Ad account restricted!
No! it’s something that sends chills down the spine of anybody running ads on Facebook, especially if you’re an ad manager.

So there are four ways that we can be disabled or banned from advertising on Facebook.
And that is our personal profile, the business page, the ad account, or the business manager. Now each of those ways have their own issues and circumstances and possible workarounds. And that’s what we’re going to be looking into. So ready, number one, the personal profile. This one is actually the biggest nuisance because according to Facebook terms, you’re only allowed to have one personal profile.

So I hope, you know, someone that you’re really chummy with now to protect yourself in case your personal profile is restricted from advertising. You need to act before it’s too late. You need to make sure that you are not the only one with admin access to advertising assets and your business page. Make sure there is someone else with admin access to that page.

To the ad account, you need to make sure that you’re not the only one who has access to the ad account and to the business manager. Again, make sure you’re not the only one with admin access to the business manager, because if your profile is restricted, then you cannot go in and make any changes to those assets. You cannot go in and then add someone as an admin to your business manager.

You can not go in and make changes to your ad account. So make sure that you have someone else who is assigned admin to all those assets as well. That’s what I would say, setting up an insurance policy so that if things go down, you’re not left wondering what am I going to do now. You’ve set things up so making sure people have access to those assets.

And if it is your profile that has been restricted, you need to be reaching out to Facebook to talk to them and try and resolve it. Facebook loves automation and their bots are overzealous. Their bots are going through and disapproving things left, right and center. So it’s that matter of reaching out to Facebook and asking for a manual review, the wording that you typically would say is that it appears that the bots have triggered a false positive, and we would like to request a manual review. So make sure that you reach out to Facebook, you get on chat support, you submit the tickets and try and follow up. Now they may respond back again with an automated reply, just keep reaching out, be persistent and get it resolved. In the meantime, while all that’s going on, this trusted person that you know, can access those assets that you possibly can’t. So your advertising can still go on while you’ve got all this other that you’re trying to sort out.

Number two is the business page. A page could be restricted from advertising and again, bots are very common with this issue. So again, you’ll be reaching out to Facebook if this has been an issue, but reasons why might genuinely be restricted is if you have consistently been posting content that is against community standards. For example, the get rich quick kind of schemes, even though that’s ad terms and policies. If you’re putting a lot of that on your page then Facebook is not going to be your friend. If your page quality is low in that, you’ve got a lot of negative feedback on it. Then again, Facebook is not going to be happy with it. You can go and check out your page quality and see what it says there. But again, a lot of times I see it getting our pages restricted, just because of bot errors. There may be reasons where our credit cards may have just been declined because they’re new cards. And so the bank’s not familiar with them or addresses can be issues or various other things. So there’s a number of reasons why. Reach out to Facebook, see about getting it resolved.

Your backup for this one could be to have another page up and running and ready so that if one page goes down, you’ve got another one. And that other one we’ll get back to in just a minute, when we talk about the business manager, but having another page that you can just go to set up your ads is a good insurance policy. Because pages are not connected to an ad account. You can run ads from any ad account from any page. I’ve seen people do it accidentally, they’ve run ads and they’ve attached another page to the ad. So that’s one of your lesser problems there. If you’ve got a lot of great quality, great content and such on the page and a lot of engagement, yes, it may be a bit of an uphill battle, but that’s probably the least of your concerns out of these four disablements or restrictions.

Number three is the ad account is getting shut down or has been shut down. Again, overzealous bots are doing this all the time. So reaching out to Facebook again, saying to them that it appears the bots have triggered a false positive, and you would like to request a manual review. It might come back and say, well the landing page was an issue. And if you know the landing page is an issue, keep reaching out, striving to tell them that yes, you strive to be compliant. So what do you do about ad accounts that get shut down? Well, this is where you have another ad account up and running and ready to go. So it’s much easier to have this set up beforehand rather than when you get shut down.

And then you try and set it all up because Facebook may ping you for circumventing policies. So having your other ad accounts set up, don’t do it in the same business manager, have it in another business manager. That way in case something happens to business manager number one, you have another business manager up and running now. In that business manager with that ad account, that ad account can be running ads from your backup page. So you’ve got a backup ad account and a backup page that you can just be putting a dollar a day through so that the page is getting some traffic and engagement. The ad account is putting some spin through it and building up trust with Facebook that yes, you pay your bills and you being a good citizen and you’re putting out good content. So if your ad account gets shut down. Ideally, you’ve got another ad account up and running. And with that ad account in the backup business manager, your backup ad account needs to also have a backup pixel. And that pixel gets installed with the pixel from your main working account.

So you’ll have two pixels over on one page getting all that data and all that tracking. Because again, if the ad account gets shut down, you can’t do anything with it, right. You’re dead in the water. So make sure you have that backup ad account as your insurance policy.

And then number four, the business managers, so if a business manager gets shut down,
then all the assets in it are shut down as well. That’s why we set up our backup ad account into another business manager so that it can still be accessed in case one business manager goes down. Now with that, don’t you create that business manager as well. So don’t you own both of those business managers with the assets in them. Because if we go back to your personal profile being shut down, then that’s two business managers that you cannot access or may get shut down along with you. So the second business manager, the backup insurance business manager, make sure that it is owned by somebody else that you trust. So it could be a partner, life partner, business partner, someone that you trust creates that business manager.

And therefore you’ve got your ad account over there, just ticking away. And that’s where if business manager one does get shut down. If you’re an ad manager and you’re running ads for clients, then the backup business manager then gets partnered with your clients, with their business managers. And so you’ve had ad spin going through there, building up trust with Facebook.

Because if you just go and set up a business manager, it’s going to take a couple of weeks for you to be able to request access to other assets. So you will have two weeks where you won’t be able to access your client’s accounts from a business manager, other than being added into their business manager, which if your profile was an issue you wouldn’t be able to do anyway. So you’ll have that backup business manager ticking along. So it’s spending money, Facebook’s liking it. And if business manager one is shut down, you can just go to your clients. Hey, here’s this link, partner with this business manager, they can partner up and you can get running again in no time.

So personal profile, page restrictions, ad account shut downs and business manager shut down. So the four big ones that we need to look out for anyone who is running Facebook ads, making sure you have those insurance policies in place. Someone else that you could trust, who has access to the page, the ad account, to the business manager, as well as creating that separate business manager that someone else creates with the backup ad account in there as well back up pixel. And that pixel is installed over on all your website assets as well.

Now, as always, reach out to Facebook, chances are that it was in error that the bots have got carried away and shut things down. Appeal, appeal, appeal, even though they may say our decision is final. Keep knocking on that door. Be persistent. Use those terminologies that the, you know, the bots triggered a false positive. We’re requesting a manual review. And just keep knocking on Facebook door. It can take a little while, which can be very frustrating. So having those extra insurance policies in place will certainly help you through as you get to the bottom of it and get things resolved.

If you are looking for support running Facebook ads for coaches and digital courses, then head over and join my inner circle at jodymilward.com/innercircle. It’s an amazing community for digital unicorns as we call them who are crushing it with Facebook ads or being crushed with Facebook ads. We are there to provide support. We have eyes on your ad accounts twice a week with our ad clinics, and we are there all the time where you can drop in a question and get amazing support, not just from the coaches in there, but also the amazing community in there. Facebook ads can be tough. Don’t go it alone. We’re here to support you along the way.