Have you ever had a Facebook ad rejected? They’re not very specific in the response message you receive, are they?
“We have reviewed your ad(s) and determined that the one or more of them do not meet our guidelines. “
Facebook has taken a page out of Google’s “I’m gonna be ambiguous” book. Sometimes I feel like the guys with the red pens in “Good Morning Vietnam” are running the approval team in the ad deptartment there.
Upon working with a Facebook Ad rep, I was able to get further insight about that particular campaign.
“We do not allow ads for MLM or personal business opportunities and will not allow the creation of any further Facebook Ads for this product.”
Huh? Don’t allow MLM opps? I seem them advertised all the time! I guess one just has to be a bit more creative with the offer.
Google didn’t like us. And guess what, Facebook doesn’t like us either.
Does that sound harsh? It’s true. Back in the day 9 different marketers could promote the same product on PPC, each pay $.25 and drive to different squeeze pages for the $47 product all day long. It was sweet!
But around 2007 Google decided they didn’t like their ad units full of duplicate product offers and went on a rampage against these affiliate marketers. You may remember hearing about it, “The Google Slap it was dubbed by many Gurus.
Well, many new marketers may feel like Facebook is now following suit and saying “talk to the hand” instead of “come advertise here”.
The problem is… if we want to run ads on their network we need to abide by their rules, no matter how ambiguous they may be.
So, lets look at 2 “feeler” campaigns my team ran recently and see how we can get ads approved. We were split testing some new campaigns to get get a base CTR (click through rate). We submitted about 10 different ads, and I figured the similarities between these two would make a good study.
This Ad Was Approved
This Ad Was Not Approved
Here is a screenshot of the squeeze page these ads were driving leads to:
Do you have a clear offer?
The lesson here is that FB didn’t mind selling me “leads on demand” clicks but they had a problem sending “earning from the 97%…” clicks. If your ads have been rejected you may consider changing the wording to something about the feature vs. touting the benefit.
Another point. I’m even using Facebook API calls to pull users email without them having to go through the fuss of entering their name and email (and I get their BEST email by using FBConnector) and they don’t even mind that.
The reason is, this page technically complies with their terms of service because it drives to a free video. They don’t seem to care what that video actually says. Another reason is because it includes a clear privacy policay, earnings disclaimer and terms of use. These 3 magic links will do wonders for your approval rating, and should be included on all landing pages you advertise through Facebook PPC.
The Ad is in alignment with the offer on the landing page
This is PPC 101, but the ad has to match the offer exactly in terms of promise and delivery. In this case, both the ad and the landing page have clear call to action, and both messages are closely related to what the user will actually get if they respond appropriately to the direct response offer. Facebook’s goal is serving relevant, useful advertising to their users, so strive to provide that in your advertising.
Whatever you do don’t use an exit JavaScript dialog box.
Many marketers who promote direct response offers online like to “catch” the visitor by using a JavaScript style alert box when the user leaves the page. Don’t. These pages won’t get approved by the Facebook Ad team, and you won’t be told this in your rejection message.
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how often they check approved pages but I would definitely not violate their TOS for advertisers during the approval process.
If you haven’t already, read the Facebook Ad Guidelines for advertisers here or submit a technical troubleshooting inquiry about your disapproved ad here. But first, leave a comment below and let me know if you find these kind of posts useful, or just grab a quick backlink for your site.
