Marketers working on the Facebook advertising platform strive to generate quality performance from the ads they run. When you log into Facebook Ads Manager and see that your ads are not approved and not being shown to the audience, it can be very frustrating. So that you can prevent these issues with the right strategy of paid Facebook advertising, in this article we will cover 10 reasons why your Facebook ads are not working and what you need to do to fix it. But first of all, it’s important to understand what an ad that isn’t working actually means.
What does a non-working Facebook ad mean?
When your Facebook ad is not delivering, you will likely see a warning next to the ads stating: “Facebook ads are not delivering”. This warning means that the ads you published are not being shown to your target audience – and as a result, they are not generating impressions. This can happen to brand-new ads or existing ads that were active previously. To check if your ads are delivering or not, go to Ads Manager and look at the “Delivery” column. If you see the ad status “Inactive” in this column, it may appear for many reasons, and in this article we will cover these reasons and how to fix them.
10 reasons why your Facebook ad isn't going live:
1. The post associated with your ad is unavailable
If the post associated with your ad is unavailable, it may display an “Update Required” message. This can happen for several key reasons:
- The post may have been deleted
- You may no longer have permission to view the post
- You may be using a post that cannot be used in an ad
- The ad may contain an expired offer or event
- The product you are promoting cannot be found because the product ID is missing or the product is out of stock (or deleted).
- The post is a shared post (shared posts cannot be promoted by anyone other than the original post owner)
How to fix the issue of the post associated with your ad being unavailable?
The best way to resolve this issue is to choose a different post to promote or fix your access permissions to the post you wanted to promote and couldn’t. It is recommended to perform one of the following actions:
- Choose a different post
- Create a different ad in a different ad set
- Get access to the page from the admin
- Check the product catalog in Facebook Shop to see if the product you want to promote is in stock
After making the necessary changes, set your ad set to active status. If it worked, the “Update Required” status should no longer appear.
2. Your ad is still under review
Facebook’s team reviews every ad before it goes live to make sure it complies with the ad policies in the company’s terms of service. There are 2 types of ad reviews on the platform: automated system review and manual review conducted by Facebook support team members. According to the Facebook Help Center, most ads are reviewed within 24 hours, although in some cases it may take longer. This means it sometimes takes more than 24 hours for an ad to go live.
How to fix the issue of an ad being under review for too long?
To make sure you don’t run into this issue, plan and schedule your ad in advance for a day or two later, giving the Facebook team time to review and manually approve the ad. However, there are several changes to ads that can trigger a new review process by the system:
- A change in creative (text, image, video, or links)
- A change in audience targeting
- A change in optimization
- A change in billing
Since these changes force a new review process for the ad, do not make edits to your ads until they are approved.
3. Your ad was rejected
If your ad doesn’t comply with Facebook’s Advertising Policies – it will be rejected and not shown to the target audience. This is quite common with Facebook ads, and when it happens, you will receive emails detailing the rejection reason (which will also appear next to your ad status in Ads Manager). There are plenty of reasons why Facebook disapproves ads, for example:
- Grammar issues and excessive punctuation
- Ads containing certain types of discrimination
- Illegal products or services
- Adult content, products, or services
- Alcohol or drug-related products
- Weapons and explosives
- Profanity and inappropriate language
- Third-party policy violations
How to fix the issue of ad rejection by Facebook?
There are 2 ways to solve this problem – make the required changes to your ad or submit an appeal. If Facebook says they rejected your ad due to inappropriate language, change the ad copy to something with more appropriate language, save the ad, and submit it for review again hoping Facebook will approve it. However, from time to time both the system and the Facebook team members who review manually make mistakes and disapprove perfectly valid ads. In such a case, you should submit an appeal on the Account Quality page. In addition, if your ad belongs to a Special Ad Category like employment opportunities (recruitment ad) or social issues (politics and social topics), your ad targeting by age, gender, or location might be limited, so make sure you choose the category that accurately describes the ad to avoid losing potential reach.
Note: During the review process, Facebook also reviews the landing page associated with your ad. Make sure the ad’s landing page is functional, contains a product or service matching what is displayed in the ad, and that your headline is not misleading to users.
4. You exceeded the account spending limit
This issue is usually caused when you set a spending limit on the ad account and forget about it. The account spending limit is the budget threshold for all active campaigns in the advertising account. As soon as you reach the number entered in the threshold, Facebook will stop showing your ads.
How to fix the issue of exceeding the account spending limit?
This issue can be fixed by changing, resetting, or removing the account spending limit. To do this, go to Ads Manager, then go to Settings, and click on Billing & Payment methods. On the right side of the screen, you will find the box that states your account spending limit alongside the amount you have already spent out of the existing limit. Once you change, reset, or remove the limit – your ads will resume running.
5. Your budget or bid is too low
When you set up audience targeting in an ad set, you tell Facebook’s algorithm which people to show your ads to. However, when you use a limited budget, Facebook will reduce your ad delivery to such a small audience that the algorithm won’t be able to collect data from it and won’t be able to determine if your ads are effective, therefore stopping ad delivery completely.
How to fix the issue of a budget or bid that is too low?
The best way to fix this issue is to keep your bid and budget high enough to give the algorithm time to optimize your ads. Instead of setting a daily budget, set a lifetime budget that allows Facebook to distribute the budget as needed across the entire duration of the campaign. It is also recommended to start with the lowest cost bid strategy (automated bidding) because it yields the best results while aiming for the lowest cost. This ensures your bid price will never be too low, and you can later adjust using an automated rule for a daily bid cap based on initial performance.
6. You chose too narrow an audience
Narrowing down the audience size that should see your ad can help you achieve good results in campaigns. However, restricting your ads to a very narrow audience may cause Facebook to stop delivering your ads. Facebook requires at least 1,000 users in a given target audience. So if the parameters you selected for targeting do not contain this number of people, or if your customer list does not match the expected number of people, your ads may not be delivered.
How to fix the issue of choosing too narrow an audience?
The best way to fix this issue is to expand your target audience while still keeping it relevant to the ad. Here are a few ways to do so:
- Expand behaviors and interests
- Expand the geographic area
- Add more users to the customer list
- Allow the Facebook Pixel to collect more data from the site before running a remarketing campaign
- Use Lookalike audiences to help Facebook expand an existing audience (website visitors, customer lists, etc.) to find similar potential customers based on demographics and interests.
7. There is targeting overlap with other active campaigns (self-competition)
When you run a campaign on Facebook, your ads compete against other advertisers for the attention of a specific target audience. However, when you have multiple ads targeting the same audience, you might compete against yourself, which can hurt your ad delivery. If several of your ad sets have similar targeting, Facebook will try to prevent your ads from competing with each other. Here, ads with the highest value will win the battle for attention, and ads with very low value and unattractive performance will be paused. While this reduces costs and maximizes budget utilization, this feature can cause your ad set not to perform at all.
How to fix the issue of audience targeting overlap across multiple campaigns?
You can fix this issue by using the Facebook Audience Overlap tool. Go to your Ads Manager and click on the “Audiences” tab. Select the audiences you think are overlapping, and under Actions, click on “Show Audience Overlap”. Here you’ll see a chart displaying the percentage of ads not showing due to audience overlap across campaigns. If the percentage of ads that didn’t reach your audiences is high, you should take the following actions:
- Turn off an ad set targeting the same audience that is showing poor performance
- Combine ad sets that have nearly identical audiences
8. Low ad engagement
Facebook is constantly working to show relevant and engaging ads to its users. So if your ads are not relevant to the target audience, Facebook will not show them as frequently as relevant ads that generate high engagement. Facebook’s ad relevance diagnostics include:
- Quality ranking – How your ad’s quality compares to other ads competing for the same audience.
- Engagement rate ranking – How your ad’s expected engagement rate compares to other ads competing for the same audience.
- Conversion rate ranking – How your ad’s expected conversion rate compares to ads with the same conversion goal competing for the same audience.
How to fix the issue of low ad engagement?
The best way to solve this issue is to create a new ad that looks better and conveys messages to your audience more effectively. You can also try changing the landing page that users reach and targeting an audience with higher interest.
9. Ad scheduling issues
Facebook will only deliver your ads during the schedule you set. So if you have a scheduling issue or some of the issues on this list, your ad may not be displayed:
- The ad, ad set, or campaign itself is paused.
- Your campaign is scheduled for a later date
- The campaign end date has already passed
How to fix ad scheduling issues?
The obvious fix for this issue is updating the ad scheduling and campaign publishing. If the campaign end date has passed – set a new end date. If your campaign is paused – activate it, and if your campaign is scheduled for a later date and you want to run it immediately – edit the campaign and activate it.
10. Your ads aren't converting
When you choose a campaign objective, you are essentially telling Facebook what exact action you want your audience to take. This helps Facebook target your audience better. to get more leads, what you are essentially telling Facebook is that you want to show the ad to people who are more likely to submit their details based on how they engaged with previous ads on the platform. Choosing a campaign goal or objective is not a bad thing, but it can also be negative because if your ads don’t convert, you won’t be able to collect enough data to convince Facebook that people want to see your ad, and when Facebook can’t determine if people are interested in your ad, it might stop delivering it.
How to fix the issue of ads not converting well enough?
You can fix this issue by changing the conversion goal (Optimization Goal). Switch to a less advanced conversion goal such as Add to Cart instead of Purchase. Even after you make a change and lower your conversion goal, Facebook will still track your conversions, but will also understand who wants to see your ads based on clicks or add-to-carts rather than strictly a purchase conversion, which can optimize your ad delivery. Once you start getting conversions consistently after the change, you can switch the conversion goal back to Purchases/Conversions.
In conclusion
Facebook’s advertising system is one of the longest-standing advertising platforms on the web. It improves and upgrades along the way, and Meta makes efforts to make the system smarter over time. However, there are many Facebook advertising issues that we may encounter while building a campaign, ad set, or ad. In this article, we went over the ten most prominent issues why your ads are not approved or working. Whenever you see an unapproved ad in your account, go over the sections in this article and fix the issue.
About the author
Dvir Naaman, 27 years old, graduate of the Digital Marketing course at HackerU College. Experienced in building WordPress websites, paid advertising on Google, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Specializes at Fialkov Digital in organic search optimization (SEO). Has rich experience in eCommerce and dropshipping, and is the owner of Merchant Center – a website aggregating information on eCommerce systems and advanced marketing systems to increase business conversions with an emphasis on eCommerce store sales.
