Phil here, from Rook Digital, and I wanted to share with you a few things I recently uncovered after banging my head against the rock that is Facebook Ads.
When Facebook Ads first came out, I jumped all over it. Back then, I felt like it was hard to understand and I was seeing so much success with traditional Ads & SEO I didn’t really pay any attention to it.
When they first started, everyone got an individual ad account. Very quickly they realized that they needed to modify this so they evolved to have a business account and you have to claim ownership of the ad account that is in your personal account if you want it removed. So, that’s something you have to know. They don’t just tell you that. Let’s fast forward to our issue.
In 2021, however, it’s quite obvious that we should all be leveraging the machine learning, scope, and power of Facebook Ads and the Facebook Pixel. All of that is to say, over the last six months, we here at Rook Digital have dived deep into Facebook ads, how they work, how to optimize them properly, and what works and what doesn’t. We’ve hired some of the very best world-renowned experts to make sure we are implementing Facebook Ads for our clients in both the local and national/eCommerce spaces, and still, I find myself bloodying my forehead on the wall after wall of Catch 22 after Catch 22 inside of Facebook.
Last week, we finally got ahold of someone in Facebook’s Concierge Support department and I had a typically bad experience. Here’s a quick rundown on what happened.
Back in 2017, I was helping a friend launch an eCommerce website. He had started selling soccer jersey’s from a “less than official” source in China and he was killing it. I mean, back then he was generating over $50k a month in online sales and that’s a figure that makes me jealous.
He was diving into Facebook Ads so I offered to help him out. He shared access to his Facebook Ad campaign and I gave him some pointers. Fast forward to 2021 and that Facebook Ads Account is still tied to my personal account despite the fact that he shut the site down in 2018 to pursue more legal options. Obviously, I don’t want any legal issues myself and I want this account removed but I could not for the life of me figure out how to do it. I had searched everywhere and I ultimately found a form on the help site to contact Facebook’s financial department. I filed a support request with them and to my surprise, they responded within minutes. I opened it up and, of course, it was a generic response telling me I hadn’t used the right form. They gave me a link, at least, so I clicked it and what do you know: it took me to a dead page.
So, right there is a very typical experience with most Facebook Advertisers I’ve spoken to, start the endless spiral of pain that is Facebook Ads. I tried clicking it a few times and it didn’t work. Finally, I copied and pasted it into a new tab and voila, it opened up just fine. There it was, the page to request the removal of a Facebook Ads account. I clicked the dropdown to select the account I wanted to be removed and… nothing. There was nothing in the drop-down.
So, I resubmitted the only form I had three more times and I got the same automated message, over, and over, and over again.
Not my cup of tea.
Finally, I remembered one of the experts we work with gave us a massive 400 page manual on Facebook Ads and there was a whole section in the back about overcoming disapproved ads (a common problem). I opened it up and in the back, I found a link to the Facebook Ads Support Center.
There were a few other instructions and digging my way through to some deeper pages, I found it. A way to contact Facebook Support. Holy crap! This was like finding the Holy Grail of Facebook Ads. I was going to talk to a REAL person.
How To Contact Facebook Ad Support
Here’s how I did it:
- Make sure you are logged into your Facebook ad account.
- Click this link: https://www.facebook.com/business/help
- In the middle of the page, there are several boxes with options. Click the third box titled “Advertise”
- On the next screen, click the “Support” tab in the top right corner.
- Next, hit the “Get Started” button on the left-hand side.
- Now, you should see a detailed list of your accounts and support options.
More Painful Facebook Ad Support Issues
So, that’s what I did. I picked chat and I got on with a live agent within 3 minutes. Holy cow, that was exciting. Needless to say, very shortly thereafter I realized that this wasn’t going to work.
- It turns out that Facebook requires every ad account to have an owner so they couldn’t just remove it.
- Also, they couldn’t close the account unless there was billing information attached (I wasn’t about to add my business information to an account tied to less than legal activities).
- The rep continued to make that recommendation, and I continued to refuse, and ultimately he provided me with a link to their internal team to file a report, but he told me it might take weeks and weeks to get a response if I ever did. Here’s that link in case you are desperate, but please keep reading because I resolved a few issues: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/268228883256323.
That left me with a solution that I have to take next which is to call my friend, reassign him to the ad account, then remove myself and let him deal with the issue. After all, it is his issue and because we are still friends, I’m sure he will oblige.
Now, my other issue. Remember way back up at the top of this article when I mentioned there are personal accounts and business accounts? Well, that creates a major problem for most of us who don’t understand the different levels inside of Facebook Ads or, like me, set up accounts for projects I still have going in my personal account prior to having business accounts.
So, that raises the question, how do I merge a personal Facebook Ad account with a Facebook Business Account? I answer that in this next article.