Top Questions

Do you think your personal Facebook profile may have been hacked? Learn how to secure your account.

If you don't recognize activity on your advertising account, below are a few things you should review:

  1. Review your purchase history and account history. Reviewing your purchase history will give you a detailed breakdown of charges on your account. You can click into each Transaction ID to see which ad the transaction was for and how the amount you spent was calculated.

    Reviewing your account history will allow you to see recent activity on your ad account.
  2. Check to see if you have a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Each time you create a new ad, you'll select a budget for that ad. You'll be able to choose between a daily budget or a lifetime budget. If you set a daily budget but meant to set a lifetime budget or vice versa, you may be billed differently than expected.
    • Daily budget: This is the amount you've indicated you're willing to spend on a specific ad set per day. Each ad set will have a separate budget, so keep this in mind if you have more than one active ad set in your account. Your ads will automatically stop showing once your daily budget for the ad set has been met for that day. Learn how to edit your daily budget.
    • Lifetime budget: A lifetime budget lets you set an amount to spend over the lifetime of an ad set. Our system will automatically try to evenly spread the amount you spend across the period of time that you've selected. Learn how to edit your lifetime budget.

    Note: If you wanted to spend a specific dollar amount over the lifetime of your ad, double check to make sure you set a lifetime budget, not a daily budget.

  3. See if your billing threshold was reached. In the Billing Summary section of your Ads Manager, you can view your billing threshold. If your ad is scheduled to run across multiple months, or if it runs longer than when your billing threshold was met, you may see the remaining balance carry over to your next bill.
  4. Check out this infographic for more information on how billing threshold works:

  5. Check for other spenders on your account. If you aren't the only person with access to your ad account, or to the payment method you're using, it's possible you might see another person's spend on your bill. If you suspect this is the case, go to your ad Account Settings in Ads Manager. In the Ad Account Roles section, you'll be able to see who has access to your account. Contact anyone you know who may have placed an order for ads with your payment method.

If you've checked these things, still see purchases that you don't recognize and believe someone has hacked your ad account, please let us know.

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If your ad isn't receiving the number of impressions you expect (or none at all), here are a few things you can check, such as your account status, budget, or ad relevance.

Check this first:

Is your campaign, ad set or ad active?
If your campaign, ad set or ad are not active, you can fix it by turning your campaign, ad set, or ad back on
Did you reach your spending limit?
Was your ad approved?

We review each ad you create before we start running it to check that it meets our policies. The most common reason ads aren't approved is because the images in the ads are more than 20% text. If your ad wasn’t approved, you can edit it and resubmit it.

Is your ad scheduled to run in the future?
  • Check that your ad isn’t scheduled to run in the future. We'll only run an ad during the time periods you specified. To fix it, change the schedule for your ad.

If your ad is active, but still getting too few impressions:

Is your budget too low?
  • When the budget is too low for the size of your audience, it can make it hard for your ads to compete with other advertisers who can spend more money to reach the same audience. As a result, your ad may reach fewer people than we predict.
Did you edit your ad multiple times in a short period of time?
It takes our ad delivery system 24 hours to adjust the performance level for your ad. It can take longer when you edit your ad frequently. To fix it, let your ad run for at least 24 hours before you edit it again. Learn more about how long it takes for your changes to happen.
Are the same people seeing your ad over and over?
Ads that are shown around 3 times or more tend to decline in performance, even if they were initially very successful. We recommend creating a new ad with a new image or text about once a week. Make sure to stop your previous ad before running the new one so that they don't compete with each other.
Is your ad is relevant to your audience?
  • Once your ad has more than 500 impressions, you can check your relevance score. Your ad's relevance score is based on several factors, including positive feedback (such as clicks or shares) and negative feedback.
  • A low relevance score means that either your ad has performed poorly with your audience, or that lots of people are clicking I don't want to see this on your ad. Because more relevant ads perform better, we’ll always prioritize an ad with a high relevance score over an ad with a low relevance score when the ads are bidding the same amount.

Other scenarios

One of my ad sets is performing better than another
  • Check that your ad sets are targeting different audiences. Our delivery system means that if 2 ad sets are in competition for the same audience you'll most likely see one set performing better than another.
  • It's normal for one ad to perform better than another. Ads are optimized so that ads with more engagement, such as clicks and shares, will run more frequently to deliver the best performance for your budget. As a result one ad may get more impressions than another in the same ad set. Learn more about why similar ads can perform so differently.
My target audiences are overlapping
  • Consolidate some of your overlapping ad sets. If some ad sets are targeting very similar audiences, you could see better results by consolidating them into one with a larger budget.
  • Refine your targeting. Take advantage of location, age, gender, interest and/or behavior-based targeting to ensure each ad set has a specific and distinct audience. You can also try creating separate Custom Audiences (from a pixel or your customer data) or Lookalike Audiences (of people similar to your best customers) for each ad set.

Additional Resources:

Still having problems troubleshooting your Facebook ads? Find additional support on our resources page.

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Before ads show up on Facebook or Instagram, they’re reviewed to make sure they meet our Advertising Policies. Typically most ads are reviewed within 24 hours, although in some cases it may take longer.

If you get an email or notification from us saying your ad wasn't approved, take a look at our policies to understand how you might revise your ad and try again.

If you're worried your post won't be approved on time, you can always schedule your post early. In the How much do you want to spend? section of ad creation, click Set a start and end date next to Schedule. You can set your ad to start at anytime in the future.

Sometimes we make mistakes. If you think your ad follows our policies and shouldn't have been disapproved, please let us know.
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In order to keep Facebook safe for people, we review advertising content. In some cases we disable accounts that don't follow our Ad Policies. There are a variety of reasons an ad account may get disabled, so we recommend reviewing those policies and our Terms of Use.

If you think your ad account was disabled by mistake, and that it follows our policies, please let us know. If you were notified that your ad account was flagged for unusual activity, you can contact us with this form.

You can also go to your Ads Manager, and follow the instructions in the red box at the top of the page.

If you've already contacted us, we appreciate your patience while we investigate.

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If the payment method you're using to run ads on Facebook fails, you can try one of these options:

Most payment failures happen when your bank or payment provider experiences an issue processing your payment.

If your ad payment fails, we'll:

  1. Try to charge your primary payment method again.
  2. Try charging another payment method you've set up on your ad account.
  3. If all of your payment methods fail, we'll stop all the ads you're running until your balance has been paid.

During this time, you won't receive any additional charges. Once your balance has been paid, we'll resume any active or scheduled ads and attempt to make up any lost time to meet the original campaign dates and budgets you've set.

Additional Resources

If you have any trouble with your payment failing, you can contact our support team.
Manage your Ads
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If you're seeing a problem with how Facebook appears in your web browser, you could have a cache or temporary data issue.

You may be able to fix this issue by clearing your cache and temporary data. You can do this from your web browser's settings or preferences. You'll need to use instructions specific to your browser version and your operating system (ex: Mac, PC):

If this doesn't solve your issue, it may be because you're using third-party browser extensions. We recommend disabling these add-ons before accessing the site again. You can also try using a different web browser.

If you believe that your issue is due to a problem with Facebook, you can let us know.

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My ad keeps getting disapproved. Why?See more: Ads troubleshootingSee more: Pages troubleshooting

Additional Support

Find more help at the Advertiser Help Center