A fellow marketer asked me recently for some tips on getting ads approved on Facebook. People generally lump all the different types of campaigns into one answer on this one, so here’s a bit of a breakdown of the different campaigns that can get disapproved and how to approach each one.
I’ll break down offers into 4 types:
1. Campaigns that are not against FB’s terms but violate their ever shifting guidelines on a technicality. Two common examples are:
A. The image is deemed too unrelated to the offer.
B. Overuse of capitalization.
This type is the simplest to deal with. Resubmission usually works eventually. As you want to create the most attention grabbing ad its part of the game to push things in this regard. For example for a Credit Report offer I’ve used images with a hot girl in front of a bike/car (the angle here is to target people that need a credit score check to get a loan to buy a motorbike/car) and I had to submit these several times to get them approved. I also often capitalize the call to action in an ad (eg ‘ENTER NOW’ for a competition offer or the word ‘FREE’) and/or capitalize the first letter of each or most words. Again, sometimes these need to be submitted several times. They’ve gotten more lax on capitalization lately. Resubmit and experiment.
2. International offers. The approval team is in the US and they wont use proxies to look at geo-targetted international offers. Some ads are even approved by their staff in Ireland, so even US offers can be affected. For these just find a similar offer for the US and get the ads approved, then switch the link. Some networks, for example Neverblue, provide a non-geotargetted preview link that you can use. If you use a tracker like Prosper202 its simple to switch the link there. Otherwise you can redirect through a subdomain or better still a redirection script, which allows you to pass through your keywords that identify your ad.
Speaking of their approval team – they are not ‘interns’ as some people call them, the intern subdomain is just short for internal.
3. Offers with special rules. The most common example is dating offers. Images of girls showing too much skin will get disapproved. And you need to tick the ‘Single’ box for Relationship status and set the Interested In field (eg tick ‘Women’). FB have gotten stricter on letting these ads through, to the point of ridiculousness. Resubmit and experiment.
4. Offers that actually against FBs terms. Examples are rebill offers (eg. acai, grants, google cash, rez v etc) and ringtone/premium sms (horoscope, dating tips etc) mobile offers that dont clearly display the cost to the user. FB have gotten very strict on these offers and there is vague chance you could get your account shut down for continually trying to submit them if they manually check your account. They’ve previously sent bots through accounts to find these types of offers and retroactively disaprove your ads. This is a whole subject in itself and has been covered extensively elsewhere – check out the NickyCakes blog or Wicked Fire. You can switch links as above or use cloaking with IP detection (ie redirecting traffic from intern.facebook.com to another site). Not something I really muck around with. Doing AM full time i dont want to risk getting banned. FB are aware of the tricks people are using and have said they’re working on detecting this stuff.
Nick Throlson on June 11th, 2009
1
Great FaceBook ad tips one thing about dating ads showing too much skin just keep resubmitting sometimes they will approve also don’t even try Acai offers never will get approved unless you have guy on the inside.
Jay Martin on August 4th, 2009
2
I have found for the past few months it has been much easier to get international offers approved. I think they finally started using proxies to view and approve the ads.
admin on August 6th, 2009
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hmm, I’ve still international offers disapproved in the last couple of weeks when I’ve forgotten to submit with a US targetted landing page. So if they starting to use proxies its certainly not across the board.
I have found non-english ads to be easier to get approved in general though – for example using an image that I simply cannot get approved for a US or AU campaign, for for non-english speaking countries its usually got through on the first go. Odd, as the ad text is an exact translation and the campaigns are similar. They are translating the ads, but seems like sometimes they get lazy about it.
Barbara on November 13th, 2011
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