How to deal with disabled Facebook Ads account

Did Facebook deactivate your ad account for no reason out of the blue and you’re freaking out right now trying to figure out how do I move forward?

Not a fun situation, right. Most people are gonna freak out at this point and say what the hell’s going on. This is unfair. This is not right.

You are in luck. I’ve got my Facebook ad account disabled as well so I understand how painful and frustrating this can be.

I bet on Facebook as my main source of traffic for my new startup and I was pretty sure that my Facebook ad account, was complying with all the rules and terms of service.

So It came as a bit of a shock and a surprise to have my ad account disabled without any warning.

Today I want to share with you the steps that I took to get my ad account reactivated again. And I got it reactivated again even after I submitted an appeal that was rejected right away.

And even if you haven’t had your account disabled yet, you must go over this so you understand what you should avoid to not make that happen.

How I got my Facebook Ad account disabled

So as I was running ads on Facebook for the first time. And I was trying out different things while I was under time pressure.

It was only a matter of time before I did something that will disable my ad account.

And this is especially true because I was running ads on other platforms. What happened was that I had a video that got great engagement on YouTube. And I wanted to see how it will perform on the Facebook ads platform.

But the problem was that the Youtube video might have an image or some wording that violates the Facebook advertising policies. So after a day of running my new ad, something happened in the algorithm, and boom I no longer had an ad account.

That being said Facebook doesn’t always deactivate ad accounts because someone genuinely violated an ad policy. Ad account can be blocked for absolutely no reason.

This was an ad account that only ran a few ads on and all of these ads were manually reviewed and manually approved by Facebook. And they were approved at the end of the day but they still ended up coming around and deactivated my ad account.

My failed appeal attempt

And unfortunately, even if there is no reason for the ad account to be deactivated it’s very rare that Facebook comes back and reactivates it. Their customer support is notoriously non-existent. No one is going to manually review the disabled ad account even if humans will read my appeal request.

But I didn’t want to give up so easily and tried an appeal process anyway. I immediately reached out to support to find out what I did wrong but then I received an automated message saying practically nothing and telling me that their decision is final.

So it didn’t exactly work as I expected.

I didn’t realize that Facebook is using automated bots to fight with the scammers and that there’s going to be some collateral damage. And when this happens I should not be like everybody else and send in an appeal saying that I did nothing wrong.

And I was thinking: “I cannot get my account reactivated, I’m screwed. Worst of all, I can’t do anything about it anymore. That’s what Facebook support told me.”

Well, there’s a way around this.

Read everything I can about Facebook’s Terms and Conditions and make again an outstanding well-done appeal.

The correct method for a successful appeal

Calm down and relax

What I would do differently is to open up a notepad and to type out everything that comes to my mind.

Asking myself questions like, “What did I do wrong? Was it something in the ad? Was the ad image offensive or misleading? Did I violate the terms of service? Why does Facebook hate me? God, why?”

In other words, I would write my first draft for an appeal, unfiltered.

I would let all my anger and the frustration out of my chest. Only then I would start with the appealing process. None of the anger and frustration should come across in the form of words that I will use in the appeal.

My advice is to be respectful and polite. Because there is a chance that someone is actually gonna read this and actually go and manually review and reactivate the ad account.

If I am pissed off. If I am all emotional they’re just gonna send me an automatic reply.

It’s better to stay calm and rational and just explain to them that it was a misunderstanding and a mistake and that you want to clear it up.

Go through Facebook Ad guidelines

The next thing I did was to take a look at Facebook’s ad policies.

Which if you haven’t read them, I do recommend you look them up. Chances are that you’ve never read their ad policies.  Because in most cases, if your ad account gets disabled it’s because you violated their policy.

Most people don’t even bother reading Facebook’s ad policies and that is why I’m not surprised that so many people get banned by Facebook.

So educate yourself and read their ad policy because you want to find out what was the mistake that you made. Read them thoroughly understand what’s acceptable and what’s unacceptable in terms of Facebook.

So I went through the guidelines one by one. Looking at the examples that Facebook shows.

Why? Because Facebook never reveals any information on what I did wrong. They’ve already made up their decision and they found me guilty so it’s my responsibility to find out which policy I violated.

And it’s important to think like a computer at this point because chances are that I triggered something in the algorithm which caused Facebook to automatically disable my account.

So it is best to be objective and to have a friend, who can look at it at the same time. Another pair of eyes that can look at things differently can increase the chance of finding out which policy was violated.

Write an appeal

Now it’s the time to start the appeals process and I’m going to tell you what you need to include in the appeal so that you have a better chance of getting your ad account reactivated.

1. Apologize

First, they just disabled your ad account because of the violation of their policies. Now whether it was intentional or not or whether it makes sense or not. That doesn’t matter in Facebook’s eyes.

You’re always wrong so it’s best to just start with an apology.

2. Identify the mistake

Second, let them know that you read through their policy guideline and that you found which policy you violated. It helps to put both the number and the name of the policy into the text.

Explain what happened and tell them that it was a mistake, that it was a misunderstanding that it was a mistake.  Tell them specifically what part of the ad violated the policy.

Is it something in the image is it the ad text in the title or description field or maybe is it something on the landing page

This will assure them that you see things from their perspective and that you know what the problem is.

3. Include action steps

Third, take full responsibility and write how you plan to fix it.

We’re all humans so just let them how this mistake happened and what action steps you will take to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.

4. Ask for advice

Fourth, ask if there’s anything that you can do to get your account reactivated again. It doesn’t hurt to ask.

Finally, kindly ask the support to re-enable your account.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that this is going to work for everybody. Just try it and there’s a chance that your appeal will be reviewed by humans and not by the bot. That’s your best bet.

And if it doesn’t work the first time then just try again using different wording.

How to deal with rejected Facebook Ads

Now since we covered an appeal process, let’s talk about the steps you need to do to stay safe and avoid your ad getting denied or your ad accounts getting shut down. Let’s get to it.

Before we dive into the specifics, we need to clear something up and make it clear here. And that’s Facebook’s primary customers aren’t advertisers, but rather billions of regular daily users.

Their primary goal is to make sure that people continue to spend time on their platform. When we understand this and when we fully respect that their primary job is to serve the needs of their users, everything gets a lot easier.

That said, they sometimes mess up and they shut down ad accounts that shouldn’t be shut down. Here are the five steps that you wanna follow religiously when creating a new ad.

1. Make it boring

Step number one is obviously to take a look at the ad. The first thing that can happen is that the ad gets denied.

This means that for some reason, something in the ad has violated their terms of service, whether it’s showing before and after pictures.

Whether it’s making claims, whether it’s advertising something that Facebook isn’t too fond of. Whatever it is, for some reason, something’s been flagged.

This could’ve been flagged by the algorithm, or it could’ve been manually flagged by one of the new employees that Facebook has hired to do ad reviews.

Regardless, take a look at your ad, go through it, and look for words that may go against the terms of service.

Try to make it a little blander and a little more boring just to see if you can get it approved. If it does get approved, then you know the issue is with the ad.

2. Start with a clean slate

The second thing is the ad account.

When you’ve got an ad account with a ton of different denied ads or that’s experienced multiple terms of service violation in the past, you are screwed. For this reason, you may need to start a brand new ad account to prevent your ads to be continually rejected.

However, do this at your own risk because Facebook doesn’t like this.

Learn from the past

With the new ad account, you want to make sure that you don’t repeat the same mistakes. If you don’t learn from your mistakes you tend to repeat them.

So do the work you should have done in the beginning before your ad got banned on Facebook and find out what might be the reason why your ad got banned.

Check out their policy, read it carefully, and make sure you never make those mistakes again. Be more careful.

Discard your old ad account

So that being said, you have to be very careful with your new ad account because Facebook flags anything that is associated with prior ad account.

That is the domain, the Facebook pages, payment method, all of that will be flagged by Facebook automatically. They’re smart.

Write anything that you ever promoted on that old ad account, the payment method you used…

You can’t use the payment gateway that you used in the past. You can’t use your Facebook pages. You can’t certainly use the domains that you used before.

Build a new personal profile

So basically what you have to do is to create a new Facebook profile. And you should be active on that profile for a while to make it look natural.

Invite friends, build your network organically, interact with people, comment, send private messages back and forth.

Do this for a couple of weeks before you try and open an ad account on that new personal Facebook account.

Build a new online brand

Then create a new online presence and a new brand from scratch.

So if you’re running a Shopify business, for example, you have to get a new domain. You have to maybe even get a new Shopify account because they may flag the Shopify subdomain or something like that.

So get a new domain get, a new Shopify subscription with a new subdomain. Get a new credit card. And you also have to create a new Facebook page that you can then use in your ads and you have to stay away from promoting anything that you’ve promoted in the past.

You have to create a new brand so it looks to Facebook like everything has been created from scratch.

3. Check the outbound URL

Next up, it’s time to take a look at the URL or the website that you’re sending people from Facebook through your ads.

If you’ve made a website with a forwarded URL. Just forwarding may cause a problem if the website at the end of the forwarded URL doesn’t match one of the other conditions.

Apart from that, try to brand it and put it under your own business. But again, if your business has continually violated the terms of service, you may need to start sending them to a different URL or a different website that’s not been associated with any of the previously banned ads or previously banned ad accounts, or any of the previously banned Facebook pages.

Now let’s say you’ve got new ads, a new ad account, a new Facebook page, you’re sending them to a new URL on a new website. I know it’s a lot of work, but if your ads keep getting shut down, it might be worth the effort.

4. Try a different credit card

The next step is to take a look at the credit card that’s associated with the ad accounts.

Again, this is one of those things that Facebook isn’t going to confirm, but if you start to look logically at what things are tied to your ad account and why your ads keep getting denied, this is simply the next logical step.

Try advertising with a completely different credit card and see if that’ll allow you to get through the barriers.

Once that’s done, it’s time to take a look at your business manager overall. If your business manager is full of banned ad accounts, it’s gonna put up a bit of a red flag with Facebook.

If you just can’t get an ad approved and you keep getting ad accounts shut down, it might be time for a complete new re-brand.

How to prevent from getting Facebook Ad account disabled

Now that we’ve got that covered, here are four tips to help keep your ads account safe and avoid getting the “Your account has been flagged for unusual activity.” message.

1. Swiftly delete rejected Ads

Tip number one is that any time you’ve got an ad that’s been disapproved by Facebook, you want to delete that from your ad account as soon as possible.

The last thing you wanna do is go into your ads manager and see a whole bunch of different ads that have been denied because that will trigger a red flag for Facebook.

2. Have a backup ad account

The next point is that you always want to have backup ad accounts. One ad account is simply not enough, especially if you’re doing a lot of advertising with Facebook, so have a backup.

3. Diversify your traffic sources

The third tip is, just like having backup ad accounts, you wanna have diversified traffic sources.

Any time that you’re relying solely on Facebook ads for your traffic, you’re running in dangerous waters. This is why It is good to have multiple traffic platforms available, whether we’re talking about SEO content or running YouTube ads or social media traffic through Twitter.

Always look for a backup traffic source so that you’re never putting all your eggs in one basket and leaving yourself at the mercy of Facebook.

4. Don’t use personal ad account

It is also important that you use a business manager and not your account to run ads. Because Facebook wants to see that you have a business even if you don’t have a business.

Open a business manager and name it after your project name. You don’t have to have an actual LLC, an actual corporation, you just want to run your Facebook ads from a business manager and not from your account.

5. Use separate business accounts

Don’t combine multiple businesses into one business account. You want to have one business account per business. So for example, your startup is one business but your Shopify store uses a whole different business account.

You are not going to put them under the same business manager.

6. Don’t use PayPal

Next, people that use PayPal as their payment method have a much higher chance of getting their account blocked. So don’t use PayPal as a payment method. Use your card or your bank account.

7. Spend less in the beginning

Always warm up your ad account before investing heavily. That means if you have just opened a new ad account, don’t set a $1000 a day budget on your first ads the first day or two.

Because that’s very suspicious. A new business usually won’t have that many products to market that fast so it raises suspicion.

You want to start slow. I am not telling you to go over a month but a week until you start heavily investing in advertising.

8. Align your ad with landing page

Make sure the content of your ad is in line with your actual offer or product on your landing page. Have clear intentions on your landing page.

For example, your ad tells people to buy a fat burner or something, and then when they go into your website, you’re trying to sell them a weight loss course.

That’s not in line. That’s two completely different offers.

Don’t hide anything from the user. So if he’s buying something and you’re going to charge them 50 bucks a month after he bought the product, don’t hide it.

Everything must be transparent. That you’re not trying to scam anybody

9. No clickbait titles

Ad intent has to be clear. No clickbait proposals or overly hyped manipulative description text. Like: “One thing only millionaires do and you are not, click here”. That is extremely click-baiting.

10. Never directly target user

You’re not allowed to target the personal characteristics of the user. Like hey, Peter it’s your birthday today and I’d like to give you a 50% discount. Facebook doesn’t like it.

You can say we know your birthday is next week. There’s even a way to target people’s upcoming birthdays but you don’t want to use first names.

11. Never make the user feel inferior

And then there’s kind of the gray area things like personality traits that you might be calling out by singling out someone. No before-and-after photos suggesting that someone’s body type is not ideal. Facebook hate before-and-after photos.

12. No adult-oriented ads

No adult-like suggestive ads. Don’t try to use girls to sell. Don’t put a girl in a bikini to try to get clicks. That usually gets your account plan blocked in literally 24 hours.

13. No money-making ads

No affiliate marketing program ads or ads for some kind of make money at home scheme.

14. No blackhat on-page SEO

What I mean by that is you can have a pop-up but no shady pop-ups, that just try to trap people so they can not leave the website.

So there you have it. I hope my post helped you in recovering your disabled Facebook Ads account and that you learned from my mistakes. Don’t forget to share your results in the comment section below. And see you in the next post.

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