Last updated 7/31/2021.

If you’ve never run into a mysterious error message in Facebook Ads Manager, you probably haven’t run very many ads. They are as common as the day is long and sometimes they go away on their own, but sometimes they don’t! Here are a few that I have run into while setting up Facebook Ads for clients along with the fixes I’ve found.

1. Can’t Create More Than One Ad Account

Solution: Pay for some ads on one ad account first. If you want to resolve this quickly, add a payment method, set your billing threshold as low as you can, and run an ad.

This issue can come up when you want to create multiple ad accounts on the same Business Manager account right off the bat. Let’s say you are a company with multiple branches. You have a page for the company as a whole and a page for each branch. You want to retain control of all the ad accounts but allow the marketing person at each branch to run ads for their branch only. Maybe you have separate marketing budgets and bank accounts for each branch so you want to set a different payment method for each ad account and you don’t want the managers to have access to other branch’s payment methods.

You set up the business manager and make an ad account only to discover that the “Create Ad Account” button is now grayed out. You will not be able to add another until you have made a payment on the first account. There is no error message for this one, which makes it all the more infuriating. Here’s the Facebook Ads Help page that explains this rule. Once you get past this, you’ll be able to make up to 25 ad accounts.

2. “Ad Can’t Run: Ad Doesn’t Comply”: Misleading Claims

There are a bunch of reasons that you can get this ad rejection message. Here’s the full message that a client of ours received recently for a rejected ad related to Facebook’s Misleading Claims policy:

Ad Can’t Run: Ad Doesn’t Comply
Update the ad to comply with our Misleading Claims policy or request another review if you believe it was incorrectly rejected.
Misleading Claims
Ads must not contain deceptive, false, or misleading claims like those relating to the effectiveness or characteristics of a product or service or claims setting unrealistic expectations for users such as misleading health, employment or weight-loss claims.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “It’s not misleading! My clients really WILL lose 20 pounds in 10 weeks or I’ll give them their money back!” I’m not saying it’s deceptive, but Facebook is saying it’s deceptive and they’re calling the shots. You’ll fix this error by rephrasing your ad copy to be less specific. For example, try “Lose weight and have fun with our at-home program.” If you’re in the weight loss space, you’re also probably struggling with the Personal Attributes policy so make sure be careful about what you’re implying about your target audience. “Lose weight and have fun” is fine but “Do you want to lose weight and have fun?” is not. It may take a little bit of trial and error but you’ll get the hang of it!

3. “Your Mailchimp list contains fields that can’t be connected to your Facebook lead form.”

Solution: You need to delete or edit some of your Mailchimp merge tags or make a new audience. Go to Settings > Merge Tags *update*

There are only certain types of fields that Facebook accepts and “Birthday,” for example, is not one of them. You will need to delete that merge tag in your Audience (but this WILL delete all the birthdays you have stored for that audience) or reformat that merge tag as a regular date field. This was confusing to me the first time I dealt with this, as I assumed that “Birthday” was a “Date” field. Not so. Another option is to create a new audience just for your Facebook leads, but I haven’t yet come across a scenario where creating a new audience was the best option.

These are the acceptable Mailchimp and Facebook lead form field types: Text, Number, Date, Zip Code (US only), Phone and Website.