We here at PPC Hero are all about stretching the reach of our industry, and with that in mind, this week’s news update is going to stretch the definition of the word “news.” This week it came to our attention that Facebook is planning on cutting the character length of their ads from 135 down to 90. New ads after February 29th will not be permitted to have body copy longer than 90 characters, and ads that already exist will be retroactively enforced starting in May. Headline length will be unchanged (25 characters if you’re wondering).
This change hasn’t been publicly announced by Facebook on their blog or in their help section, but if you believe the good folks at Rimm-Kaufman (along with All Facebook’s post from February 7th {I told you this wasn’t “news”}) this change is coming down. All of this is expected to be made official at the exclusive Facebook Marketing Conference on Leap Year Day (which also happens to be Indiana’s own Jerry Gergich’s birthday – Happy B-Day, Jerry!).
All Facebook (the blog) speculates that this change allows for more ads to appear on each page, which makes total sense. Justin Timberlake himself said this Facebook thing would be profitable someday, and reducing characters/increasing ad space would only make it more so.
Even though Facebook hasn’t made the word official, fellow PPC Hero Dave Rosborough thought that the Rimm-Kaufman blog post warranted an office forward. And if an office forward in the hallowed halls of PPC Hero doesn’t warrant a news update, I don’t know what does.
What do you guys think of the change? Writing Facebook ads with their enormous character limit always felt to me like the two lane road that Kramer created on his adopted highway. There are soon to be fewer characters and it’ll feel a lot more like driving on a regular old, normal-sized lane.
