In my previous article on contacting Facebook Ads customer support, I talked about the painful cycle of deadends advertisers often run into in Facebook Ads and how I finally figured out how to reach someone. If you haven’t read that article, I’d read it now and come back.
In that story, I realized I needed help with two other Facebook Business accounts I had. Both individually owned accounts were for two separate eCommerce businesses that I own and both block you from uploading a list of buyers or leads to exclude in future cold audience advertising/special offer campaigns or even simple look-a-like audiences for which Facebook ads are famous.
In order to do that, you have to merge your account into a business account as shown in the screenshot below.
No problem, I know how to add an Ad Account to Facebook Ads. Here’s how you do it:
- Click that big blue button that says “Add to Business” as shown in the image above.
- Check the box next to the Facebook Business you want to add that ad account to (see the image below).
Straight forward, simple… sort of. As you can see, Facebook WILL NOT let me check the business account (They Call Me Phil LLC) I want to add that Ad Account to. It’s grayed out.
What the heck? I want to add it, but it won’t let me. This is annoying, but it’s cool. I know a sure-fire way to add it. Here’s how:
- Go to the Facebook Ad Account you want to merge into your business account. In the top navigation, you can find your Ad Account ID as shown below. Copy that number.
- Click the hamburger in the top left corner (looks like a grid of dots) and select “Business Settings”
- On the next screen choose the Facebook Business Account you want to add it to. (If you don’t have a business account, you can create one to here).
- On the left-hand side of the next screen, select Accounts > Ad Accounts and click the blue “Add” button.
- There are three options here, “Add Ad Account”, Request Access to an Ad Account”, and “Create a New Ad Account”. We want the first option “Add Ad Account” because it will grant complete control over the ad account. Option two would be a way to grant access to an Agency like Rook Digital (this is what happens when we manage client Facebook Ads). The third is to create a new one, you don’t want to do this yet and I’ll explain shortly.
- Enter the Ad Account ID we copied in Step 1. Hit submit and Voila!
Wait… That didn’t work either? What the heck? I need to make a payment? But I can’t, because this Facebook Ad Account isn’t in my Business Account… Catch 22? You bet’cha.
If you look closely to the right of that last image, you’ll see that I already had an Ad Account created in there. That Ad account was set up by a well-meaning friend trying to help me get Facebook Ads up and running last year and when we created that new Ad Account, it used our 1 of 1 Ad Account threshold for this Facebook Business Account. It says you can see the limits on the settings page. Just go to the left-hand column again and scroll to the bottom where it says “Business Info”:
Right there at the bottom, it says my Ad Account Creation Limit is 1. So, I can’t add this Facebook Ad Account to my Facebook Business Account. So, what does one do? They try to deactivate their Ad Account which I’m not even going to show you how to do because, surprise! Deactivating an account does not remove the account (even after the 7 day waiting period to make sure you don’t owe them any money) and it will still count against your threshold of 1. Idiotic? You betcha! So what is one supposed to do?
Thankfully I reached back out to Facebook Ad Support and I got ahold of an amazing rep who immediately asked if he could call me to answer my questions. I couldn’t believe it. The frickin’ jackpot of customer support situations. I gladly agreed and 30 seconds later I was on the phone with him. He asked me some questions to figure out where I was in my account setup, what my problems were, and he spent about 30 minutes on the phone with me to help diagnose and propose solutions. In short, he agreed that most of my problems were infrastructure problems that they are just stuck with, but he would pass my grievances up the chain. He did help me solve my problems though and here’s how you fix this problem.
How Do I Get Past the One Facebook Ad Account Threshold In My Facebook Business Account?
Here’s the quick answer: you have to spend more than $10 in your Facebook Business Account. If you do that, they almost instantaneously lift your threshold to five Facebook Ad Accounts. I tested this on another project pictured above that had the same problem, and sure enough, it worked.
I checked my Business Info and it showed a threshold of five:
Awesome! So I repeated the steps above and it worked like a charm. We merged the two individually owned Facebook Ad Accounts into their respective businesses and this resolved my issue.
So, to recap, and in short, here is what I could have done to PREVENT this issue from happening:
- If you have a Facebook Ad Account in your individual account that you want to merge into a Facebook Business Account, DO NOT create a Facebook Ad Account in your Facebook Business Account.
- You are entitled to ONE Facebook Ad Account per Facebook Business Account until you spend at least $10.
- If I had just added my individual account straight over, it would have merged no problem, and I wouldn’t have an extra, useless account as I do now.
Here’s what I did to resolve my issue and merge my individually owned Facebook Ad account into a Facebook Business Account:
- I ran $10+ in the junk account I created. That traffic wasn’t wasted because the traffic fired the pixel on my website and that pixel was attached to my old Facebook Ad Account so the pixel caught all of that beautiful data.
- Once the Facebook Ad Account threshold was lifted to five, I added the account back in and it took just fine.
By the way, I know this can be incredibly frustrating to deal with, so if you’d rather just turn it over to someone and get help solving these kinds of problems, call Rook Digital and we’d be happy to see how we can help you out.
You now know how to merge an individual Facebook Ad Account with a Facebook Business account in two common scenarios. Please, leave a comment below if you have any questions about this process, or if it helped. We’ll try to keep this all up-to-date as things change constantly online, but we’d love to know if you found this valuable.
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