Facebook Ads Hidden Penalties: How you’re paying more for your ads even if you don’t know it (and how to pay less again)
By: Sergiu Zaharie
Tags: Ecommerce, Marketing, Facebook Ads, Lead Generation

Facebook Ads Hidden Penalties: How you’re paying more for your ads even if you don’t know it (and how to pay less again) Sergiu Zaharie Follow Sep 1 · 6 min read

Running Facebook Ads can often be a nightmare. You can have very good results for weeks, months or years but then this changes in a few days. It changes so fast you can’t understand what happened. In fact, it changes so fast you didn’t even know this would ever be possible. If you found yourself in a similar situation before, or if you just want to know what to do if this happens to you in the future, read this article to the end. Also, if you have valuable information about how this happened for you, make sure to leave a comment so other people here can benefit from it.

What are Facebook Ads hidden penalties?

I should start by telling you that you won’t be able to find this information on Facebook’s website. Actually, you will rarely find anyone talking about this. You might be wondering, “So how do you know this is true?” and that’s a good question. I had the problems I’ll speak about on multiple ad accounts I manage and I saw a few patterns. I had a feeling something like a “hidden penalty” might exist, but I also thought that might just be my mind, making up excuses for the fact that some of my ads were not working. So what I did was asked a few people that work at Facebook, in some consultancy calls I had with them. I asked 5 different people at Facebook about it. Three of them ignored my question and moved over it. However, two of them suggested this system exists although they don’t publicly speak about it. However, the real confirmation only came when I figured out how to get out of the “hidden penalty” phase and my ads were performing great again, but I’ll speak about this later.

How do you know you’re being penalised?

It’s hard to know when you’re being penalised, but as a general rule, I noticed one thing that always happened on the accounts that had a penalty: CPM is going crazy. Let’s say, for example, that your CPM was around $20 when your ads were performing well. With a penalty, in just a few days, your CPM could go to $30+.

Another indicator, although not as strong as the CPM in my experience, is poor traffic quality. You can easily notice this if you make no changes to your funnel but your conversion rate drops significantly in just a few days.

With that being said, let’s see what will get you a hidden penalty and how you can get out of it.

Trending GoBeyond.ai articles:

Reasons why you could get a hidden penalty from Facebook

You’re getting too many rejected ads in a short period of time

If you’re running ads in a very restricted niche, such as debt management or face masks sales, you will most probably get rejected ads frequently. And when this happens… well… Facebook will screw you.

In order to avoid this, what I find to be working well for me is publishing just 1–2 ads at a time, in a single ad set. When these get approved, I’ll duplicate them in the other ad sets as well and when the duplicates get approved I’ll move forward and launch some new ads. If they don’t get approved, I’ll try to get them approved in a manual review. If they get approved in a manual review, it’s like nothing happened. If they don’t, you’ll need to sort out what you’re doing wrong and fix that before publishing new ads. You need your ads to get approved, so you should consider using a new creative or a short simple text, just to get the ads approved and make sure your account stays healthy.

If you’ve already been penalised, what you need to do first is to make sure you get rid of all the rejected ads in your account — just delete them as fast as possible. Never ever keep rejected ads in your ad account. The second thing you need to do is to keep running ads, even if you do that at a lower daily budget until things get back to normal. In this period, make sure you don’t publish anything else that might have chances of being rejected, every new rejected ad will just increase the period of the penalty.

I also heard some people are publishing 100% compliant ads and turning them off, just to increase the approved / rejected ads ratio. Not sure if this works, I have never tried it, but it sounds reasonable. If you want to try it, give it a go and make sure you leave a comment with your findings.

If you’re doing everything right, you’ll start to see improvements within a few days to a week later and it will take up to 4 weeks to get your results to what they used to be.

2. You have rejected items in your catalog

This is not as intuitive as the first one, but it can have the same impact on your ad account. Rejected items in your catalog will make Facebook suspicious about the ads you’re running. As a result, Facebook will charge you more to discourage you running ads.

Never ever keep rejected ads in your catalog! You can either get them approved by changing the description or the image, or you should just delete them. Of course, you will have to say goodbye to Dynamic Remarketing for those products, but that’s way better then being penalised by Facebook. Their penalising system is so brutal you have no chances of staying profitable in the long run.

3. You have frequent payment problems

In my experience, this leads to penalties as well. However, the penalties here are not as brutal as in the cases mentioned above. But it’s still a penalty and you’re still paying more.

So next time you receive a Payment Failed email from Facebook, you should be just a bit worried and you should make sure this never happens again.

Conclusion

I’m sure there are many other cases in which you can be penalised by Facebook, but these are the ones I went through and got out of in the last few years.

Were you ever penalised by Facebook? Did you find the reason why? How did you get out of it? Let us know and maybe I’ll write a part two based on your stories.

Thank you for reading. Don’t forget to Subscribe for more useful Facebook Ads & General Marketing tips.

Sergiu Zaharie — Brand Developer

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !