My Facebook ads have been rejected/ad account has been banned. How to solve it?

After launching your store on Shopify and setting up the Facebook Sales Channel, you decide to run some ads. However, immediately after you create the first campaign, you receive a message that your ads have been rejected or, in the worse case, your entire ad account has been banned. What should you do in this case? Follow the steps and tips to get your ads running and the ad account enabled.

Rejected Facebook Ads

First of all, let’s have a look at reasons why your ads might have been rejected and what the steps are to get your ads running again.

The most common reasons why your ads are rejected

• Too much text in your image
• Advertising banned topics
• Incorrect destination URL
• Bad grammar (lots of mistakes or inappropriate language)
• Targeting wrong audiences (bad targeting on age restricted topics – e.g. alcohol, gambling, financial products…)
• Facebook decides to reject your ads for unknown reason. Facebook ads are being reviewed automatically by robots, not by human. And in many cases, this is the most common reason why your ads are rejected.

How to get your ads running again?

1. Make sure your products (or services) comply with Facebook Ads Policy. There are quite lot of categories, which can’t be advertised on Facebook or some categories which have very restricted content.
2. If you are 100% sure that your ads comply with the policies, head over to the Account Quality section in your Business Manager. Choose the ads you would like to request review for.

1. Request a review. After you do so, you should see the selected ads in the column “In review”.
2. It might take Facebook up to a couple of days to review your ads. So be patient.
3. You should receive a notification when your requested ads have been reviewed.
4. If Facebook rejected your ads wrongfully, they will automatically start delivering. If you need to do some changes, make sure to follow the instructions and recommendations! Otherwise, you might end up with a banned ad account.

Note: Yes, it might happen that your ads are running smoothly for some weeks and suddenly you receive a notification that one of your long-term running ad has been rejected.

Banned Ad Account

Banned ad account is a nightmare for businesses, which are dependent on Facebook (I’ll get back to this in one of my upcoming articles). It’s much worser than having rejected ads. What’s very bad is that banning ad account seems to be quite common practice these days. It also happens that FB bans an ad account immediately after you created it.

The most common reasons why your ad account was disabled

• You have too many rejected ads.
• Your ad account have been already banned before due to breaking the ad policies.
• There’s a suspicious activity on your ad account (e.g., changing IP addresses way too often, regularly signing in from different devices and locations, providing incorrect business details,….). Facebook will always find something.
• Frequent payment failure.
• Facebook (any related platforms) users reported your ads.

What are the steps to get your FB ad account enabled?

1. To be honest, a chance that you get your ad account enabled is very low unless you have friends working at Facebook. Or, you have a direct contact to a Facebook Representative who is eligible for unlocking your account or can ask someone else to do so. (Or anyone at Facebook who can actually whitelist your ad account – yes, this is also a common practice).
2. No, you can’t chat with anyone from Facebook nor call them to discuss the reasons for disabling your ad account. No personal contact is possible.
3. The only thing you can do is to request a review of a restricted ad account. Here is the link: Request a Review of a restricted ad account
4. Fill in the form and have a cup of coffee. Or more cups. This might take up to days, sometimes up to weeks.
5. If you don’t get an answer in the following days, you can give it a try once more.
6. Well, if you business is dependant on Facebook ads, the only thing you can do is to create a completely new ad account and connect it to your BM, Page and IG account. However, be prepared that the newly created ad account might be disabled as well. You can try creating the ad account under a completely different email and use different credit card for the payment. Despite this “hack”, there is still a high chance of gettting your ad account banned.
7. Plus, be prepared to lose all of the data (if you haven’t regularly downloaded the reports nor used any third-party app to get the data).
8. Hope your ad account will be enabled or the newly created one will be working!

Well, so what’s the key takeout? Before opening a new ad account, integrating it with Shopify and running your first campaigns, make sure your products comply with the ad policies. Be prepared that your ad account might be disabled early as you set up your first campaign.

If you don’t use any another marketing channels, now it’s time to think about it. You never know when Facebook decides to ban your ad account and then what? Diversify the risk of being dependant only on one tech giant. Look rather at some other marketing tactics such as SEO, email marketing, content marketing, event marketing, and else – ideally a combination of them.