If you don't recognise activity on your advertising account, here are a few steps that you can take to learn more about charges that occurred and what may have caused them:

• View your payment history
• See if you reached your billing threshold or monthly bill date
• Check your daily budget or lifetime budget
• Check for other spenders on your account

View your payment history

The Billing section of Ads Manager is where you can find your ad account's billing information. There, you can view your payment history and get receipts for payments that you've made for your ads.

To learn more about a specific charge, go to the list of transactions in the Billing section of your Ads Manager and click the Transaction ID of the charge that you want to know more about. This will bring you to your receipt for that charge. Your ads receipt will show you things like how much you paid, when you paid, which payment method was charged and which ads you spent money on.

See if you reached your billing threshold or monthly bill date

Once you have your ads receipt, you can review the billing reason that's listed on it to find out why you were charged. This will let you know if a charge happened because you reached your billing threshold or your monthly bill date:

Bear in mind that it's normal to be charged for ads multiple times a month or even after you've stopped running them. This is because when you create ads on Facebook (e.g. boosting posts from your Page), you don't pay for them straight away. Instead, as they run and people see them, they accrue ad costs that you'll be charged for later.

There are two ways you'll be charged for these costs:

• Whenever your ad costs reach your billing threshold
• On your monthly bill date

A billing threshold is an amount that you can spend on ads before we charge you for them. Whenever your ad costs reach your billing threshold, we'll charge you that amount. Your monthly bill date is when we charge you each month for ad costs that don't quite reach your billing threshold.

Because of this, you may be charged multiple times or just once in a given month, depending on how much money you're spending on ads:

Learn more about your billing threshold and monthly bill date.

Check your daily budget or lifetime budget

A budget is a cost control tool. It helps control your overall spend for an ad set (or campaign). There are two types of budgets:

• Daily budget: This is the average amount that you're willing to spend on a specific ad set or campaign every day. Each ad set will have a separate budget, so bear this in mind if you have more than one active ad set in your account.
• Lifetime budget: This is the amount that you're willing to spend over the entire run-time of your ad set or campaign. Our system will automatically try to evenly spread the amount that you spend across the period of time that you've selected.

If you set a daily budget but meant to set a lifetime budget (or vice versa), you may be billed differently than expected.

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

Check for other spenders on your account

If you share either your payment method or ad account with others, make sure that you check with them if you don't recognise charges on your account. Often, in this scenario, another person will have run separate ads using your payment method or ad account.

If you think this is the case, go to your 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.

You can also review your account history to see recent activity on your ad account:

Need more help?

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