My Blogging History
I am a starting blogger and an owner of the site HowButingtingWorks.com. This site, which was originally started on Blogger and hosted at Blogspot platform way back 2019, is now being hosted at HostGator using WordPress site builder. I migrated to a paid WordPress hosting service due to the fact of the difference in services and quality between a free and a paid one. Surely a paid blogging platform offers more advance features not available to free-offered services. This advance features are what I need to enhance the site’s appearance, make it more appealing and optimize its content for visibility and higher rankings in organic search results. All these features are offered thru the use of plugins. Since that migration, my site has undergone major improvement yet the traffic going in is still low. Google’s SEO (search engine optimization) surely has its own algorithm for determining the order of my pages to appear in any search results and as a newly developed site, I know my success on getting on top of the search results would be low. So instead of relying everything to SEO’s job, I asked my self, “Why don’t I look for my audience instead of them looking for me?”. This is how I came to think of building my own Facebook page for showcasing my blogs.
Birth Of My Facebook Page
Facebook is undeniably one of the most leading and growing online social networking sites which connect millions of people around the globe. And that makes it a perfect platform to showcase anything you want the world to see. You can do advertisement, propaganda, promotion and even publicity. However, to me, my greatest obstacle in doing such thing is the fact that I only have just few number of friends and I’m not even confident that I could make at least half of them to follow and like my page. Yet I said to myself that I don’t need to get much affected to it. I’ll find ways just like how other successful marketers in Facebook did so I stayed focus and continue my business. So I started creating my Facebook page on January 3, 2021 and imported all my finished articles to it. I also started inviting my friends to follow and like it.
Facebook Ad Account Gets Restricted
Through further development of my page, I came across with this feature in my post with button name, “Boost Post”. (see below image)
Without researching further, I engaged my post to this feature immediately and learned that this feature allows me to advertise my post to public. The advertisement can run for days depending on your preferred duration and you can select your own target audience. And since this is advertisement, you have to pay Facebook according to your preference in advertising your post. Good job there, Mark! To us, Facebook is just a meeting place, to you its a restaurant that holds the meeting for us.
Getting back to the Boost Post feature, I tried it for my 5 posts for a duration of 5 days. The result was really satisfying and uplifting. All those 5 posts I applied for Boost Post has reached the public and people I am not connected with. Those people reacted on it, some commented and others even shared it. And the best part of it, those who engaged to my post can be invited to follow and like my page so I can get them as my audience for upcoming post. It was really superb until one day the public engagement to my post has stopped. On the the 3rd day of advertisement, the notifications for likes & follows has gone and the Boost button went to “Boost Unavailable“. Upon checking the settings of my promotion, I was shocked to learn that my Facebook Ad account has been restricted on Jan 21. I didn’t even receive any notification nor email from Facebook administrator or support prior to this restriction aside from the ads receipt. But why? They only say that they noticed an unusual activity in my account thus they restricted my access to advertisement. I didn’t receive any specifics to which policy or standards I failed to follow. (see below status of restriction as well as the disabled assets)
What To Do To Reinstate Ads Restriction
Upon further checking, in my Facebook account quality page, this is the only thing they can offer me, to request for review of my access to advertising. (see below image)
I followed the steps from that and it only requested me to submit any official identification, to which I submitted my SSS ID. (Don’t worry as Facebook guaranteed that they won’t be sharing it to the public, according to their note)
Meanwhile, I was on the 2nd day of waiting for the result of the review since I requested it and I can’t just ease sitting and waiting for a restricted account to get active and resume my business. What makes it despairing is that you don’t know how long you have to wait for the result. So I tried researching further online about what to do next. I tried to reach Facebook Business Support team via Live chat but their chat was unavailable. So I tried contacting them again but this time through Ads Manager page where I can contact them as the business owner. (see below image)
Then fortunately, a Facebook representative talked to me via Live chat. She then verified my Ads Account ID prior to attending my problem. She was able to confirm that my ads account was indeed blocked due to non compliant to their Ad Policies. She also stated that she has limited access to internal system so she only share the possible reasons why my ad account was restricted:
- Ad Account(s) with history of disapproved Ads associated to your profile.
- Ad Account is linked to duplicate/inauthentic admin profiles and other roles.
- Your Ads, Page Posts, or profile were reported by users
From the 3 possible reasons given to me, I was very anxious that probably someone reported me or my post. It was totally devastating to think that I am just starting in this field and this is already happening to me. At the end of our conversation, everything just went more depressing because I didn’t get any specific reasons why I got restricted. She just recommended me to submit an appeal to regain access to advertising here which I have already done (request for review). According to her, it might take the internal team 24-48 hours to respond or longer depending on the complexity of the issue and investigation and due to COVID-19 as well. Though she has no idea when the investigation will be finished, she assured to me that I will receive a notification coming from their Internal Team once the review is done. She added that as for meantime, I can only monitor their feedback through their support page.
To my frustration, I skipped working for my blog that afternoon and end up doing my gardening stuff. Sure gardening relaxes our minds as I did not realize that sun is already setting. After I took a bath, I proceeded immediately to my laptop hoping that there might be a result for my review case. When I refreshed my Facebook page, my eyes can’t believe that my ad account has been reinstated just like that (see images below). My Boost Post function feature has also been enabled.
Final Thought
After believing that my Ad account has really been reinstated, I tried checking my email inbox as well as Facebook support inbox to get the results of the Internal team who reviewed my case. Unfortunately there was none. Upon checking again the reinstatement message, it makes sense to me that probably the failure in my part is that I was not able to configure my Facebook Manager Business Suite Account and that I was not able to confirm my identity since I directly engaged in Boost Post feature. Likewise, the only message I received after my ad account has been reinstated is that confirmation about my identity. This review resulted that way after I submitted my SSS ID.
At end, I was still grateful that the cause of my ad restriction was the failure to confirm identity and not something like being reported by any individual or that my post or page has violated any Facebook Policy and community standards. If ever your ad account has been restricted, I recommend to just request for a review of your access in advertising via your Facebook Account Quality Page. To me, the review result only took for about 2 days to arrive. And if ever your review turn out to have verified that you indeed violated a policy, then just write an appeal to their internal team.
