How To Comply With Facebook’s Super-Strict Advertising Rules (+ The Soccer Mom Strategy For Getting Ads Running Even If They’ve Been Disapproved)

We’ve all been there.

Struggling to get a good idea for promoting our service.

Sitting around with a pen in hand, watching minutes and hours go by as we scratch our heads wondering what to say to get people to buy.

And finally, we’re hit with inspiration.

“I’m a genius!” we think to ourselves.

We open up the ads manager.

Throw our ideas together into an ad campaign.

Our attention-grabbing headline.

Our eye-capturing creative.

Our conversion-guaranteed copy.

We submit our ads for review; then wait.

And after minutes or hours, we receive an email from Facebook.

“Your ad is disapproved.”

Wtf?

“Ad Can’t Run: Update Text

This ad can’t ask a question or make an assumption about a user’s personal attributes.

Here’s what you can do:

Edit the text in your ad. We’ll show you policy info and tips to help you.

Request another review if you think this is a mistake.”

And so we blindly change what we think Facebook might be making reference to, submit it for manual review, and wait.

Hours or days go by, and we receive an email from Facebook.

“Your ad is disapproved.”

At this point, the discouragement sets in and we decide it might just be better to give up on our ideas. We can’t figure it out anyway, and Facebook is so vague in telling us what we did wrong.

So we take the loss and go back to the drawing board to figure out what the next best move is to get new clients into our business.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

If you’ve ever taken a look at Facebook’s advertising policies, you’ve probably found that they’re not really any help at all.

Obviously, you can’t promote illegal products or services; you can’t show violent images; you can’t vouch for sexually suggestive content… but as a small business owner in the health and wellness field, you’re not doing any of that!

So what are you doing wrong?

And how do you fix it?

The 3 Usual Culprits

In my experience, there are three areas where coaches and therapists usually get caught and have their ads disapproved:

Uncomfortable Imagery;

Making Claims;

Personalization.

Uncomfortable Imagery

You might be aware that, when split-testing, you should test images that are both pleasure and pain focused. So if you’re offering counseling service to help out people who are feeling anxious or depressed, you might test one set of images of people smiling and enjoying life, and another set of people who are sad and look like they need help.

Pleasure-focused images usually pass Facebook’s screening, but sometimes the pain-focused images can be a little bit too harsh. Check out the example below:

Can you guess which of these two images would pass?

That’s right, the first one.

Why?

Because the one on the right may lead people who are viewing the ad to associate a little bit too closely to the image (imagine if they’ve struggled with depression and are suddenly reminded of their most difficult moments when casually scrolling through Facebook).

The key here is to walk the fine line between discomfort and actually triggering pain. If you’re unsure of where that line is, feel free to shoot us an email with your ad creative ideas and we’ll gladly help you out!

Making Claims

It’s easy to want to stuff your ad full of the results you know you can deliver, adding in things like:

“I’ll help you lose 7lbs in your first month!” and

“Guaranteed to get you from a career you hate to the one you’ll love!”

But this violates Facebook’s policy on making claims.

Facebook has a duty to protect its users, so they dislike the idea of an advertiser making claims that they can 100% get a result if they purchase a product or a service.

And let’s be honest with each other… even if we have 100% confidence in our ability to deliver, a lot of what we do depends on how much effort the client we’re working with is willing to put in.

You may be able to help someone lose 100lbs in a year, but if they keep eating like crap and don’t exercise even after buying your program, odds are they’re not going to want to take responsibility for their failures and they’ll instead push the blame on you.

Facebook understands that human psychology works like that, and so in a way, they’re also trying to protect you with this type of regulation.

Eliminate any claims that are aimed directly at the person reading the ad, and instead implement this next trick.

Personalization

The final point, and probably the most common reason for Facebook to reject your ads, is personalization.

Just like with making claims, Facebook wants to protect its users from their advertisers saying that the reader can get X, Y, and Z benefits from their product or service.

At first, this one may be difficult to counteract, but we recently figured out a really great strategy that allows us to keep our winning copy virtually the same and still make the same claims without it being too personal for Facebook’s rules.

How do we do it?

Easy.

Instead of making “you” claims, talk about past successes that you or your clients have experienced.

Let me help you understand… 

Instead of:

“My health coaching service will help you lose over 100lbs in 12 months,”

Say:

“My health coaching service has helped clients lose over 100lbs in 12 months.”

Don’t make claims. Show past examples.

So What Do I Do If My Ads Still Get Disapproved?

If you still can’t get your ads approved after implementing these three tricks, there are two things you can do.

The first, and what almost everyone does, is to submit the ads for manual review.

When you do that from the ad editing section of the ads manager, you can send off your ad with a comment and wait for Facebook’s manual review team to get back to you. The upsides of this strategy are that it’s quick and it’s easy to do, but the downsides are that it can take a lot of time and you don’t get any type of communication with the team after they’ve made their final decision.

The second is what I call the Soccer Mom Strategy.

The Soccer Mom Strategy 

If your mom is particularly outspoken, you’ve probably been in a few situations in your life where you were forced to stand around, embarrassed, as she got into an hour-long argument with a store manager demanding that she receive a reduced rate for whatever she’s trying to buy.

She’s been a loyal customer for many years!

How dare this company treat her like this after she’s been so loyal to them?!

If this company is not interested in treating her with respect, she’ll contact every person she knows (and she knows many!) and boycott the store, taking all business elsewhere!

You know the type…

The “I want to speak to the manager” type.

The Soccer Mom who’s totally okay with losing hours of her time if it means saving $10/month type.

If you’ve been around people like this, you probably hate the idea too. But it could be the difference between your ads making it through review and leaving them in the ad graveyard forever.

Facebook’s Live Support Chat

Very few people know this, but you can actually get in touch with Facebook live support. It’s very well hidden and very secretive, but I’ll guide you through it.

Head over to https://www.facebook.com/business/help/support.

Select “Ads.”

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Chat with a representative.”

Fill in your information, hit “Start chat,” and away you go.

Explain your situation to the representative, and give them the details they need to get your stuff moving forward.

Be kind, ask them how they’re doing, thank them for helping you, and when they tell you why your ad was disapproved (they’ll just repeat the same thing as your ads manager said), ask them if they can tell you exactly what the reason is.

Depending on who you’re talking to, you could get anywhere from “yeah no sorry” to “well actually I think it might be X.”

Regardless of what they say, make sure that they submit it for manual review.

They’ll then inform you that it should take time for the team to get you an answer and that they’ll be happy to follow up via email.

At this point, tell them that you’re okay waiting until they hear back from the team with the exact reason why your ad is disapproved.

There are hundreds of possible scenarios from this point, and I’ll save you the deep dive into my dozens of hours spent doing this, but the main point to remember is to be firm and stay on target.

No matter what they say, you’re not taking no for an answer and you’re not disconnecting until they get a response.

Even if it means that you have to speak to their boss.

In my experience, if your ads don’t heavily violate the advertising policies, they’ll get approved within an hour.

So go forth, Soccer Mom. Make a big deal about something that doesn’t actually matter too much and get what you want.

Don’t take no for an answer anymore

If you like this tip, but don’t have the desire to engage in confrontation or spend hours in a chat with a 21-year-old who earns $8/h to throw his script in your face, schedule a call with us through this link.

We’ll take care of all of the little details you never knew would have to go into your advertising campaign so that you can focus on what matters most: running your business.