10 Mistakes That Will Get Your Facebook Ad Account Shut Down

Facebook Advertising is the most efficient digital advertising product of our time. Its effectiveness as an advertising channel largely stems from the fact that over 22 percent of the world's population uses the social media platform to consume digital content, and the majority of these people do so on a daily basis.

Facebook ads are incomparable to none in terms of the cost of building awareness. While TV commercials, on average, have a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of over $35, the CPM for Facebook ads is nearly five times less at just above $7.

As a marketer or business owner running ads on Facebook, you run the risk of losing your Facebook ad account permanently if you infringe the platform's community guidelines and ad policies. In the majority of shutdowns, there is a clear, published reason why Facebook chooses to disable the ad accounts. Of course, there is a slight chance that the closure is erroneous, in which case, the damage is reversible.

Nevertheless, some mistakes will get your Facebook ad account shut down indefinitely. Despite what you may have witnessed or heard concerning the closure of other people's Facebook ad accounts (most cry foul and insist they've done nothing wrong), Facebook is very clear about what you should and shouldn't do with regard to running your ad account.

This article talks about ten mistakes that can result in a Facebook ad account shut down and provides advice on how to avoid losing your spot on the world's most effective digital advertising platform.

The Three Main Reasons behind Ad Account Termination

Whenever Facebook terminates an ad account, it usually has something to do with the following three elements:

• The advertisement
• The advertisement account
• The advertisement's landing page

Ad Mistakes that will Cost you your account

Ads that go against Facebook Terms of Service

The best advice you'll get concerning how to avoid compliance issues is to get familiar with Facebook's ad policies. Breaching any of the Terms of Service, or posting ads that do not comply with their policy will result in an account shutdown, whether it's immediate or not.

Staying abreast of all changes in their policy is the only way to avoid penalties. Not knowing the do's and don'ts of Facebook advertising is an excuse that will not hold water when contesting your account shut down. It is incredibly vital that you take the time to read their ad policies thoroughly.

Facebook explicitly warns against the following type of ads:

• Ads that promote sex, gambling, or violence, which are just three of many gray areas that people unwittingly cross into.
• Dating ads from a non-approved dating vendor.
• Ads that promise to help people make money.

Negative User Feedback

Even if your ads don't infringe on Facebook's compliance policies, there is still a chance that you might get shut down simply because your ads receive a lot of negative feedback, either from Facebook or the users.

Facebook rolled out Relevance Scores and gave users the ability to close ads to optimize user feedback. The relevance score tells you how well your audience receives your ad, and a lower score can dramatically reduce engagement. However, negative feedback is more critical to the survival of your Facebook ad account.

It doesn't matter how high your relevance score is. If you receive a lot of negative feedback, you risk having your account shut down without prior notice. You have to keep an eye on your ads because even if they get great positive feedback initially, this can change over time.

You should be quick to pause or adjust any of your ads that start receiving high negative feedback before Facebook takes note and disables your ad account. In all cases, often, the problem lies in how your ad affects the overall user experience.

What kind of ads does Facebook frown upon?

• Ads that contain clickbait, inspire fear, exaggerate information, or otherwise manipulate users into action.
• Advertisements that do not have clear intentions-Facebook requires you to be transparent about what the user should expect upon clicking on your ad.
• Ads that make unsubstantiated claims or describe the brand or product in a misleading manner.
• Ads with irrelevant, misleading, or unrelated images.
• Ads with illegal components such as sexually suggestive content, personal user information, and claims that suggest the user is flawed, incomplete, or otherwise lacking in one way or another without the advertised product or brand.

Using the Same Payment Source for Multiple Ad Accounts

A wise thing to do when advertising on Facebook is to create a Facebook Business Manager account from which you can run up to ten ad accounts, or up to 1,000 if you qualify as a true agency. This way, if one account gets banned, you don't lose your entire foothold. It's a sort of contingency plan for the worst-case scenario.

You can use different payment sources for all these accounts, which is beneficial for one reason. When Facebook bans an ad account, they disable its associated payment source permanently. This spells doom for anyone running multiple ads using the same payment source.

It is wise to diversify payment sources so that should one get disabled, you have a few backup plans ready. You can set up secondary credit cards at the bank to help facilitate this. Please do not use PayPal as it is not the best payment source to use when running a Facebook ad account. Stick to credit cards.

Logging in from Different IP Addresses

If you're on the road a lot, it's not advisable to log into your ad account from different computers. Facebook flags accounts with multiple logins from different IP locations for potential fraud, and if the trend continues, they ultimately disable these ad accounts.

A way around this is to log in from a mobile device whenever you're not around the office.

Spending too much too quickly

As a new Facebook marketer, there are limits as to how quickly you can grow your ad campaign without giving Facebook the impression that you're spamming its users. Newbies fall into the trap of spending a lot of money on ads right off the bat or drastically increasing the daily budget on an ad campaign that's proven effective.

The correct way to scale upwards without raising suspicion is to do it slowly, preferably by increasing your budget by not more than 15 percent a day until your ad account is seasoned, and therefore has a higher spending limit.

Too Many Disapproved Ads

Before you push the envelope to get more ads approved, ensure you don't have a history of too many disapproved ads. Facebook considers these, much like they do with approved ads when deciding whether to sign off on your next ad. Your chances are considerably slimmer if you have more disapprovals than approvals. After one too many ads are turned down, your account may be shut down.

A Long History of Disapproved Ads

Don't leave any disapproved ads on your account as this could inspire Facebook to look a little closer at your ads, and maybe even shut down your account altogether. While deleting disapproved ads from the past won't hide them from Facebook, which keeps a separate record, leaving them in your account is like scattering red flags all over it.

Upon ad disapproval, it is essential to delete the disapproved ad as soon as possible, especially if you plan on posting another one. A familiar mistake advertisers make at their peril is uploading an ad immediately after disapproval, which lessens their chances of getting an approval.

Sometimes, an ad that was approved earlier can be disapproved later on due to a recent policy change. And if Facebook detects old ads that got rejected after a retroactive review, they reserve the right to disapprove more of your future ads and even shut down the ad account.

Failing to Limit Access to your Ad Account

It's not a new revelation that Facebook keeps track of Fanpages, individual user accounts, and ad accounts to see how each associate with each other. If a user that's recently been banned is associated with a Fanpage or ad account, it results in an automatic shutdown.

The worst mistake you could make is failing to check who accesses your ad account. All it takes is one person with a bad history with Facebook to cause an account to shut down, whether the account belongs to them or not.

You should be very strict with who you grant access to your ad account. It doesn't matter if it's a client, manager, or vendor. Your account's reputation is linked directly to the people who can access it. If Facebook notices that a banned user has access to an ad account, they flag it as the user's new ad account, and shut it down immediately.

Landing Page Mistakes you should avoid

Unclear Intentions

Any user that clicks through to your landing page should know exactly what to expect by opting in. Leave nothing to chance when explaining what's on the other side of the link. Specify the kind of information on offer, and the format it is available in, whether it's a PDF document, a video, or an email subscription.

Be as straightforward as possible so as not to be perceived as a misleading source of information.

A Lack of Business Information or Direct Relation to the Product

Your landing page MUST contain the following:

• A business name and logo
• A full address
• Relevant contact details
• Resource links to your terms of use
• Disclaimers where applicable

If any of this information is missing, Facebook may flag the account associated with the landing page as a possible scam threat. There should also be fluency between the product or service in your ad and the products on your landing page. Your lander should also relate to the headline in your ad.

Facebook prioritizes user-friendliness above all else. If your landing page is not similar to your ad, you could get your account disabled.

All landing pages should also have a disclaimer that confirms their non-affiliation with Facebook.

Failing to Pay Attention to Relevance and Overall User Experience

There's a lot of debate as to whether it's appropriate to send users to a squeeze page rather than directly to the content when they click on a Facebook ad. On the one hand, both of them have little impact on whether your account gets banned or not. On the other hand, they are both crucial determiners of your audiences' user experience and therefore, can make or break your ad account.

What is more important to consider is whether your landing page content is relevant and contains the right message. If anything about your ad is not up to scratch, whether it's the targeting, messaging, copy, or images, you will undoubtedly hear from it in the form of user complaints, which is the last thing you need for your ad account.

Bonus Advice

Make sure your payments go through.

Facebook will flag your account if it has consistent payment issues. Delayed or incomplete payments may portray your account as unreliable, and after one too many late fees, you may lose it altogether.

• Stay updated about your Facebook page quality.

When you violate a community guideline, Facebook lowers your page quality. You're especially at risk of termination if you post inciting or fake news to gain people's attention.

You may get away with one or two violations, but in the end, repeated policy violations only end up one way: with a banned ad account. You must keep an eye on your ad account, and the ads under review to ensure that you do not go against the ad policies and risk getting your account shut down indefinitely.

How to Keep Your Facebook Ad Account Alive

Most of us are savvy enough to use Facebook, but because there are fewer repercussions on the social platform than the advertising side of things, they may not know how to avoid these common pitfalls.

Losing your ad account can be devastating, especially if you've invested a lot of time and money in it. One way to virtually guarantee that you do not lose your investment is by hiring a PPC agency to handle all your Facebook advertising needs.

Remember, Facebook rarely re-activates an ad account once it has been blocked. Rather than take chances with your hard-earned money, outsource your advertising needs to SparrowBoost and get a free proposal here to keep your ad account engaging, updated, and, most importantly, ALIVE.