How Long Does Facebook Ad Review Take?

It can be frustrating to go through the process of creating your Facebook Ads, only to then have to wait before it goes live because it is pending review. After all, you had to pay to post an ad in the first place. So just how long does Facebook ad review take?

Reasons Your Facebook Ad Is Pending Review

You aren’t alone if you’ve found this process challenging. But there are legitimate reasons this process takes time. Facebook reviews every new ad campaign manually. With so many businesses advertising on Facebook, there are thousands of ads for them to sift through on a daily basis to ensure they meet their platform’s advertising policies. As you maybe aware Facebook has come under much public scrutiny lately and as a result, they have been rejecting ads en masse to err on the side of caution. 

What are the review times?

According to Facebook, once you’ve created an ad, it is usually reviewed within 24 hours.  After you’ve created your ad, it will be in line with other ads waiting to be reviewed. This means you could be waiting a while if there are a lot of other ads that have been submitted for review before yours. Ad sets with manual bidding and high budgets take longer to review generally. Unfortunately, this is also true if you have scheduled your ad to begin immediately. The good news is that once the review process is complete, your ad will immediately go live. 

Facebook Ads Guidelines 

If you run into the unfortunate scenario where your Facebook ad is declined, you will need to correct your ad, and go through the process again. This clearly isn’t what you want to have happen, so it’s recommended that you carefully review the ad requirements before creating it. For a full list of reasons a Facebook ad can be denied, you can check out their ad policies page. For a quick overview, here are the most common reasons an ad is denied on the platform:

• Are overly sexual or use scare tactics
• Ads that don’t fit the product advertised 
• Have a high amount of negative feedback
• Contain information user data that has been collected from Facebook
• Ads that use Facebook branding, or mimic its site features
• Lead to sites deemed abusive
• Lead to an error page
• Advertise alcohol to any user who is underage
• Use or ask for certain user characteristics such as implying race, sexual orientation, gender, age, etc. 

What You Can Do In Regards To Timing

As with almost everything, it’s not a good idea to wait until the last minute. If you wait until the day you need your ad to run to create it, the chances your ad will run on time are low. That said, there are ways you can ensure your ad is reviewed and running when you need it:

Create And Pause Your Ad

You can create your ad ahead of time and pause it. This will allow it to go through the review process so you can run it when it is ideal for you. 

Plan Ahead

Instead of setting your plan to run immediately, you can schedule your ad to run for a future date. This set it and forget it method allows your ad to go into review and run exactly when you intend it to, without any hiccups. 

Use a Different Network

If all else fails and you need your ad to run immediately, you may want to consider running it on a different platform. There are several to choose from, and you can always head back to Facebook again with the thought in mind of planning ahead and allotting time for the review process.   

Boosting Your Post

If you want to boost a post, you can do so with little wait time. In general you can expect to wait up to an hour for a boost to be approved.  The only drawback to this is that the ad isn’t reviewed by an actual person, so if you have a word in your ad, or you are linking to an article that contains a word or keyphrase that sets off an alert, your ad can be denied.   

What to do if your ads are rejected

Have your Facebook ads rejected can be a frustrating experience. If this happens, you can contact Facebook staff and request a review of your ads. Because it needs to be reviewed manually however, the approval process can be lengthy.  If you need professional assistance, the Facebook ads team at True North Social are experts in Facebook ad placement. We have learned quite a bit about getting ads pushed through the review process (through a lot trial and error), and we would be happy to help. Feel free to reach out for a free consulting call today.   You can also check out some of our other articles on Facebook ads here:  How To Target Facebook Ads For E-Commerce What Is The Best Size For Facebook Ads?