Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world. It hosts over 2.9 billion active users through its mobile application and web-platform. Since its launch, it has transformed the way people connect with each other on the web. Thanks to its intuitive features and versatility, you can make new friends around the globe, chat with them, share stories, go live, run niche pages, follow celebs, run a business and more.
Well, apart from being a social platform for the public, Facebook is one of the most promising growth platforms for brands.
Over the years, Facebook has launched many tools to make the platform user-friendly to businesses, allowing them to leverage the massive in-platform audience to derive growth.
For instance, using Facebook business manager you can post advertisements scaling across unique niches, audiences, and interests to market, re-market, and convert potential customers.
You can also create distinct strategies for unique stages of your sales funnels and execute each of them using specific tools.
Facebook business manager lets you manage every aspect of your business advertisements with advanced filters to make the most of your budgets.
But to get started, you need a Facebook ad account. It allows you to create, post, and track performance of all your ads.
While it’s an integral part of your brand growth, every so often it faces issues rendering it ineffective.
One of the most common issues is account restriction or a Facebook advertising ban.
This means the platform restricts or completely bans you from managing advertisements.
Well, that’s a bummer because it results in incomplete campaigns, and budget losses.
There are many reasons this happens and if your account faces restriction or a ban, you must solve it quickly to get back in the game.
According to HubSpot: “Facebook provides the highest return on investment of all paid channels for a majority of companies. More than 1 in 3 listed Facebook ads as their best performer in terms of ROI, ahead of Google Paid Search and Instagram”.
This means getting your account restricted or banned for a long time, may cause loss of opportunities to convert potential customers.
In this article, we’ll discuss various reasons for Facebook ad account restriction and ban and learn a few solutions to avoid it.
What is a Facebook Ad Account?
Facebook requires you to use a Facebook Ad account to manage all the advertisements on the platform.
An ad account lets you precisely create ad campaigns targeted to achieve a specific set of goals liket to increase the volume of app installs, generate brand awareness, re-market customers and more.
You can create ad sets, use many filters to narrow down your target audience, design all the ads with unique descriptions, titles, images, videos, and track performance to understand what’s working for a certain budget.
If you run a team of marketers, you can also allow different levels of accessibility to each individual by assigning specific roles. Bottom line: It’s a remarkable tool to control, curate and execute advertisements on Facebook with advanced targeting and tracking filters.
Why did your Facebook ad account get restricted or banned?
Getting your account restricted or banned means losing the capability to utilize tools like Facebook Ads, Facebook Pixel, Facebook Catalog, and more.
You won’t get to post advertisements, use the Pixel to track website performance and all the accounts/pages tied to your personal account will face the same restriction.
Well, there are many reasons your Facebook account gets restricted or banned.
Repeated ad violations
Ad violations are the most common reason Facebook restricts and bans accounts.
The social media giant has an ad review system that automatically reviews all the advertisements to check whether they agree with the Advertising Policies.
These policies are a set of instructions you must follow while creating ads.
This process extends to an ad’s destination, like the landing page, click to Messenger, threads and more.
Facebook looks into the severity and frequency of the violations to restrict or ban an ad account.
Some prohibited practices include:
Use of Facebook brand assets and adult content
Facebook strictly discourages brands to use any assets that represent Facebook. This means you can’t use Facebook assets without permission.
You must also avoid using images depicting nudity or implied nudity, people in suggestive poses, dating ads, and content alluding to sexual activity.
Prohibited categories and sensational content
Facebook restricts promotion of a few categories of content on its platform.
For instance, you must avoid posting content promoting illegal products, tobacco, drugs, unsafe supplements, weapons and ammunition, payday loans, penny auctions, and prohibited financial products.
It also restricts the use of sensational content depicting violence, inflammation, and shock.
Deceitful practices and subscription services
Deceitful practices include cropped images that urge people to click on advertisements, and landing pages with pop-ups.
You must never promote subscription-based services without checking Facebook’s requirements.
Restricted keywords and capital letters
Facebook restricts the use of certain keywords in your advertisements.
For instance, you can’t use fat loss, lose weight, mortgages, payday loans, and terms that fall under sensitive topics.
You must also avoid using capital letters frequently.Now, there are many rules outlined by Facebook, which you must keep in mind, while creating advertisements.
Negative user feedback
Feedback from the Facebook review process and users play a critical role in affecting the effectiveness of your advertisements.
While positive feedback shows growth of your campaigns, negative feedback gets your account restricted or banned.
The Ad relevance score determines how well your audience is resonating with your advertisements.
A low relevance score means people don’t connect with your ads and results in negative feedback.
A lot of negative feedback on your advertisements, urges Facebook to restrict or even ban your account.
Too many disapproved ads
Facebook looks into your ad’s history before approving the new ads.
This means if you have too many disapproved ads in the past, you only have a slim chance of getting your new ads approved. It shows your ineffectiveness in creating relevant ads and puts your account at the risk of getting banned or restricted.
Declined payments
Facebook offers you a plethora of payment methods which you can add to make timely payments on your advertisements.
But you must keep in mind, if your payment method gets declined many times, it might put your account at risk.
Facebook might consider your account as an “bad debtor”, if you frequently make late payments or block the payments.
This usually results in account restriction and ban.
Multiple country logins without 2-factor authentication
Facebook asks you to comply with 2-factor authorisation to keep your account safe and avoid suspicious logins.
It’s a security measure involving logging in using both a password and one other means of identification, often the phone number.
If you haven’t turned on the 2FA or you are logging in from different locations without proper 2FA, Facebook finds this as suspicious activity and restricts your account.
How to avoid Facebook ad account restriction and ban?
Well, you know some of the major reasons that forces Facebook to restrict or ban your ad account. Let’s now discuss some pointers that you can follow to avoid it.
Check ad’s quality score
Facebook scores advertisements for accuracy and relevance, before approving them.
This means, by making sure your advertisements have a high relevance score, you can get your ads approved easily. You can check your ad’s quality in the Ads section of the Facebook Ads Manager.
It’ll not only help you improve your advertisements, but attract positive feedback from Facebook and your targeted audience.
Follow all Facebook advertising policies
By violating the advertising policies instituted by Facebook, you can get your account restricted or banned in no time.
This means to avoid such a situation, you must double-check all the policies before and after creating your ads.
Facebook allows you to review your previously disapproved ads to check the policies you’ve violated.
You can also monitor the ads that are under review or appeal.
Make timely payments
Repeated Issues with verifying payment methods and late payments are two of many reasons Facebook restricts and bans ad accounts.
Typically, Facebook turns ads off until you’ve paid what’s due.
Hence, follow the guidelines to add a relevant payment method and pay timely. If you face issues, simply contact the Facebook team for help.
Use 2-factor authorisation
Adding 2-factor authorisation is a simple process but if ignored creates plenty of troubles. Facebook wants to provide you a secure environment to manage your ads.
This means if the company finds you suspicious, it’s highly likely it’ll restrict your account.
But you can avoid this by adding your phone number as a second authenticator along with your password.
Add relevant landing pages
Facebook screens the landing pages of your advertisements by applying the same set of ad policies.
This means if the landing pages are poor in quality, Facebook might disapprove of your ads.
You can tackle this by using Facebook’s Sharing Debugger, which allows you to see what information Facebook is pulling through from your link or landing page.
What to do after getting restricted or banned?
Say Facebook has restricted your ad account. Now, you don’t have many options to lift the restriction. The only thing you can do is follow Facebook’s recommendations to solve the issue.
Troubleshoot your ad account
Facebook allows you to troubleshoot restricted ad accounts to help find out what’s wrong. You can do this by navigating to Account Quality and check your status. Then, click on the restricted account and look for a What you can do section. Now, take the recommended steps for your account.
Create a new Facebook Account
You can take many cautions to prevent your ad account from getting banned. But if Facebook has banned your ad account, the only option you have is to create a new ad account. Follow the steps below to create a new ad account on Facebook.
- Open the Facebook Business manager and on the left-hand-side panel, navigate to Business Settings
- Click “Ad Accounts” under the “Accounts” tab on the menu to the left.
- Tap on the “Add” button.
- Click on “Create a new ad account.”
This time, add a different payment method or credit card from the one connected to any restricted or banned ad account.
Conclusion
There you have it. Now, you know various reasons for Facebook ad account restriction and ban. You also know how to avoid your Facebook ad account from getting restricted or banned.
Your Ad account is crucial to manage advertisements; hence, you need to follow all the guidelines instituted by Facebook to stay in the game.