Facebook moves to clarify glitchy ad review processes

For many of the 200+ million organisations that operate across the Facebook family of apps, bugs, glitches and unreasonable ad rejections are an all too common daily experience.

However, according to reports from Digiday before Christmas, growing frustration from marketers is beginning to tip the balance. With brands and marketers no longer fully trusting the platform enough to dominate the lion’s share of digital marketing investments.

Jeromy Sonne, MD of Moonshine Marketing, via DigiDay.

“While it’s still the biggest and everyone will still use it, brands no longer trust it enough to go all in on Facebook.”

Alongside day-to-day management frustrations, several years of successive and excessive price rises are beginning to drain interest.

Digiday claimed that Marketers are increasingly questioning the value of Facebook campaigns since its CPMs are roughly 3x as expensive as other platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat:

• Facebook costs $14-$17
• TikTok and Snapchat costs $3-$5

And, according to Facebook CFO David Wehner, further price spikes are expected through 2021.

David Wehner, Facebook CFO, April 2021

“We are pleased with the strength of our advertising revenue growth in the first quarter of 2021, which was driven by a 30% year-over-year increase in the average price per ad and a 12% increase in the number of ads delivered.

We expect that advertising revenue growth will continue to be primarily driven by price during the rest of 2021.”

Rising costs and poor customer service are unlikely to be a winning combination for Facebook forever.

To help with the latter slightly, if not the former, Facebook has recently moved to clarify its ad review systems to help marketers better understand the root cause of some of their day-to-day pain.

How does the Facebook Ad review system work?

Facebook reviews all ads before they go out through the ad review system. Robots do the heavy lifting here, but humans do step in when required.

Jeff King, VP Business Integrity, Facebook

“While our review is largely automated, we rely on our teams to build and train these systems, and in some cases, to manually review ads.”

Ad reviews are normally done within 24 hours, but there’s no guarantee that the process stops there as ads can be reviewed again, even if they’re live.

Facebook reviews ads, but it also reviews and investigates advertiser behaviour, such as the number of previous rejections. Basically, be a good egg when it comes to Facebook advertising because previous bad behaviour will be held against you.

What policies are applied to ads?

Advertisers do need to follow Community Standards and Advertising Policies, which are put in place to help protect people from bad experiences. Ads should not use swear words, nudity or be misleading, which is obvious. However, less obvious is the aversion Facebook can have with copy; for example, getting its algorithmic mojo out of whack when copywriters refer to “You” too often.

Brands that advertise on Instagram must also follow its community guidelines, while boosted Marketplace listings need to adhere to Commerce Policies.

What should you do if your ad is rejected

If you’re in the unfortunate situation of being on the bad end of an ad review, you’ll be sent an email with more information. This email will help you decide whether you want to edit the ad to meet requirements or to request another review.

You can also request another review by going to account quality.

What is Facebook ad quality and how can you monitor it?

Ad quality is designed to get maximum value for people and business because higher quality ads perform better in the auction.

Ad quality is determined from feedback from viewers and assessment of low-quality attributes, such as click-bait language, poor information or misleading experiences.

Ads with lower quality ranking cost more and can see reduced distribution and poor results.

You can determine ad quality by using quality ranking in ad relevance diagnostics.

What is the Facebook Ads library and how might it be useful?

Facebook also offers an Ad Library that brands and marketers might find helpful as they try to navigate these waters.

Jeff King, VP Business Integrity, Facebook

“We also have a publicly available, searchable Ad Library that enables people to search for all active ads across Facebook. People can see demographic data about who saw an ad and where it ran for up to seven years after the ad has stopped running.”

Everyone can see the Ad Library, search for any term, name or Page and view data from it. You can search ads by Page name or via filters such as country or status. At the same time, users can go deeper into each ad to see details such as impressions, the amount spent and demographic information in certain categories.

The Ad Library can also provide a useful outlet for cross refencing approved ads with your disapproved creatives for those suffering from rejections.