Facebook advertisers can study Business Integrity 101 to help avoid unintentional violations of business principles, ensuring smooth and effective ad campaigns that achieve the intended marketing goals and prevent ad account limitations.
Meta’s objective in setting usage policies is to maintain safety and a high-quality community. Therefore, if advertisers violate these policies, their account usage and advertising on various platforms within the Meta may be restricted.
Ad Account is Meta’s ads management account included in Meta Business Suite, enabling advertisers to create advertisements, campaigns, make payments, and access insights and analytics.
What will happen if your ad account is restricted?
- Unable to use or manage Ad Manager
- Unable to create new campaigns or ads
- All currently running ads will be immediately deactivated
- Unable to manage advertising assets or people for businesses
Reasons for Ad Account Restrictions
4 advertising policies affecting business assets that can lead to ad account restrictions
- Violating Content
- Evading Content
- Account Authenticity
- Violating Networks or Associations
1. Violating Content
1.1 Personal Attributes: avoid using the word “you/your” to reference a personal attribute or viewer’s traits and status (examples include race, ethnicity, age, and financial Status).
Example: Personal attributes content
1.2 Personal health and appearance: avoid using “before-after” images of products or services to show unrealistic outcomes. Including implying or attempting to generate negative self-perception in order to promote diet, weight loss, or other health-related products.
Example: Personal health and appearance content
1.3 Low-quality or disruptive content: avoid using cropped or low-quality pictures that can only be seen clearly and in full by clicking through the entire ad. Low-quality ads contain content that is designed to be shared in deceptive or annoying ways that attempt to mislead people to drive engagement. This leads to unexpected or disruptive experiences.
Example: Low-quality or disruptive content
1.4 Nonexistent functionality: such as imagery that replicates play buttons, notifications, or checkboxes, as well as ads containing features that do not work, such as multiple-choice options in the ad creative itself.
Example: Nonexistent functionality content
1.5 Unrealistic outcomes: ads must not contain promises or suggestions of unrealistic outcomes as specified below for health, weight loss, or economic opportunity.
Example: Unrealistic outcomes content
Other examples of content violation
- Deceptive content
- Illegal products and services
- Sexually suggestive content
- Tobacco and related products
- Violates the intellectual property rights of any third party, including copyright, trademark, or other legal rights
- Promotion or sale of counterfeit goods
- Non-functional landing page
2. Evading Content (Advertising policies affecting business assets)
Examples of attempts to circumvent our review processes include:
- Attempting to create new ad accounts or other business assets after we’ve disabled existing accounts for violation of our policies
- Create and run the same or similar policy-violating ads across multiple business assets
- Circumventing systems: Using techniques that may hide an ad’s content or destination page
- Limit Meta’s access to evaluate the destination page used in ads (Cloaking)
- Use Unicode characters or symbols in ad text with the intent to obfuscate words or phrases
- Obscure images in ads
Example: Evading content
3. Account Authenticity (Advertising policies affecting business assets): Advertisers’ accounts must not be harmful to the community, including those that compromise the security of other accounts and our services.
4. Violating Networks or Associations (Advertising policies affecting business assets): Advertisers must not manage business assets that are connected to other abusive business assets or display behavior similar to business assets that we’ve already taken down
Example: Violating networks or associations
How to appeal advertising restrictions
Misconceptions when an ad account is restricted
❌ You should not appeal, just create a new ad account
❌ Appeal takes so long. Just create a new account
❌ Don’t appeal. There’s a negative backlash to your account
But the best practice is to appeal an ad account restricted
Steps to take if your Ad Account is restricted
1. Visit Account Quality, you can access Account Quality via restriction notification (in products and email), or via the URL: facebook.com/accountquality
(Please ensure you’re logged into your advertising account before navigating to AQ)
2. Select the “Account Issue” or “Account Status Overview” tab, and click on the restricted assets.
3. Go to the “What you can do” section, and click on the “Request review”
3.1 Advertiser ID verification, advertisers who have not previously confirmed their identity will need to click on “Confirm Identity” in the “What you can do” section. (If there is no need to verify identity documents, proceed directly to step 4)
4. Select a reason for the review, and then submit the request.
Once appealed, the processing time may vary. The fastest response time is within 48 hours. Advertisers will receive a notification of the appeal outcome and will have the option to appeal again if dissatisfied with the result.
To conclude, the best steps to take when you run into Business Integrity roadblocks
Do
✔ Confirm that your ad account is disabled by accessing your account quality dashboard.
✔ Check if you violated any policies.
✔ Raise and appeal via Account Quality using the Request review box.
Don’t
❌ Create a new ad account and begin advertising on the new ad account.
*The purpose of this document is to make Meta Business Partners and Advertisers aware of our community guidelines, ad policies, and what to do when any of your assets are blocked or restricted by Meta.*