Facebook has been under a lot of fire over the last few years with privacy issues, political election drama and a stint in the Supreme Court. Due to this, they’ve had to make some pretty monumental changes to the advertising arm of their business.
I remember around 2007/2008 when ads first came out – it was super easy to create and run ads – successfully. This was largely due to the fact that not many people were using the service at that point. Not even the large companies were utilising it.
This was heaven for the little guy/woman. I started my first e-commerce business using Facebook ads around this time too. You were able to target ads so much more specifically on the person rather than the search phrases – similar to how Google operated but different as Google is search term based.
Facebook ads opened up a world of opportunities as they collected personal data and tied this into the advertising.
The cost was unbeatable! Even to this day. I get $0.23 for a lead on Facebook while I pay up to $3-5 on Google. Of course, Google leads might be more qualified as the user is specifically searching for your service/product. While Facebook is kinda invading someone’s ‘privacy’ to match users to an ad.
However, invading people’s privacy worked and continues to work. With the cost of advertising on Facebook being so low, Facebook Ads are here to stay.
Judging by the last few years of bashing, it seems as though Facebook are a little over their heads.
When the big companies started to learn that advertising on Facebook was cheaper and more effective than traditional advertising techniques such as print ads in the media and TV commercials; Facebook began to heavily invest in their ads platform.
Due to the lawsuits and the dramatic increase of absolutely anybody being able to run Facebook ads, it’s no longer a simple system. There are so many rules around advertising properly now.
The regulations and rules required to run an ad now have become quite the minefield. There are even rules about how you word your adverts too.
Obviously with so many hurdles, it’s easy to slip up and lots of people have fallen victim to not playing by the rules. However, due to the sheer amount of ads being created daily (an estimated 5.4 billion ads are shown per day) – Facebook just does not have the capacity to review them all.
Due to this unmanageable amount of reviews, Facebook has to rely on robots to try and pick up on any malpractice with ads. Seemingly, the easiest thing for the robot to pick up on is the 20% text rule.
More recently, there seems to be a surge in rejected ads like never before. Facebook is banning ad accounts and business managers all over the place.
It looks as though we really need to up our game and knowledge of the system – pay close attention to the rules or get banned.
Facebook has implemented a policy lecture where users need to answer multiple choice questions and be logged in via personal accounts to teach us to comply. They’re finding ways to force us into learning the rules for proper advertising on the platform.
These are not mandatory training but as Facebook is essentially a big robot that’s tracking our every move – if you’re gonna run ads it’s probably a smart move to take them – basically showing the robot you’re complying by learning it’s rules.
Here’s a link to all their training on using Facebook/Instagram ads.
Because you need to be signed in via your personal account – Facebook can see who’s taken the test – so may potentially treat these accounts differently.
If you’ve landed on this piece today, you’ve most likely had your ads rejected or your ads/business manager account disabled (it sucks, I know). I have solutions for you – they’re listed below.
There are a few things you should do if you’re running ads to limit the damage if your account gets disabled. Upon getting disabled, you will no longer have access to your Pixel and Audiences. All the hard work collecting the data is gone.
If you’ve created some custom audiences – to secure these in case of getting disabled – simply share them with an alternative ad account. Yes, you’re able to share audiences between accounts.
All that’s required is an account ID and you’re free to share the whole audience with them. I strongly recommend doing this just in case you find yourself under fire from Facebook and get banned.
At first you will not have access to sharing audiences with business accounts outside of your organization. You need to prove to Facebook that you are following their guidelines and advertising correctly.
They will then open up more options for you, such as importing your email database and sharing your audiences to other businesses. Until then go ahead and create another ad account under the same Business Manager and share the audience over to this one for safety.
You will not need to use this ad account, but go ahead and share your custom audiences over to this account for safety.
Now let’s look at a few ways to get your ads and account up and running when they are disabled. I will even show you how you can personally get in touch with Facebook and what you need to have ready for this conversation in order to get your account active again.
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Ads Being Rejected
This is a pretty normal thing, as you might have already found out.
It could be due to using too much text (over 20% of the image/video) – although, Facebook doesn’t seem to care too much about this any more.
It could also be some wording you’ve used goes against their standards.
I was promoting my eBook “How To Launch A Single in 2020” (download a free copy if you haven’t already) and my ads were repeatedly rejected.
There are three areas they’re taking into consideration here. Firstly, the content in the ad (image or video), the caption, and the landing page (if you’re linking out of Facebook).
If your ad gets rejected the first thing you should do is to look through the ads policies – see if you’re doing anything that’s not allowed.
For example, promising results is something that Facebook does not allow on ads… Let’s say you’ve promised guaranteed weight loss from a product – this is a red flag.
Another example is using the word “your” too much – this gets flagged up for being too salesy.
The landing page you link to will also be scanned and if the content on it does not match up with your ad, this will also cause issues. Also, if you’ve got tons of pop ups on the page, Facebook will reject the ad because of this.
Additionally, if you have a landing page whereby users need to watch an ad before accessing it, Facebook won’t allow it. This also goes for YouTube videos with ads. So be sure you’re clear of other ads.
So there are several reasons why your ad might be rejected. If you get this message, make sure you review the ads policies I linked to above. Then, correct any flaws and reupload for another review.
If you are still getting rejected you can ask for a manual review of your ad. You then have to go into the Account Quality Section of your Business Manager.
They will also give you an overview of all the account violations in the last 6 months.
You can then select the ad that got rejected and send it for a manual review. This may take a few hours or several days depending on Facebook’s workload. Since I went through my ad and my landing page and found nothing wrong I decided to do manual review and it got approved.
However, the problem here is that even though you get it approved through a manual review, you are still marked as violating the platform in the first place which hurts your metrics. You only have so many strikes before they disable your full ad account – which brings me to the next point.
2. Ad Account Disabled
When your ad account gets disabled, you are in some deeper sh*t. It’s not the end of the world as there are ways around it – but you are definitely on Facebook’s radar now – your metrics are also damaged.
I am not saying you will get bad views on the ads that will get approved, I am saying that you have been flagged so many times that it’s likely Facebook will just disable the whole ad account.
This happened to me once out of the blue – when I wasn’t even using ads. There are a few options available for you when this happens.
But first, let’s take a closer look at why this is happening. It’s most likely you have had several ads rejected at this point – and you’ve been “flagged” so many times by the Facebook robot – they will now take it up a notch and disable your whole ad account.
If your ad account gets disabled, you need to request a manual review. There will be a link to where you do this in the email they send you when your account has been disabled.
This may take just a few days or even a few weeks. In the meantime, you will not be able to use your ad account. What you can do in the meantime is to head over to your other ad account that you have connected with your business manager when you shared your audiences, and start using this while the other one is under review.
To create more ad accounts in your Business Manager, you do this in the ‘Business Settings’ under ‘Accounts’.
If you’re thinking “I haven’t done anything against their ad policy regulations” and that may be the truth; the robots have been shutting your ads down for too many times that the algorithm has had enough.
This is not actual people reviewing the ads. They do not have the manpower for that. So it can be very frustrating.
I was promoting my ebook “How to Launch a Single in 2020” and the robots picked up the word ‘single’ as if I was promoting online dating (funny but annoying).
Eventually it led to my whole account being disabled, where they later reactivated it after manual review:
However, if your ad account continues to go against the rules and you’ve been banned a few times; you’ll face a permanent ban eventually.
Or they will end up disabling your whole Business Manager.
3. Business Account Disabled or Ads Account Not Reactivated
You may want to try another manual review if your business account gets disabled. However, you are now in deep trouble if your ad account gets disabled as well as your Business Manager.
You could potentially create a new Business Manager which means you’d have to create another Facebook page. By doing this you automatically get a new Business Manager created.
With a new Business Manager you can then claim your Instagram and Facebook page which you can then start advertising through the new Business Manager.
However, because of your track record with getting into trouble, your troubles will likely follow you there too.
You could always set up the new Business Manager with a new IP address and email so they cannot trace you that easily. But you still run the risk of Facebook following your moves and blocking your ads.
At this point you’re probably very p*ssed off and think about leaving Facebook and Instagram for good but then you realise there’s no other platform that gives the same performance results from ads for so cheap quite like Facebook does.
Facebook have finally introduced a customer support chat portal. Previously it felt like throwing a request into a black hole because you’d never be sure if it would get picked up by the Facebook team.
Human manpower helping users instead of automated help pages is a monumental win for users.
In order to connect with somebody from Facebook just click here.
Scroll down to where it says “still need help”:
Click Get Started which will take you to a new page:
Select “Chat with a representative” which will open up a new page where you have to fill out a form:
Then begin the chat.
The reason I am putting this option as the last resort is because the chat will try to get you to do a manual review and all the different steps you have already gone through. You should then send some screenshots of the deactivation and reactivation of account several times and say that the manual requests have not worked for you – send them the screenshots of your account being deactivated and reactivated several times. See here:
They will then pull in the special forces team.
Which after 48 hours I received this:
You should hopefully be back up and running. And you have screenshot evidence for the next time your account gets flagged from the internal team.
So next time you ask for a manual review or talk with someone live, try sending them this to get them up to speed on everything, so they can reactivate your account as soon as possible.
I hope this helped and that you are back up and running with advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
