If you run enough Facebook ads, it happens to everyone, at some point or another.
Your ads are running, everything seemingly going well when you get an email. It says your Facebook Ads account has been disabled – and your ads are no longer running.
First thing’s first, don’t panic. From our experience, this is a relatively common issue and more times than not it can be resolved by appealing the decision.
That’s why in this article we’re going to go over how to appeal a disabled Facebook Ads account, as well as how to prevent your account from being disabled in the first place.
What Do You Need to Appeal a Disabled Facebook Ads Account?
All you need to submit an appeal is to be an admin of the ad account that was disabled.
How to Appeal a Disabled Facebook Ads Account
Facebook themselves recommend the following steps to get your disabled add account appealed:
- Visit Facebook’s Account Quality page.
- Under “What You Can Do”, click the Request Review button.
- Follow the prompts and fill in the requested information.
- Someone from Facebook will review the appeal and make a decision.
Contacting Facebook Support
If that doesn’t work, your next best bet is to contact Facebook’s Business Help Center directly – via the following steps:
- Go to this page on the Facebook Business Help Centre.
- Select the business account which was disapproved.
- Select “My ad account is disabled” under the list of issues.
- At the bottom of the page, click “Contact Support” and fill in your details.
- Click “Start Chat”; once the wait is over you’ll be taken to a live chat with a member of the support team.
Create a New Ad Account
If all that didn’t work, your only option is to make a new Facebook Ads account and try not to repeat any mistakes you may have made with the old one.
You’ll probably need a new Facebook account to set this up – so get a friend or employee to help out.
If you’ve been running ads off of your personal Facebook account – now would also be a great time to set up a Facebook Business Account.
How to Avoid Getting Your Facebook Ads Account Disabled
As always, prevention is better than cure.
Your best bet to avoid getting your Facebook Ads Account disabled is to familiarise yourself with Facebook’s terms of service and to make sure you don’t break any of their policies by accident.
In most cases where your ad account was falsely flagged, or you unknowingly broke the policies, you can get your ad account reinstated.
However, you still lose all of the potential sales you could’ve gotten while it was in review. So – it’s best to avoid it altogether.
Facebook Ads Policies You Should Be Aware of:
According to Facebook themselves, these are the top policies you should be aware of to avoid having your ad account disabled:
- Unacceptable Business Practices
- Facebook doesn’t allow ads that promote “unacceptable business practices” including deceptive or scammy business models, overly sensational or misleading advertising and bad grammar, profanity and punctuation.
- Misleading Claims
- Ads, and any connected materials like landing pages and business pages, are not allowed to include deceptive or misleading claims or offers.
- Ads, and connected materials, are not allowed to promise cures to incurable medical conditions or claim unrealistic results. Even if the product may work for some users – it’s still not allowed as it doesn’t hold true for everybody.
- Non-Functional Landing Page
- Facebook can also disable ads and ad accounts where you link to nonfunctional or policy-breaking landing pages.
- Your connected landing page on your site must work (not lead to an error page or an “under construction” page) and must also comply with all policies around unacceptable business practices.
- Adult content
- Ads with any sexual or mature content are not allowed on the platform.
- Repeated violations
- Repeatedly trying to run ads that break Facebook’s guidelines, such as by trying to get an ad that’s against the terms of service approved, can lead to your account being disabled.
- Avoid trying to get the same ad approved repeatedly without making major changes to avoid.
Avoiding User Reports
Aside from breaking Facebook’s policies, another common reason ad accounts get disabled is because Facebook users report a significant number of your ads.
There are a couple of steps you can take to avoid this, so in general:
- Look at your ad frequency. If it’s too high, users are more likely to become “annoyed” with your ads and report them.
- Watch the comments on your ads. If they’re overwhelmingly negative – there may be something wrong. Take individual “trolls” with a grain of salt, though.
General Tips
Finally, a few general tips to help you avoid getting your Facebook Ads Account disabled:
- Experiment with new ads gradually. If you start running a gigantic campaign all at once, and all of them break policy, your account may get instantly disabled.
- Instead, try running one new ad at a time to see what gets approved.
- Be familiar with Facebook’s policies and don’t willfully break them. There are ethical ways to advertise “restricted” businesses on the platform.
- Take a look at the list of restricted content, community standards and general ad policies to get a feel for Facebook’s policies.
Conclusion
We hope this helped you resolve your disabled Facebook Ads Account – and informed you of how to avoid having it happen in the future.
In many cases, it can be a simple misunderstanding or a “false flag” – in which case it can be quite easily resolved.
However, it’s still better to keep your ad account up and running. That’s why it’s useful to familiarise yourself with their policies – so you don’t run anything that could be misconstrued as breaking them.
If you enjoyed this article or found it helpful, check out more e-commerce marketing content on the inSyte blog or listen to the inSyte Podcast.
This article was brought to you by Syte.
We’re a specialist e-commerce digital marketing agency dedicated to driving up your bottom line.
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