Last week for the first time ever one of my client’s Facebook Business account got disabled. The message that Facebook was giving me said that we could no longer use that business account because of a policy violation.
I gotta admit, the first thing I did was I panicked. I thought “what policy did we violate”? After putting some thought into it, I realized we didn’t violate any policy! Then, I remembered I’ve heard my colleagues talking about many of their clients’ accounts getting disabled for no reason but then after they appealed, they got their accounts turned back on within a couple of days.
So here’s what I did:
Right under the warning message, there was an option to request a review of this account if I believed it was disabled by mistake. I clicked on that option and it redirected me to a Support Inbox page. Once there, it asked me why I was appealing the decision. I wrote that I believed that this business account was disabled by mistake. Within 10 minutes I got an answer back where they said
“We reviewed the business account again and determined that access to advertising was incorrectly disabled. Any of its Ad accounts or Ads that were affected will return to their previous status. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
My first thought was “Oh that was easy!”. Then on the next morning, I go to optimize my client’s ads and now it was showing that the ads account was disabled! 😳 . I followed the same steps I took when the business account was disabled but this time, I didn’t hear back from them for 5 days. I knew this was obviously an error from Facebook, but the fact that they were taking so long to get back to me was making me worried. On day 2 of waiting, I contacted Facebook support and asked them if they could help. They replied saying that the escalated the request and that I should hear back from them soon. Then, I waited for 3 more days until I finally got a message that said
“We’ve reactivated your advertising account and you should now be able to create new ads and manage your existing ones.”
I was thankful to get this message because I was already planning on having my client create a new ads account because we needed to create the ads for her launch.
Why do Facebook ads account are getting deactivated by mistake?
- One of the main reasons is because we are on election season and Facebook is being extra careful with what’s being advertised.
- It could be just a glitch. Something in your account can be triggering the deactivation and you’ll need Facebook support to turn it back on.
What to do if this happens to you:
- Don’t freak out 🙂
- Check Facebook’s advertising policies to make sure you didn’t violate them https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/.
- If you know what your Business account or ad account got disabled by mistake, appeal the decision right away by clicking the “Request a Review for this ad account” link.
- Be patience. Due to COVID, it may take several days for them to answer your case.
Ana Katz Digital 