How Long Will My Facebook Ad Be Pending Review?

When you create a new Facebook ad, or you edit an old one, you’re taking a risk. That risk is the almighty Facebook gatekeeper. Every single ad that runs on the system needs to be reviewed by someone internally at Facebook. Ads must meet the advertising guidelines for approval before they can run.

The problem is, Facebook’s advertising guidelines are long and complex. Here are some excerpts:

• Ads must not contain false, misleading, fraudulent, or deceptive claims or content.
• You may not use Facebook advertising data for any purpose except on an aggregate and anonymous basis.
• Ads must clearly represent the company, product, service, or brand that is being advertised.
• Ads and sponsored stories in the News Feed may not include images comprised of more than 20% text.

Here’s the thing: you and I have both seen ads that seemingly violate one or more of the advertising guidelines, and yet they got through. Facebook’s advertising gatekeepers are either drastically inconsistent or bad at monitoring, due to the sheer number of ads created every day. Doubtless, large parts of it are automated, but it can’t all be automated or else we’d see more issues with just the automation.

In any case, when you create an ad, that ad is “Approved pending review.” In other words, it needs approval from Facebook’s team before it will show up on the site.

Time to Approve

Facebook claims on their knowledge base article about approval that, on average, ad approval takes around 15 minutes. Some people will have never experienced a delay longer than five. Others have likely seen ads floating in limbo for days at a time. Elsewhere, in the community, Facebook reps have said approval can take up to 24 hours.

Ads are sent to review the moment they are created. The common advice for marketers looking to run limited-time or time-sensitive promotions is to create your ads early. Unfortunately, this can hamper the process of split testing, which you will have to anticipate. Unfortunately, there’s no email you can message or account you can flag in order to get your pending review ad pushed through faster.

There are various rumors about factors that can increase your chances of getting an ad through review. Some marketers claim that increasing ad spend will streamline the process. The theory, of course, being that Facebook is prioritizing advertisers with a lot of money. This sounds like a good theory, except the scale of the problem affects everyone.

When a small business ups their spending from $25 per day to $250 per day, that’s a sizable increase. However, when you realize that companies with literal millions of dollars to spend are also advertising, why would Facebook prioritize a $250 daily ad when they could instead prioritize a $10,000 per day ad?

The reality is that changes like that only refresh the pending queue. Each time you edit an ad, that ad needs to go through the approval process again

Issues With Approval

When your ad is pending approval, if it’s taking a long time, you might be at risk for a denial. Thankfully, Facebook will email you if your ad is denied, including a link to the advertising guidelines and a note about which guideline you have broken.

Possibly one of the most common issues to come across is the 20% text rule It’s a flaky rule and depends more on positioning than it does on actual text coverage.

You can check out examples of good and bad ads for each major category of guidelines on Facebook’s site. It’s actually a very handy resource, and will show you examples of some of the things Facebook is trying to stay away from.

The most common violations tend to be:

• Poor command over the language. Bad spelling, bad grammar, bad punctuation, it’s all under this banner. It’s also the single most left-to-reviewer-discretion guideline in the entire ads program. You’ve surely seen ads with all caps or misspellings, but for every one you see, hundreds are being rejected.
• Cloaked URLs for landing pages – including links to files that aren’t web pages, like PDFs – will earn you a rejection. They can, in extreme instances, also lead to an account termination.
• Inaccurate ad text. Ad reviewers need to learn a bit about your business and product when your ad is under review. They’ll probably even check out your landing page. If your ad turns out to be too different from what you’re actually selling, issues arise.
• Irrelevant images. Sex sells, but on Facebook, it doesn’t sell unless you’re selling whatever the model in question is wearing or doing. You can’t have an ad for a piece of database software and sell it with pictures of Kate Upton.

So how can you make sure your ads are approved?

Bypassing the Review Process

Well, you can’t bypass the review process entirely. You can, however, do what you can to comply with the standards Facebook sets and ensure your ad gets through quickly.

Having an account in good standing is a benefit. If your account has been flagged for ad violations in the past, you’ll struggle with the review process as you’re under more scrutiny.

Edited ads are more likely to be approved than new ads, as long as the edits are minor. Changing targeting, a tweak to copy, etc. Facebook can compare to the old version and see both that the old version was approved and the new version is not much different.

Obviously, you need to comply with prominent ad guidelines, such as the rules for targeting minors with alcohol, tobacco, drug or firearms content. The same goes for geographic restrictions on these products.

Here’s one you might not realize; “you” is a bad word. If your ad mentions the user directly and personally, specifically if it uses individual data, it will be rejected.

Be careful with your copy, choose relevant images, don’t cloak destination links and you should be good to go.

How to Grow Your Page Likes as Fast as Possible?

If you’re just launching a new Facebook page, for an event or a business, you’re going to have a lot of catching up to do. Other businesses are probably established in your niche. If they aren’t, and you’ve found a new niche to occupy, you need to act fast to assert your dominance. Either way, the result is the same; you need as many fans as possible as quickly as possible.

Before we begin, there’s one thing you should pay attention to above all else; fan quality. Many older Facebook pages have an issue with low quality fans. Bad fans decrease organic reach, dilute your message and make it harder to succeed in general.

If you start early, you can keep an eye on your fans and prune out any bad fans that follow you. This keeps your reach as high as possible just on the basis of your audience quality, plus it helps avoid skewing your Insights.

Invite Email Contacts

You probably have a mailing list. Import it using Facebook’s “build audience” button on your page dashboard. This will allow you to hook in any mail service, or import a CSV file full of email addresses. Anyone whose address matches a Facebook account will receive an invite to like your page.

While you’re at it, invite your friends. Most of your friends probably won’t bother to like the page, either through disinterest or ignorance of the invite, but those who do are a nice early boost.

Partner and Cross Promote

This is difficult for new businesses, but if you can find a few larger companies to partner with, you can use their influence to reach a broad audience right off the bat. A pre-existing relationship with a prominent business boosts your reputation and gets more users to follow your page on principle alone.

Learn Your Audience

As your audience grows, you will gain more and more insight into their demographics and personalities. You will also gain more and more information in Facebook’s Insights panel, which will quickly become indispensible.

Much of the information you learn through Insights will be useful for other means of fast growth.

Tailor Your Language

In particular, Insight data will allow you to identify the types of people following your page. This will in turn allow you to customize the language you use to communicate. On Facebook, you have to avoid advertising language outside of ads. However, that still leaves you with plenty of tonal range.You could post like a valley girl, a stodgy businessman or a schizophrenic.

With those options come hazards. If the majority of your followers are age 50+ middle-class white men, posting like a valley girl is just going to get you removed from their feeds. If your audience is primarily teenage girls, posting like a robotic businessman from the future isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Post Great Images

Your cover photo and your profile picture are highly visible indicators of how seriously you take the platform. Always use both spaces for branded content, particularly content that plays well together. You don’t want two embedded pictures to clash, do you?

While you’re at it, make sure you’re using Facebook’s graph elements to customize the preview image for each post you make. Additionally, upload images for use in your tab apps, if and when you use a tab app.

Post Your Link Everywhere

Do you have a newsletter? Mention your Facebook page in that newsletter and add a link in the footer of your template. Do you have an email account? Add your link to your signature. Do you run a website? Add a Facebook Like box to the sidebar of every page. Anywhere you can possibly mention your Facebook page, drop a link.

Consider Purchased Likes

It’s possible to buy likes from a third party advertiser, but you have to be aware of what you’re getting. Make sure the business you use is reputable and trustworthy, and monitor the quality of the fans that come in. Avoid shady businesses that sell fake likes; only buy the real stuff.

Run Paid Ads

This is an extension of both of the previous tips. Posting your link everywhere can also mean posting it through various advertising platforms, including Facebook PPC and Google AdWords. It’s also another way of buying likes; using the Page Like objective on Facebook ads, for example, directly converts your ad budget into page likes.

Use Facebook Comments

If your website has a blog and you have comments natively through WordPress, through a stand-alone CMS or through a third party service like Disqus, change them up. Rather than rely on one of those services, integrate Facebook comments. That way, whenever someone posts a comment on your blog, they’ll be sharing your post on Facebook as well.

Use Facebook Video

Facebook’s native video service is rivaling YouTube for largest video host on the web. It’s also fairly robust, and Facebook has been making a lot of money through video advertising, so they’re going to be pushing the system in the coming years. Get in early and you can capitalize on the trend.

Respond to Users

When you post a link, don’t just walk away. Facebook is social media, which means that shared link will attract comments. When a user comments, respond! It might just be a simple thanks, it might be a response to a question, it might be a pun to play off a pun. Whatever the case, engage with your fans and they’ll stick around.

Post Frequently

Every business and every audience is different. That said, as a general rule you should always post at minimum once every day, even weekends. This gives you a constant presence in the minds of your followers. As you grow, you can increase your post frequency to several times each day.

Run Contests

A simple contest can attract a lot of users, but you need to do it right. None of that “free iPad to our 10,000^th follower!” bullshit. Give away something meaningful, something important to your business. Give a discount, a product, an office tour, a free lunch. Give away something that encourages the winner to investigate your business a little more.

Is Advertising in Your Facebook Timeline Allowed?

Switching to the new Facebook Timeline will provide you and your business with a number of advantages that the old Timeline simply didn’t have. Along with a new look, the new Facebook Timeline is creating a bit of a stir among businesses that started with the ability to create something called a “Cover image.” The controversy comes in when trying to figure out what you can post on your Facebook page while still staying within the terms of service agreement.

What is a Cover?

A Facebook page’s Cover is a large banner-like image that appears at the very top of your Timeline. While this is a feature currently only available for people who switch over to the new Timeline, it will be a standard feature by December 21st.

As far as dimension go for your Cover image, Facebook has stated that the minimum width is 720 pixels wide. The consensus amongst page owners already utilizing Cover images is that an 850 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall image will produce the best results.

What Are You Supposed to Use It For?

According to Facebook, the purpose of the Cover image is to allow other people to get to know you better. In really simple words, it’s another way for your users to become more familiar with what your page has to offer. The main things you’ll probably want to use it for is to give new followers a brief overview of who you are and to give the users who already follow you a better sense of familiarity.

What’s the Controversy Around Cover Images and Timlines?

While the requirements for Cover images should be pretty straightforward, there’s a lot of confusion as to what Facebook actually allows. A number of pages have already received slaps on their hands from Facebook and had to alter their images to comply with Facebook’s terms of service agreement.

Here’s a rough guideline on what you can’t put in your Cover image:

• You can’t put any information related to a price on it. This means you can’t put the value of an item on your image, nor can you even mention that it’s on discount. Stay away from any numbers.
• Keep your contact information in the “About” section of your page. This means you should keep your company’s website, address and everything else where it should be. Don’t even put your company’s phone number in your image. Leave it all in your page’s “About” tab.
• Don’t reference Facebook interface elements. In other words, don’t put a big message that says “Like” on your Cover image.
• You can’t use any calls to action. Phrases like “Get it now” and “Share this” are things that belong elsewhere on your page. Keep them away from your Cover image.

The Big Question: Is Advertising Allowed?

This is the question that everyone wants to know the answer to. The short answer is that all advertising on Facebook should be done through Facebook’s ads. The long answer, on the other hand, is that it’s probably okay to have business-related advertisements on your page’s Timeline, but not direct product advertisements

The reasoning behind this is that the purpose of a Facebook page is to create a business presence with your demographics. It’s also supposed to be a way for you to keep in contact with them. There is absolutely nothing wrong about directing your Facebook fans to your website to interact with you.

Think of your Timeline just like your Cover image. It’s okay to have your website’s address listed in places that it’s supposed to be. It’s also okay to have your company’s identity on that page. If you can keep your Timeline in a clean and pristine state that doesn’t have messages of “Buy Our Product Now” written all over it, then you can advertise.

The bottom line is to keep your Timeline’s content in line with what your users would appreciate seeing. Don’t overdo it with calls to action, but don’t be afraid to interact with your fans. If you want to advertise a product, use either Facebook’s ads or redirect them to your website.