18.02.2025
Facebook ad got rejected? Facebook ad rejection has its main reasons and ways how to fix it too. Learn about top reasons why your Facebook Ad got rejected, how to fix it and how to prevent it from happening in future. We've all been there - you tune your copies perfectly, polish your landing page, make top-notch creatives, hit publish and then out of sudden your Facebook ad gets rejected. Horrific experience for sure, but you are not the first not even last - and yet many marketers somehow manage to get their ad back to track like nothing happened.
Let's dig deeper - our article covers top reasons why Facebook Ads got rejected, how Facebook review mechanism works, how to fix Facebook Ad rejection and how to prevent from Facebook Ad being rejected in future.
When Facebook Ad gets rejected, it actually means that review mechanism of Facebook considered your ad against Facebook Advertising policies and you are not delivering your ad. Read that again: review mechanism of Facebook considered your ad against its advertising policies. Important word here is the word considered - keep that in mind, it can really shift your mindset of how you can play this rejection game as a winner. Hence, from pure logical standpoint, the character/contents of your ad doesn't really matter in case your Facebook Ad got rejected. What really matters is that Facebook saw it as against policies.
There is a reason why you sometimes see Facebook ads, which are clearly against its policies (by some help of the marketer maybe) - because Facebook considered it as "ok" and approved it. The bottom line here is more than obvious - if your ad appear to Facebook ad review mechanism as legit and according to its advertising policies, you will receive approval. If it appears as against policies, your Facebook Ad will be rejected.
To get a better grasp on why your Facebook Ad got rejected and put it to your marketing advantage, it is useful to know (and many marketers don't have any clue) how Facebook Ad review mechanism works. Before your Facebook ad will get approved or rejected, there goes underlying, from technical standpoint very intensive, but in business terms quite simple process. Facebook worked on this for long time and automated this process in belief of getting that tremendous mass of ads reviewed quite fast, but still doing most to respect its policies.
The review process is done when the algorithm compares your copies, creative contents (be it image or video), link and its destination (landing page) of your ad against its Facebook Advertising Policies. As mentioned, it is good to have in mind that this process is most of the time automatic, done by machine (hence automated and algorithm). When automated machine review process is done, it passes the verdict.
But also, and it is not rule of thumb, but if automated review process "feels" that something is off with your Facebook Ad or it can't clearly tell if its legit towards its Advertising policies - it calls upon manual review option. In other words: the human check steps in. It is a good point to mention here, that manual review is not done strictly by some very objective, deep Facebook Ads Policy wise gentlemen/ladies, but many times with just people who want to get their job done. So it can easily happen, that manual review of your ad can get into hands of a person who basically not care and just decides that your ad is wrong out of a bad day. Look at the diagram below to grasp the review process from holistic standpoint.
To form a conclusion: you submit your ad, it goes through automated machine review process - if contents/character of your Facebook Ad appears legit according to its evaluation, then your ad goes to delivery process as approved (your ad will be shown shortly) or if your Facebook Ad appears against its Advertising policy, then your Facebook Ad will be rejected. If the automated system is not sure about your ad - it will pass it to human check and the human decides if they let it through.
We can't actually stress enough the importance of the word appear - key to make Facebook review process work in your favor is to make always the ad to appear as legit. So if you have an ad which you considered as risky to run- tune into the Advertising policies and try to make it appear as most legit. Over some time and time, you can "smuggle" someting what you want and let it run easily. Or you don't have to smuggle anything and even run risky ads with Facebook Agency Ad accounts regardless of your business.
The key period here stated by Facebook is usually within 24 hours. It is just formal number- time can vary depening, and it can take longer in some scenarios (even shorter) on the following circumstances:
Usually, the Facebook Advertising policy makes it clear what is against its advertising rules. Actually here is some nasty catch, because Facebook can use extensive interpretation or its Advertising rules. And thats why your Facebook Ad sometimes get rejected because it falls under something which is restricted maybe not directly, but by wider interpretation it could be seen as something that can't pass. Below are the most common reason why your Facebook Ad got rejected.
This happens most often. There is a little difference betweeh prohibited and restricted: ads of prohibited categories cannot be shown at all to users, restricted category could, but you have to follow some extra Ads Policy steps how to make those pass.
According to the Facebook Advertising policies those are prohibited categories (and can't be run ever):
The full list of prohibited categories can be found here. So if your ad contains any of those you Facebook Ad will be rejected. In some specific cases like crypto business you can actually opt-in for Facebook Agency Ad Account.
Regarding the restricted categories you have to follow little specific rules as listed here. Restricted categories are for example:
If you follow guidelines as linked above, you will be most of the time good to go. If it limits you and you want more freedom without restrictions and solid guidelines, Facebook Agency Ad Account can help here too to advertise more freely.
Grounding of ad rejection here is Intellectual property infringement. Basically you probably used some product/service/brand characteristics which were in conflict with third party rights. Common scenarios here are some fake products or using other/third party branded content.
It is very important here to mention, that this is really heavyweight category and can easily lead to Ad Account disaproval. You can even get a little uncomfortable legal email. That email is usually just warning to stop doing this copyright infringement. If this already happened it is recommended to be very careful about ads like these, since Facebook really looks for these more intensively.
This can be divided into two main subreasons: either the content of the ad (copy, creative, landing page) is misleading/deceptive or you are obviously trying to smuggle like "wolf in sheep's clothing" some product service and the user flow is misleading (we will explain below).
If the content of the ad (copy, creative, landing page) is misleading/deceptive this is also self explanatiory. In layman's terms it means that what your ad is showing to people can be claimed as misleading, deceiving or sounds "too good to be true". These are some examples how it looks in practice:
So if any of that kind of aspects are in your creative, ad copies or even on landing page - you Facebook Ad will be mostly rejected.
Regarding the misleading user flow: it is not oftenly spoken, but also causes of Facebook Ad being rejected (usually after Facebook Ad being approved). It happens when you for instance try to bait people on legit ads and serve for review purposes some legit landing page too - but then you change landing page to more misleading, more deceiving. It is like some very soft and unstable version of something known as cloaking, but Facebook can figure out that too - especially with new Facebook Ad Accounts. They will just find out you are trying to flight under radar when you thing the air is clear. This subreason is in essence similar to submiting regular misleading content for review as stated in first subrason and can appear to you as a same thing, but the form/vector differs. The bottom line is to remember that by doing any changes to landing page which contains misleading content, even after ad approval - can lead to Facebook Ad rejection too!
The main experience which Facebook content (and ads) has to deliver is positive only. Do otherwise and your Facebook Ad is rejected. Simply, you need to make users not feel bad about themselves or in more general sense not bring negative emotions. That's why some restricted categories (as mentioned earlier) can be run, but in certain conditions. Let's look at some examples:
Fat loss/food suplements:
Correct way:
Wrong way (before & after photos):
See the difference? First ad is not as disturbing - it provides idea about food supplement which causes person to lose fat. On the contrary, second ad shows sort of bodyshame (negative emotion) and promise benefits. It can easily trigger bad emotion about oneself.
Before & after photos mostly show not only content against community standards (thus the example), but also can fall under misleading category. So in these cases you can expect one of violations stated in your Facebook Ad rejection commentary.
Other contents against community standards include:
This mostly bounds to the idea how the specific parts of your copy, creative or landing page can affect the users. The difference from the reason before (against community standards) is that what objectively sensitive/dangerous content is, not the way how it communicates subjectively with the users (and possibly really disturb specific users, like happens at rule of community standard). In essence, fat loss before after photos are against community standards and makes your Facebook Ad rejected, because it subjectively goes for user shame in terms of bodyparts (thus disturbing specific division of users which are trying to lose fat, not marginally most of users). On the contrary, sensitive/dangerous content it something that can disturb marginally most people, thus including:
You probably get the specific idea now why Facebook Ad can be rejected by senstive/dangerous content. Lets look upon how to fix Facebook Ad rejections.
When your Facebook Ad rejection happens, there are several options you can do: asking Facebook for reviewing of your rejected Facebook Ad again, try to update and resubmit rejected Facebook Ad or reconsider your Facebook Ad Account to work it more efficently and freely.
If you are sure, that Facebook Ad rejection was unfair and the contents of your all ad elements (including landing page) are without any aspect of Facebook Ad policy violation - you can try to request a review of rejected ad. It is worth the try, because you don't have anything to lose.
The process of requesting review of a rejected Facebook Ad could be little swarming if you are new for the game, but once get comfortable with the enviroment it is easy to follow. First, you need to go to your Account Quality Page. There you will see your Facebook Ad Account(s) - see the image below:
Pick the relevant Ad Account under which the rejected ad happened. After that, you will see available ads which can you request for another review. You should see something like this:
Then you just select rejected ad you want to submit for a review and click the "Request review" button. And that's it.
In few days you will hear from Facebook how it went. You can also review the status of this request by visiting again the section where you submitted chosen rejected ad for a review. If the rejected Facebook ad is not appearing in the list this time, chances are 99.9% your review was successful and your ad is running.
If your ad was approved like this, but after some time you are not getting any impressions, try to review the reasons why your Facebook Ad is not delivering.
This requires no more explanation. Tweak your copies, images/video, URL in your ad accordingly to what Facebook Ad rejection says. You should have probably a clear idea what went wrong. Also in some cases (especially with videocreatives) reuploading the image/videocreative with little irrelevant change can help too (review process will review in its eyes different creative and can overlook it this time) - but is a little risky if you are afraid about another Facebook Ad rejection.
By choosing Facebook Agency Ad Account, your ads start to operate with sort of immunity against Facebook Ad rejections and even immunity against Facebook Ad Account restrictions. Benefit is also that you will never lose your important data.
Facebook Ad rejection happening all the time? Well, the options are two: either you are not paying enough attention towards Facebook Advertising policy or at worse scenario, especially in case when you are sure that you are not publishing anything specifically against advertising policy- Facebook has probably flagged your Facebook Ad account.
When your account si "flagged" it means that you are under more intensive watch from the Facebook side. Most of the time this happens from a reason, but sometimes Facebook just do it with no rationale. But in any case- being flagged has been caused with something. Did you try to farm more ad accounts? Or did you publish something very disturbing in your previous ad submission? There can be many triggers but the watch from the Facebook is valid - so as a prevence, it hardened its conditions towards reviewing process of your ads. And sometimes, hardened too much.
The options what to do here are following:
The Facebook Advertising policy itself is quite complex and we already highlighted the most common reasons why you Facebook Ad could be rejected. To form a conclusion of the best approach to avoid rejections, you can narrow those to two main divisions: best approach for copies and best approach for image/video creatives.
The main rules for ad copies are following:
Before submiting image/video of your Facebook Ad, make sure that:
Facebook Ad rejection are not comfortable but you can also run your ads without facing any. And that is exactly one of many benefits of Facebook Agency Ad accounts. Not just you can avoid any restrictions or bans, but with Facebook Agency Ad Account your Pixel/Dataset is always safe, you get far cheaper CPMs and CPAs, you can scale to thousands USD budget from day one without warmups. And the best part? You can also run GH/BH ads too! Learn more about Facebook Agency Ad accounts or don't hestitate to contact us.
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