the ad:

See Open Graph tags and Facebook link preview not updating.

Check all three fields against their truncation points with the Facebook ad text counter.