I've been advertising on Facebook for the past 7 years now. Wow seems like a long time. It was back in 2010 when I purchased Jonathan Budd's course “Get Traffic 3-0”, back when very few people were advertising at all. I loved the course and I started advertising immediately. However, at the time, Facebook was a lot more laid back. We could place ads with pictures of money, make claims, basically do almost anything we wanted and we'd get approved. Good ole' days…
Well, I wish I had had more budget back then. I could only spend a couple hundred a month and wasn't taking it all that seriously. It wasn't until 2012 that I started advertising for my marketing services, webinars, and affiliate marketing opportunities. Flash forward until today and during all that time I never had an ad account flagged for policy violation. But these days, Facebook has gotten more strict than ever. And in just one week they flagged 4 of my accounts!!, including my main account, my favorite one. :'( Luckily, I had followed the advice I give my own students, and had already created several accounts that I could continue to use, but it's still a pain.
This is the one thing a FB Advertiser dreads waking up to:
The worst part is that their “reason” is always very vague, so you never know exactly what triggered the ban.
And even though I managed to get back 3 of my banned accounts (they had banned 7!), it's always better to be safe than sorry. I was reading an article on Adleaks and I wanted to share with you the main points they recommend avoiding, in order to optimize conversions on your landing page, and to avoid being disapproved and/or banned:
- Negative first impression.
- Your ads call-to-action doesn’t align with landing page.
- You have a pop up on the first step of the landing page or funnel.
- Your value proposition is unclear, unreasonable or misleading.
- Poor mobile experience (more weight now than ever before).
- The landing page and ad creative are not aligned.
- The page load time is too long (high bounce rate)
- The opt-in forms and sign-up boxes are not easy to find.
- Lengthy opt-in forms (keep it simple).
- Before and after images.
- Excessive amount of emojis, characters or using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.
- Missing a privacy policy, terms and any applicable disclaimers
- Your Landing Page Redirects to another type of page (pop-ups, income claims, etc. are no bueno).
- A video on your landing page that auto-plays.
If you ever get banned, the warning in your account will say “if you believe this is a mistake, contact us”. So go ahead and always click that and explain why you believe it's a mistake and ask for a manual review, and sometimes they'll do a manual review and conclude that it was indeed a mistake. I was lucky to get some of my accounts back!
Also, if you want to expand on the topic of Facebook advertising and how to improve your conversions, I'm hosting a training this week where my partner and I will show you our best strategies to maximize your traffic to your ecommerce store, or any online business with Facebook Ads! Click here to register your spot for this FREE Training!