Facebook Withdraws Ad Approval

Very disappointing and an adrenalin kick start when you read the email heading saying

“Facebook Ad Denied”

and wonder what caused it! Did they make a mistake? Especially since I’ve never been turned down from Facebook previously.

Let me start from the beginning. I had just finished setting up my new facebook business page and the only image I had on the site was my timeline image. I wanted to start advertising for page likes immediately and therefore I used the timeline image for the advertisement image which for me was perfect and the only image I had on the page. In a few minutes facebook approved the ad and Within an hour I had 3 likes and one of them visited this website and signed up for the Newsletter. As it was late in the wee hours, I went to bed with thoughts in my head of having a fistful of likes in the morning, only to be met with the unwanted email.

“Facebook Ads alert: Your ad wasn’t approved”

So what caused the reject? The image!

Facebook has a 20% max coverage of text to the image when used for advertisement, something I had vaguely seen long ago (everything is long ago in technology 🙂 ) and forgotten. Apparently they have no objections if its on your page but won’t approve if used for placing ads.

How do they determine what percentage is text? They were graceful enough to send me a link on the process for me to test the image before submitting it. It’s very easy and self explanatory as you see in the directions and no excuse for me to make the same mistake again. Happy Advertising.

PS: I did get a handful of likes while the ad ran and they do charge for the time prior to stopping the ad.

Follow up on above facebook image/text issue::

Edited the image, different one from above, to comply by changing the font size, shifting the text and so on using Photoshop. The problem was that with slanted text and what was needed, tweaking the image, crop to resize and test became a time consuming issue. Shifting one way became intrusive on another side etc. Frustrating and time consuming. I needed all of the 20% to make the image work.

Not sure if they include the whole box section against the text even as the text uses a small portion of the box but I didn’t want to test the rule. Each box accounts for 4% of the image, 5 boxes total.

The size of the image to run this particular ad is 1200×444 and as I expect to run into this issue again, I decided to make a Photoshop template to overlay the image so I could tweak it easier and quicker. Worked great.

I made a transparent png a bit larger allowing for adding a border and defining the grid better. Should be about 99% accurate. You can download it if you need it and try it out. Link below. Good luck

Download it here

If not sure how to use it in Photoshop, sign up for the Newsletter and use the Contact page to request directions. If I get enough requests I will add to the post (an after thought, sorry!)