Agencies and small businesses say their Facebook accounts are getting suspended for no reason
This is having a major impact on SMBs, as they aren't getting the answers they need.
Brittanie “Bebo” Boe is no stranger to the Facebook ad management system. She started using Facebook ads about 7 years ago, and she said she’s had “incredible success” using Facebook ads to help drive people to a Kickstarter for Guildhall Studios, a developer of a board game called Sea of Legends. Bebo said that she raised over $500,000 for the game in May, leaning on Facebook ads.
But last weekend, on the biggest shopping weekend of the year, Bebo noticed something weird when she put up a campaign driving to a Kickstarter for Calliope Games.
“I spent over $800 in ads over the weekend and I got a grand total of 3 results,” she said. “Meanwhile I ran another campaign and made THOUSANDS on my other more established campaign. To only raise $14,000 on a campaign we genuinely believed would break $350,000 was honestly depressing and astounding.”
Bebo said she used two different ads accounts, and neither showed her any information over the last four days.
“[The ads] appeared to be not firing off at all,” she said. “Then [Monday] morning, it showed $100 a day spent for all five days, despite showing me zero data over the holiday weekend and $0 spent.”
This is not the first time someone has complained about the possibility that their ad campaigns have been unfairly, if not inexplicably, dinged from Facebook. Nor is it the first time that Facebook reporting its metrics has been unreliable.
Two weeks ago, Ad Exhanger reported:
For nearly a year, advertisers using Facebook’s conversion lift studies tool were unknowingly being fed faulty data.
A code error caused the reached conversions metric to be undercounted for conversion lift tests conducted on Facebook by several thousand advertisers between Aug. 15, 2019, and Aug. 31 of this year.
Advertisers use conversion lift studies, a free tool provided by Facebook, to measure the incrementality of their Facebook ads and make decisions about their Facebook spending. For affected advertisers, this information was erroneous.
Facebook fixed the bug on Sept. 1, and is “working with impacted advertisers,” a Facebook spokesperson told AdExchanger.
But Facebook didn’t alert buyers to the issue until last week.
Last week, Business Insider reported that
[H]undreds of advertisers claim they've gotten caught up in Facebook's AI dragnet despite not violating any policies, according to messages and screenshots viewed by Business Insider.
Because Facebook doesn't tell advertisers which specific policy they violated when it disables their accounts, it's difficult to know what proportion of those bans were actually the result of an error by Facebook — or how many additional errors have gone unreported. But in interviews with Business Insider, seven business owners and ad agencies said they've seen an uptick in bans that Facebook ultimately admitted were made in error.
Facebook says that its ad review system has long relied primarily on automated review to check ads against its advertising policies, and it uses human reviewers to improve and train its systems, and in some cases, review specific ads. The company has added several thousand reviewers over the past few years, in addition to 35,000 people working on safety and security across the company.
But this apparently hasn’t helped the many agencies and companies who say their accounts are suspended, thus hurting their businesses.
Since mid-October, many of the 146,000 members of the Facebook group “Facebook Ad Hacks” have been experiencing issues of ad accounts inexplicably getting disabled, and they’re saying that these issues are hurting their businesses and their clients’ businesses. But what they really want is just better communication.
One agency executive, speaking to me on condition of anonymity as they didn’t want their agency to be flagged by Facebook, told me they keep getting the runaround from Facebook reps.
Between researching online, speaking with the Facebook rep through the phone (a Facebook rep can only call, and according to the agency exec, has not responded to the past couple of emails) and live chat (which can easily waste an hour with each interaction as they request “several minutes to look for answers… and look forward to resolving our issue during the chat… but cannot provide any policy team answers or estimated timeframes…”) the exec has spent many hours trying to find answers.
“The only way we are able to run ads is by having multiple admins in our agency Business Manager,” the agency exec told me. “But it is a major inconvenience when all of this should never have occurred in the first place. We only work with respected brands, and are super careful with creative. The rep today told me our ad rejection rate is 1 percent, considerably less than others that he had personally seen.”
One potential possibility: hackers targeting ad accounts and using victims’ money to promote scam posts, per CNET.
Back in April, Kassie Mullins, of North of Eight Design, said that in the beginning of the pandemic, her agency was running ads for a couple of small businesses in her area and then were shut down because two ads were flagged. She told Channel4 News:
“The first was for a kitchen store. They were running an ad for olive oil and it got flagged for guns. I think I reached out personally six times on Facebook chat and then they shut me down. Finally, in November, we heard we will no longer be able to advertise. And as a digital marketing agency, that’s a huge hit to us. We’re in a very rural community, so other platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, Google, don’t perform nearly as well as Facebook ads. So for our clients and our audience, Facebook is where it’s at.”
Facebook has built its advertising revenue strategy off the backs of its more than 10 million small business advertisers. It’s what’s allowed the company to navigate “boycotts” and finger-wagging from large spenders. The company made $70 billion in 2019.
“As Facebook’s ad revenue continues to climb, I’ve wondered if they simply do not want to work with SMBs and their agencies,” the agency exec said. “The rep this morning said that is not true, but it sure feels like it to me.”
When reached for comment about companies getting put into the penalty box, a Facebook spokesperson said:
“We know it can be frustrating to experience any type of business disruption, especially at such a critical time of the year. While we offer free support for all businesses, we regularly work to improve our tools and systems, and to make the support we offer easier to use and access. We apologize for any inconvenience recent disruptions may have caused.”
Some have told me that unless you have $10,000 in your Facebook account, you don’t get granted support. Facebook told me that, like many companies, “we have sales teams that support some businesses, but our online tools help us scale and support the more than 10M advertisers and 200M businesses that use our apps and services.”
Coupling advertising reporting errors with randomly suspending advertiser accounts, it’s inevitable that the very people you’re trying to serve will get upset. At this point, Facebook is an all-powerful beast, dictating how other businesses operate. It’s created an ecosystem with it in the center, as companies fight to survive on the platform.
“The reality is most of us with disabled ad accounts do appreciate the end result for clients with Facebook and would like to continue including them in plans and buys,” said the agency exec, who told me they’ve spent six-figures on Facebook this year. “We are fortunate to work with all media, but some independents or super small social shops are paralyzed if they do not have additional admins, etc. We just want answers and our ad accounts restored.”
Bebo, too, is just looking for some guidance from Facebook.
“I can't even sort out how to contact them,” she said. “They have a $10k minimum before you can even talk to a person. This is a new job with a new client and we were certain this whole project was a slam dunk.”
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Blues Traveler, “Runaround”
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