How to write Meta ads primary text that works in India

Meta truncates primary text at roughly 125 characters on mobile. Everything after that sits behind See more, and most people never tap it. So the practical rule is simple: if your hook and your offer are not both inside the first 125 characters, you have written a caption, not an ad.

That single constraint explains most of what separates Indian Meta ads that work from ones that quietly burn budget.

Put the price in the hook

Global copywriting advice says to sell the benefit and save the price for the landing page. In India that advice is usually wrong.

Price is a qualifier here. A customer scrolling past your ad is deciding between you and a cheaper option two shops away, and hiding the number does not delay that decision, it just moves it to a page they now have to load. Ads that name a price, a discount, or an EMI figure in the first line consistently pull better-qualified clicks.

Cold-pressed coconut oil, 500ml, ₹399, free delivery

reads as a real offer. "Discover the purity of tradition" reads as a stock photo caption.

Write one call to action, not four

A depressingly common Indian small-business ad ends with: Call now, WhatsApp us, DM for price, visit our website. That splits the audience four ways and tells Meta's optimiser nothing useful about what conversion you actually want.

Pick one. If you want WhatsApp conversations, ask for a WhatsApp message and nothing else. If you want form fills, do not mention your phone number.

The 125-character discipline in practice

Write the ad. Then paste the first 125 characters into a separate line and read only that. Ask two questions:

1. Does it say what is being sold?
2. Does it give a reason to keep reading?

If either answer is no, the rest of the ad is decoration.

Hinglish is a register, not a translation

Real Hinglish is Roman script with Hindi dropped in the way people type on WhatsApp. "Aaj hi order karo, stock limited hai" is Hinglish. Devanagari spliced into an English sentence is a translation artefact, and Indian audiences notice instantly.

If you are not confident writing it, write in English and have the tool transcreate rather than translate. Transcreation rebuilds the hook and the rhythm for the target language; translation moves the words and loses the persuasion.

What to test first

In order of impact, based on how the scoring rubric weights these dimensions:

1. The hook. Worth 25 out of 100 for a reason. If nobody stops, nothing else matters.
2. The offer framing. Same discount, different framing: ₹399 instead of ₹599 versus save ₹200 versus 33% off. These perform differently and it is cheap to find out how.
3. The CTA verb. Order, book, claim, reply. Small change, measurable difference.
4. Length. A 40-word ad and a 15-word ad are genuinely different products in the feed.

Change one at a time. If you change the hook and the CTA together and the ad improves, you have learned nothing you can reuse.

The mistake that costs the most

Running the ad first and judging it after. A rewrite is free. Learning that your hook was weak by spending ₹8,000 over five days is not.

Score the copy before it goes live, fix what the score tells you to fix, and let the budget test the things a rubric genuinely cannot predict: your offer, your audience, and your landing page.