It is the moment no marketer wants to experience. You open Facebook Ads Manager to look at your ad campaigns and instead of it you read this chilling message:
“Your ad account has been flagged for policy violations. Any ads you’re running have been turned off. If you believe this is a mistake, please contact us.”
This is the standard message that notifies you that you have a disabled Facebook ads account. Now, before you panic, you should know that this is not the end of the line for you and your business. Facebook has become extremely aggressive in enforcing its rules and may flag accounts that only seem to have breached the rules.
What Is the Right Approach to Recovering Your Disabled Facebook Ad Account?
First of all, remember to play by the rules of Facebook. If you try to circumvent them, for example by creating a new personal profile to associate to your ad account, you will get yourself fully banned from Facebook.
Thus, there are two ways to go about reinstating your account. It depends on how you got the notification that your account was disabled. If you see the message above on the Facebook platform, click on “contact us” and follow the steps to file an appeal against the decision.
If you got the notification by email, reply and request your account to be reinstated. It is important to make sure that you provide all the information you can think of to support your case, i.e. that you are running a legitimate Facebook ads account.
Other Ways to Get Back Your Account
There are other ways in which you can reason with the Facebook Team and regain control over your disabled Facebook ads account. This means that you need to be proactive and get in touch with Facebook in other ways than in reply to the notification.
Thus, you should go to the question mark in the top right corner of the Ads Manager menu. When you click on it, you will get several suggestions for help with issues, including a link to the Help Centre.
Chat with a Facebook Representative
On certain occasions (but not all the time), after you clicked on Help Centre, you will see the option: “Chat with a representative”. You will also see the estimated waiting time until you will be one-on-one with the representative.
Important: the highest chances of recovering your disabled Facebook account are when you are polite and do not try to blame Facebook for the issue. Always remember that they do not disable accounts from paying users (business accounts) for no good reasons.
What Happens When You Cannot Recover a Disabled Facebook Ads Account?
Despite all your best efforts, there is still a chance that you don’t recover the ads account. In this case, you have to create a new one.
However, make sure that you use a different credit card as your payment option for the new account. Once the old account was disabled, the credit card linked to it was flagged, as well.
How to Prevent Getting Your Ads Account Flagged by Facebook
The golden rule in this case is simple: always comply with the advertising policies of Facebook. Especially, pay attention to the Prohibited Content and Restricted Content sections.
Some of the most common mistakes advertisers make are:
- Promoting an affiliated marketing program
- Including a forwarded URL in Facebook ads
- Promoting gambling or lottery related websites or apps
- Promoting a dating/relationships website or app.
Secondly, constantly review your page and ads for negative feedback. These negative feedbacks are expressed by:
- Hiding an ad
- Hiding a post or hiding all your posts
- Reporting a post
- Unliking the page.
By constant monitoring of these issues, you can understand what your followers like and don’t like. Thus, you can adapt your ads and the content you share on your page to lower your negative feedback rate.