All about moderation on Facebook 2024: why ads are banned and how to avoid it

Facebook is not the easiest platform to advertise, but it is one of the most effective. Therefore, affiliate marketers have to overcome barriers and strict advertising rules, which are constantly becoming more challenging. At the end of 2023, Facebook began to moderate ads even more strictly and the likelihood of rejection (that an ad would be rejected) increased. Let’s try to figure out why ads are rejected and how to avoid it.

How Facebook reviews ads

This social network has its own metric – the so-called fraud score.

The main thing: moderators do not ban an ad for a specific text, specific creative or word in the text. Everything is reviewed in its entirety:

● creative

● text

● domain

● payment

● offer or landing page where the ad leads

First, the AI performs a cursory scoring. If the neural networks fail to determine whether the advertisement complies with the rules, the ad will be checked by Facebook technical support team. In controversial situations, real people are also involved to resolve them. Quite commonly, the AI sees something prohibited in a picture by mistake – for example, nudity.

But objectively, it’s better that bots accept your ad and it doesn’t fall into the hands of Facebook staff. The AI is trained quite well and it’s not that difficult to make a creative that it can recognize as good enough and complying with the rules.

Based on a combination of factors – the quality of the landing page, domain, image and text – the ad scores fraud points. If you get too many points, your ad will be rejected.

What an ad should be like to pass moderation on Facebook

● With clear image. If something is blurred in the creative, the neural network will not be able to recognize the ad and it will instantly be banned;

● With an adequate white page/pre-landing page corresponding to the creative;

● Thoughtful message – it must be clear from the advertising text what exactly is being advertised, otherwise the neural network will not understand what it is about, and the ad will be subject to the manual review;

● Minimum nudity – it’s better to exclude it completely, or at least avoid too large areas of naked body. Even if the ad is not immediately rejected, you can run into a moderator and wait a long time for an approve;
● Without personalization – the text shouldn’t indicate the audience’s age, figure, or health status. “Are you a man aged 35 buying an apartment in a mortgage?” - this kind of stuff will be banned immediately.
● Without “Instagram” figures. Models and other overly beautiful people should not be used. Facebook will consider that you encourage your audience to achieve unattainable heights of figure and beauty. Therefore, stock photos of fit beauties and handsome men are under an unspoken ban.

Some nuances that we noticed by virtue of our experience:

1. Moderation considers the Whitepage in the absolute last turn.

2. If your ad is rejected, don’t be nervous, nor stop the entire campaign, nor delete the creative. Change the creative or text, file an appeal and re-launch the ad until you pass the moderation to the end.

3. Facebook doesn’t always understand when the same creative has been uniqualized and re-uploaded a million times. They’ll have to empirically find out the frequency of uniqualization of the creatives.

4. If the creative contains text, then the CTR is commonly higher, although in general it depends on the niche

What helps reduce ad rejection on Facebook

● Remove the words EARN and PROFIT, or smooth them out by removing some of the letters – depending on the creative language. For example: PR*F*T

● Blur the currency: USD EUR CAD TRY, etc.

● Run ad 1-1-1 with advertising campaign disabled, turn it on only after the moderation. The ad set budget for the period of moderation should be $2-3, after the moderation it should be increased to the required level

● As soon as the ad goes to review, disable it, and then turn it on after passing the moderation

If you run 2 ads with the same picture, but different text, the following may happen: one ad is rejected immediately, then the advertising campaign is banned, and the other advertising campaign may get rejected, after which the ad will still run. This means that there was some kind of trigger in the text that added fraud points to the ad.

The same thing will happen to the creatives that are similar, but lead to different landing pages: Facebook will accept one of them, but will not the other.

Conclusion: if ad campaign was banned, this does not mean that the creative failed.

You can re-upload the creative, for example, having removed the text, to reduce the fraud score. Or run the same creative, but with a different text.

Anyway, don’t give up, but try various options, setups and landing pages, give working creatives a chance. We hope that Facebook moderators’ hands will not reach your advertisement.