Troubleshoot issues with Facebook and Instagram Ad campaigns

• Appeal a disapproved Facebook or Instagram ad
• Appeal a disabled Facebook Ad account
• Time it takes for an Ad campaign to go live
• Overlapping location targeting
• Connect to Business Manager to create the audience
• Payment Method Missing, Unsettled Account, or Spend Limit Reached
• Banned from using Facebook products or need to enable Two-Factor Authentication to launch campaign

Appeal a disapproved Facebook or Instagram ad

Learn how to troubleshoot a rejected ad in the Facebook Business Help Center.

Appeal a disabled Facebook Ad account

Learn how to appeal a disabled ad account in the Facebook Business Help Center.

Time it takes for an Ad campaign to go live

If your campaign is scheduled to start delivering immediately, we can't quote an exact time for your ad to be up and running, but it's usually within a couple hours of hitting "Launch."

Things that may cause a delay:

• Creating new lookalike audiences. Facebook takes time to "populate" a large audience where they find the correct people to put in your target audience. To fully populate a lookalike audience can take up to 48 hours.

• Facebook's ad approval process. Facebook’s ad review time can be anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 days. Once your ad is created, it enters a review queue where a team of highly-trained Facebook employees will review it and then either approve or reject it.

If you'd like your campaign to begin delivering at an exact time, we recommend you create and launch with a start date that is in the future. This will "schedule" your campaign and give Facebook time to populate your audience and approve your ad.

If your ad campaign has had ads pending Facebook review for over 24 hours, please request a review directly from Facebook in order to quicken the resolution process. If your ads have been pending Facebook review for over 48 hours, please notify us on the 'Get Help' chat.

Overlapping location targeting

"Locations Can't Be Used - Some of your locations overlap. Try removing a location."

If you've received this message, some of your locations in your target audiences overlap. You may have two overlapping cities or targeted a city as well as the state the city is in. There are a few steps you can take to help resolve this error:

1. Select Edit Ad Campaign.

2. Go to the Modify Target Audiences step.

3. Click on each of your target audiences and remove any conflicting locations under the basic targeting section. If you have multiple target audiences, you will need to change the locations for each of them.

4. Select Update Campaign.

Connect to Business Manager to create the audience

"Connect to Business Manager to Create This Audience - This ad account is not connected to Business Manager. To create or edit a customer file Custom Audience, your admin needs to connect this ad account to a business account."

This error message relates to a Facebook restriction. In order to create an audience from .CSV file, you need to connect the ad account to Business Manager.

Payment Method Missing, Unsettled Account, or Spend Limit Reached

You must have a valid payment method associated with your Facebook Ad account before you can create ads.

If you have received any of these issues, review your Facebook payment settings here.

Banned from using Facebook products or need to enable Two-Factor Authentication to launch campaign

If you receive an error message that says Facebook has disabled your ability to use Facebook advertising, it's likely that you haven't activated Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).

We've seen an uptick in this message, as Facebook has begun to "ban" users from advertising who don't have two-factor authentication set up on their Facebook account.

The lack of 2FA puts your Facebook account at risk. If you don't have 2FA set up, you can do so here. Once that's done, you should be able to resume the campaign.