How to Make Sure You Never Get Banned From Advertising on Facebook

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How to Make Sure You Never Get Banned From Advertising on Facebook

Bryan Karas

August 30, 2018

Natural Cycles, a Swedish contraceptive app, had their Facebook ad banned because they were “misleading” the effectiveness of the product.

This provides an important lesson for advertisers who might push the boundaries to attract customers using copy that may or may not follow government and/or Facebook advertising policy…

The ad stated that, “Natural Cycles is a highly accurate, certified, contraceptive app that adapts to every woman’s unique menstrual cycle. Sign up to get to know your body and prevent pregnancies naturally.”

Doesn’t sound too bad…but the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said Natural Cycles could not communicate that their product was a highly accurate method of contraception and to not promote the efficacy of the app in preventing pregnancies.

You can read the whole article on TechCrunch – very interesting…

The Federal Truth Commission

The FTC has a whole section on their website dedicated to “helping” advertisers. At the most basic level that means, “under the law, claims in advertisements must be truthful, cannot be deceptive or unfair, and must be evidence-based. For some specialized products or services, additional rules may apply.”

And when it comes to marketing to children the FTC doesn’t mess around. If your product is targeted towards kids you better read up here…

For native advertising – the FTC holds all parties liable – that means the agency, the advertisers, the content creators…everybody. If the content is “clearly” an advertisement or promotion you don’t need a disclosure – in other cases you do.

But at the end of the day, it’s at the discretion of the advertiser to comply…

Facebook and the Googs

Have you ever had an ad disapproved by Facebook or Google? Of course you have, so let’s figure out how to overcome that…

What do you know, Facebook also has a whole section on their website dedicated to “helping” advertisers. But what’s more important is their review process. If you understand the review process you’ll save tons of time…especially if you plan to test new ads in the future.

Facebook considers your images, text, targeting and positioning, as well as the content on your landing page. Here’s an easy to read article about FB’s ad policy.

Google also happens to have all their ad policies posted online…

So if you plan to market a product in the “realm of controversy” make sure you’ve read up on all advertising compliance on all platforms. I’ve seen whole ad accounts locked because of shady advertising practices in the legal space – it tanked the company’s revenue and they never recovered. Don’t let that happen to you…

Besides piss yourself…what to do if your FB ads account is disabled

Imagine this…chaos ensues after you realize the majority of your traffic has tanked and conversions are way down because your FB ads account has been disabled. What do you do? Here’s a complete resource on how to handle this situation…