Facebook Ad Account Disabled – no reason and forever

This is our true story about how Facebook disabled our Ad account.

We learned that Facebook can stop you from advertising without giving you a reason, without explaining what you did wrong, and without giving you a chance to make things right.

While trying to contact their support, you will find out that you are communicating with a robot and even so, you need to wait at least hours for the reply so it looks like human interaction. When you finally get reach of a real live person, their advice is to break the rules and create a new “fake” account.

But wait, breaking some rules probably was a reason for disabling our account? Well as we investigated further, probably not in our case. It looks like robots and artificial intelligence are not that great and fair as they closed our account before several times by mistake. Facebook’s review processes are set up in such way, that you have to appeal, you don’t get a reason, just one sentence apology and your ads are paused in the meantime.

Usual response from Facebook support:

We reviewed your Facebook account and determined that access to advertising features was incorrectly disabled. We’ve reinstated your access to advertising. Any ads that were affected will return to their previous status.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Thanks,
The Facebook Business Team

So we got blocked many times before, some Ads were rejected, some accounts got warned, we did a lot of Ads for many of our clients. Mistakes were made, corrected. When you deal with Google Ads, if you make a mistake or break some policy, they will give you a reason why your Ads got rejected.

Facebook decided to take a different approach, they permanently disabled our account without a notice

Hi ******,

After further review of your Facebook account, we found you didn’t comply with our Advertising Policies (https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads) or other standards. You will no longer be allowed to advertise and your access to features for managing ad and business accounts will remain limited.

The Facebook Business Team

These error messages started to appear in the Facebook Ads Manager:

Ad Account Disabled
This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled. You can’t use it to run ads.

On the Campaigns page :
facebook.com/adsmanager/manage/campaigns?act=****
Ad Account Disabled
​You can’t use this account to run ads. Its ads have stopped running and some of its advertising assets are also disabled.

On the Account Quality page:
facebook.com/accountquality/***/***
Ad Account Disabled
This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled because your Facebook account is restricted from advertising.

So what now? What actions to take? How to proceed?

If you get blocked too many times, even by a mistake of machine learning of Facebook’s AI, your account will be disabled and Facebook staff is not authorized to make it right. Their advice is to create a new account, Ads account on the affected account is supposedly unrecoverable.

So at first, we appealed as always. Filled out the forms, pasted account ID or product ID’s and made our case. No response for a week. No response for a month. No response to anything for three months, … We tried every publicly available way to get in touch with Facebook support. Finally, an e-mail came explaining that our account is permanently blocked and we should create another account.

As we could not believe it and assumed that it was just a badly trained support staff, we reached out to our colleagues and competition from the industry. They confirmed having the same experience. Happened to some of them, most of them heard about someone in the same situation. None of them liked the idea they could be switched off anytime Facebook feels like it.

So I am here begging Facebook robot to let me spend our dear client’s budget on their platform? We got suspended, disabled, ignored, and advised to break the rules. Meanwhile, Russians tried to supposedly hijack elections using Facebook and were allowed to advertise stupidly insane and offensive stuff. We were denied a simple promotion of local services and business.

By the way, we are also getting this message into our inbox every time we appeal, but it is just a robot response, don’t be fooled and don’t be happy, they don’t mean it and no, your account will not get activated:

Lessons learned

Don’t trust Facebook. They don’t give a shit. Use their platform while you can, but don’t become too attached or dependent on their Ads.

Instead, use proven platforms like Google Ads, where you can build sustainable advertising campaigns. We cooperate with Google since the very beginning of online Ads. They were never rude, never ignored us, always gave us an explanation of why the banner or text ad was rejected. Their measurements are accurate and fair.

While Facebook Ads appeared cheaper for a while, the price is not everything. The effort, time invested and lengthy training is not worth it if you get banned and you never know when and what for.

Do you have your own experience with Facebook? Share it in the comments.