What should you do when your Facebook AD Account has been locked
What should you do when your Facebook AD Account has been locked
If one of the things you do is create campaigns on Social Media platforms, my recent experience with Meta may resonate with you.
The speaker details the journey of promoting a platform on social media, primarily Facebook, encountering challenges such as a locked-out account post-advertisement. It delves into the investigation process, discussing the ad’s innocence and the complexities of adhering to Facebook’s rules. Interaction with Facebook support reveals navigational hurdles and inconsistent communication. Eventually, resolution comes with the ad’s approval, prompting reflection on potential causes and plans for further testing. Insights emphasize rule adherence, intuition in decision-making, and learning from past mistakes. The conclusion highlights adaptability to platform-specific rules and anticipates future engagement with a mindset of continuous learning and improvement.
Summary
Introduction:
Description of promoting a platform on social media networks, particularly Facebook.
Mention of creating different campaigns for different regions.
Brief overview of the issue faced with a locked-out Facebook account after posting an ad.
Investigation of the Issue:
Discussion on the simplicity and innocence of the ad content.
Reflection on two approaches to ensuring compliance with Facebook’s rules: thorough rule-checking vs. relying on doing what is perceived as right.
Discovery of a lengthy list of rules on Facebook’s campaign page.
Initial attempts to understand the reason behind the account lockout.
Interaction with Facebook Support:
Narration of the process of requesting a review after the account was disabled.
Encounter with challenges in navigating Facebook’s support system.
Inconsistencies in communication regarding the timeline for account review.
Resolution of the Issue:
Receipt of approval email for the ad after multiple attempts to reach out to Facebook support.
Contemplation on the potential cause of the rejection, particularly focusing on the use of certain fonts.
Expression of intent to conduct further testing to confirm suspicions.
Insights and Advice:
Reflection on the importance of adhering to platform rules and avoiding controversial content.
Emphasis on trusting intuition and moral compass in decision-making.
Discussion on learning from past mistakes and adapting strategies for successful ad campaigns across different platforms.
Podcast
Transcript
0:00
You know, we promote our platform on different networks, on different social media platforms. One of them is Facebook, and we use that for different parts of the world, different regions, and I create different campaigns. That’s part of what I do outside of coding and engineering work.
0:18
So a couple days back, I posted an ad, and then our account got locked out. So we got locked out, meaning they disabled our account, and we couldn’t post anything. Then I was trying to wonder why because our ads are pretty simple, innocuous, straightforward.
0:34
We just talked about the platform, and that particular ad was just a technical video that I promoted. I was wondering what could have transpired, right? If you go to the Facebook page, one of those campaign pages has a list of rules. It’s a long page, with a lot of bulleted items, a pretty lengthy list.
0:55
You know what? You could go about this in two ways. One is when you create an ad or a campaign, you can look up all the rules to make sure you don’t violate any of them. That’s possible, and you could choose to do that.
1:13
Or the other way is just say the right things and do the right things. If you feel like you’re doing the right things, the odds that it’s going to violate something is almost negligible, right? So when we create campaigns and advertisements, I talk about technical stuff, sometimes non-technical stuff, but there’s nothing in those videos that you could possibly even take offense to, even if you wanted to.
1:40
Even if you went out of the way and tried to identify issues, I could almost challenge you that you probably can’t do it because we don’t think in that fashion. That’s how I go about it. I don’t have the time honestly to read every single bullet, but if you do the right thing, what your heart sees is right, what are the odds that you’re actually going to violate anything anywhere in life? That’s how I’ve lived all of my life so far, and I don’t see a reason why I would change it going forward.
1:59
So I was like, okay, why would they reject it? Then I tried to look through each of those bullets, actually spent time two days ago later on at night, just trying to read through that. Sure enough, I didn’t see anything that we had done that would have violated any one of those items.
2:20
So then I went through, went to their page and tried to request a review. But here’s where I’m actually coming to the crux of this video. Even large companies, almost trillion-dollar companies, can have not just bugs, lots of bugs, but also fundamental issues with certain aspects of their products and platforms.
2:41
So I go there and I follow the links in the email. It asked me to submit proof of my identification. Yeah, sure, I did that. They asked for a couple of options. I did provide proof and then I clicked submit. I know when you do that it generally takes a while, but it had no relevance or I didn’t see what the connection between that and my ad accounts being blocked were. But maybe there was, maybe there could have been a connection, right? So I did that upload and then I still could not request a review because it said that they would have to approve that step before I could request a review of the ad that was rejected and the account that was locked.
3:22
That didn’t sound right to me. So I kept looking more and then I found some more links where you could actually get to chatting with Facebook support like as a business customer, completely not something that was in their email, right? Or their links. You have to go someplace else, go through Facebook business or campaign.
3:41
One of those tools are, and then you have to answer quite a few questions. If memory serves me right because you can’t get to talk to a representative, right? That’s generally hidden and intentionally so because they want you to not bug them and just hopefully get your answers resolved.
3:58
But it hardly ever happens, at least by personal experience. So I found that now starting to chat with the representative and sure enough one more time they told me the exact same thing that I already knew or what the email alluded to essentially. “Hey, make sure you don’t violate these items yada yada yada.”
4:16
And I’m like, no, I did not. And if I did, can you please tell me what it is? And they’re like, hey, we’re not the team that does it. We’re going to have to forward the request to some other team. Okay. So there’s not a whole lot of value add there particularly. So after a pretty lengthy chat, they at least put that through in the pipelines to request review.
4:35
They said it had to be a completely different team. And then I got another email that said it could take between one to two weeks, right? And be patient. But then when I checked that out on the Facebook campaign manager or the ad manager or whatever that platform is called, it said it could take several weeks. Or did it say months or several weeks because of different. Because of the situation you’re all in, it could take several weeks. So there was also inconsistency between documentation there and what they had sent in the email.
4:51
So I was like I kept my fingers crossed I knew it would be approved eventually. I just didn’t know when or how or what they might ask their questions. And now in the meantime, I was trying to debug, right? Just trying to draw a parallel between trying to contrast between this ad which caused this whole account to be disabled.
5:24
I had a feeling it should have had something to do with that particular ad because it happened quite immediately after I published that ad and then I’m looking at the video, it’s like 60 seconds and talking about an Apple bug I ran into. It’s none of the video. Feel free to check that out. So there’s absolutely nothing controversial in that, right? Only thing I could think of was the fonts I had used. Again, they were. I think the name of the font is a fantastic font. It’s one of the nicer looking stylish fonts. But it’s not particularly easy to read. Maybe not easy enough for a machine to read it. So maybe it identified those characters as something it probably did not recognize. That’s at least my hunch because they did not tell you why an ad may have gotten rejected, just tell you it got rejected.
6:12
It could be one of any number of reasons and your guess is as good as mine or theirs because they don’t disclose that to you, or not even disclose. They don’t even give you an indication as to what your problem might be, so you could actually fix it. It’s just a boolean right, right or wrong, true or false, good or bad, yes or no, locked or unlocked, approved or disapproved or rejected.
6:34
So that’s as simple as that. So I waited and I sent them a couple more emails. You know, if you dig deeper, there are large companies. So there’s a number of different ways you can actually reach out to them and you don’t know which might work faster than the other. So you have to do your due diligence and I think I reached out through one of three or four means if I remember correctly.
6:56
And then on my birthday, thank you, happy birthday to me, May the force be with you. So I got the email and I was happy because they approved it, they unlocked it, they said hey, apologies, it was incorrectly logged. So we’re going to unlock it.
7:12
But now the only way I can confirm if my font theory is even remotely accurate is I have to create another ad which is very similar but using that same font. And if it does get rejected one more time, then at least I know that that’s got to be the case, right? I don’t know if I want to do that, but I’m still curious.
7:29
I might do it because I don’t like a few fonts that show better on these ads when you or thumbnails. I don’t lose a font because I might incorrectly think that it was rejected because of that font, which may or may not have been the case, but we’ll see. Anyways, I just want to share this experience, so if you’re creating campaigns, keep an eye on that, right?
7:50
Obviously on top of, not on top of. You know, I’m going to say the obvious, but you can see the list of their rules. I mean, don’t say anything that’s controversial. Don’t. I think they say, don’t say anything political. You know, anything that you feel like might be wrong, just don’t do it.
8:07
I think that’s the best way to go about life before you do something and ask yourself if you feel comfortable doing it. If for whatever reason you feel uncomfortable, there’s a good chance that you probably don’t want to do it. Maybe there’s something wrong. That’s the only way I keep my checks and balances and sanity.
8:24
If my heart says don’t do it, I refrain from doing it. That’s not to say that when it says do it and you do it and it ends up being picture perfect and great, but that you can’t help, right? You want to learn, live and learn and rectify mistakes, but when you feel like it’s not, doesn’t feel or smell right.
8:42
Just don’t do it because 99.99% of the time it probably would not be right, right? So keep an eye on it. But there’s other rules too when it comes to campaigns. You know how much text you can have on these ads, whether it’s too texty or too verbose. They allow a certain number of texts as a percentage, I think is like 20% or some number like that.
9:02
So I’ve tried in a number of different ads. Some have been rejected in the past, like when we started the campaign out, when we went live almost a year ago now. But since then I’ve posted a number of ads on a number of networks on a number of social media platforms. And I would say our success rate, at least in the ads being approved and not being rejected has been well over 90%, right.
9:23
So I think we’ve learned from our earlier mistakes because each of them has slightly, I mean there are common aspects of their rules. There are overlaps and if you drew a Venn diagram, you’d see that. But there are items that are unique as well. The same ad that gets approved by Facebook may get rejected by Pinterest, for instance.
9:41
Right. And actually it happened. It has happened to me. Just because their rules are different, you know, and there’s plenty of things that come into play anyways. Hopefully, some of that made sense. Maybe some of it was entertaining, but talk to you soon.
Snowpal Products
Backends as Services on AWS Marketplace
Mobile Apps on App Store and Play Store
Education Platform for Learners and Course Creators