How To Avoid the Facebook BanHammer Woes

Let’s talk about Facebook terms of service, the almighty banhammer & what you can do to avoid getting Facebook account banned.

This entire brisk-read is going to be aimed more at those of us whom are already running ads on Facebook. I would highly recommend everyone read this because I can assure you that you’ll find some information in here which might one day save your account from that dreaded banhammer, but of course it’s totally up to you!

As of the writing of this article Facebook has (yet again) made some sweeping changes in their handling of Ad-Accounts and it’s seemed to have hit a number of us marketers in a very negative way. With accounts getting knocked off left and right it’s easy to just throw up one’s hands and shout to the sky “just forget it!” but let’s not forget what gets us where we truly want to be,

…perseverance!

Now, if you’ve already had your Facebook account banned and you’re reading this in hopes of some magic nugget of wisdom which will get it back for you, I’m sorry to say that you have an  uphill battle ahead of you, but there may be light at the end of your tunnel, keep reading to find out more.

WHAT TO DO IF YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT GETS BANNED

There honestly is no simple response to this.

It all comes down to what it was banned for, if you have one of those shiny brand new accounts and it’s gotten shut down right out the gate, chances are you’re not getting that back and I’m very sorry for that.

If you have some history in your account and it’s mostly positive you might stand a chance. What will most likely happen is you’ll get an email from the support team over at Facebook informing you that your account has been terminated and they’ll usually give you some arbitrary reason why which may not even make sense at first. One thing to keep in mind about all that is simply… a lot of the time the people behind the scenes doing all this don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re just following some outline given to them in a training room somewhere and if your account ticks off those red-flags then you’re going to get hit, nothing you can do about it.

However, if you feel your account was incorrectly closed, and I mean truly a mistake, we aren’t talking about a scenario where you know you were walking the line and finally got caught… then you may have to keep bugging those support folks until they actually respond with something other than a canned-reply.

The best thing you can do is this case is look around the internet at forums and see what others are reporting may have worked for them.

KEEPING UP TO DATE ON UPDATES

What I’m about to share with you isn’t something that’s exactly ‘new’ but it seems to be more closely monitored now than it ever was before.

In your Facebook ads account you’re going to have some customization options and there are a few specific options I’ll point out which you may want to start using.

Positive Feedback & Negative Feedback!

Here is a quick overview of how to get these up on your display.

If you use the power manager which is an extension in the google chrome browser then the steps are pretty similar but may vary slightly. The labeling should be the same however.

Click the little arrow pointing down, it’s on the far right, near the top of the webpage when you’re logged into your Facebook account.

You’ll get this panel which drops down and you will either click the “Create Ads” option if you have no ads up and running yet. Or, you will click the “Manage Ads” option if you already have ads running on the Facebook platform.

Once the Facebook Ads Manager has loaded up you’ll see your ads-account as usual, the link will say “My Account” in this case, go ahead and click on it in order to proceed to the next step. Something to note is that it’s now possible to manage more than one account if you’ve been granted access by the owner of that other account. If this is the case just be sure to choose your account in this list and proceed as usual.

Once you’re in your ads account you’ll see the usual list of ads if you already have some running. If not then it’ll be empty and that’s perfectly fine. Look for the little icon in the image below, that icon is on the far right side, near the top of the page… click it & then click “customize columns”.

Once you get to this next step you’re going to see a new panel show up which will display a bunch of check boxes and options for you to choose from.

What you want to do is check off the boxes which say:

Positive Feedback

Negative Feedback

Then hit the button which says Apply and you’ll see those panels available to you in your ads. This is what the option menu looks like if you’re curious.

Once everything is set up and the appropriate displays are in place you will be able to see your positivity scores. This is important because if your scores begin to reach high negativity you stand a pretty good chance of losing that account now. It seems like Facebook is now putting a very strong emphasis on building a positive user experience. This is aimed at the average, everyday Facebook user, not us advertisers. We have to play by the rules or risk getting the boot!

Knowing your way around Facebook Ads is a pretty important skill these days for us marketers. It just so happens to be something we teach over at the Powerhouse Affiliate academy. Not only that, it’s just one of the number of things we teach so you’re never locked into any one-thing.