Facebook ads not working? Seven checks, in order

Before changing anything, open metastatus.com, Meta's page for the status and outages of its business products. It lists Facebook Ads Manager, the Marketing API, Catalog, Facebook and Instagram Shops and Meta Business Suite, each with its current status.

If Ads Manager or the Marketing API shows an issue, wait it out. Editing campaigns during an outage gains nothing, and significant edits send ad sets back into the learning phase once things recover. If every product shows no known issues, the cause is in your account, so carry on.

The Delivery column in Ads Manager tells you what Meta thinks is wrong. Check it for the campaign, the ad set and the ad, because they can differ: Meta notes a campaign can show as active while an ad set or ad is In review after a recent change.

The statuses Meta currently lists include In review (being checked against its Advertising Standards), Processing (being updated, which can take up to 8 hours), Preparing (passed review, being matched to bids and audiences before its first impression), Learning, Learning limited (not enough results to exit the learning phase), Scheduled, Rejected, No ads, Ads off or Ad set off, Active and Completed. The icons group them: an error means it cannot run at all, a warning means limited delivery, and pending means it has not started yet.

Hover over an error or warning to see Meta's explanation. That one line usually tells you which of the next steps to jump to.

An Active status with little or no spend usually comes down to one of five things.

Budget below the minimum: Meta sets a minimum budget per ad set, calculated as a daily amount even for lifetime budgets, and warns when you are under it. Bid or cost control too low: if other advertisers bid more aggressively, Meta says your bid cap or cost per result goal may not be competitive, so raise or remove it. Audience too small or saturated: a narrow audience limits delivery, and audience saturation, where much of the audience has seen the ads without acting, slows it. Schedule: a future start date shows as Scheduled, and budget changes late in the day give the system little time to spend. Constant edits: Meta says frequent pausing interferes with its ability to pace budget.

Also check that the campaign, ad set and ad are all switched on. A blue toggle at campaign level does not help if the ad set is off.

When a payment method fails, Meta pauses your ads and disables the ad account until the amount due is paid. Go to Billing & payments, select the ad account, click Payment methods and then Pay now. Once the balance is paid, Meta resumes active and scheduled ads.

If nothing failed, check the account spending limit in Payment settings. When it is reached, ads pause and stop spending. Raising, resetting or removing it gets ads running again in about 15 minutes. If ads are paused and neither limit has been hit, you may have reached the daily spending limit Meta sets, which resets every day.

A Rejected ad does not comply with Meta's Advertising Standards. Meta emails you and shows the exact reason in Meta Business Support Home. Read it before touching the ad.

You can edit the ad to fix the flagged element, whether the image, video, text, targeting or landing page, and it goes back into review automatically. Meta says most ads are reviewed within 24 hours. If you believe the rejection is wrong, request another review in Business Support Home, where Meta aims to decide within 48 hours. Do not delete the ad first, because Meta warns that deleting it may remove your ability to request a review.

Repeated or severe violations can lead Meta to restrict the ad account itself. If that has already happened, follow our workflow for a disabled Meta ad account instead, and never open a new account to keep advertising.

When ads deliver and clicks arrive but Ads Manager shows few or no purchases, suspect tracking before the ads. If purchases reach Meta only through the browser pixel, ad blockers and connection errors hide some of them. Meta says the Conversions API is less affected by those problems than the pixel, and recommends running both.

Compare purchases in Ads Manager with orders in your store over the same days. Some gap is normal, because Meta only credits purchases inside the ad set's attribution setting, such as 7 days after a click or 1 day after a view. A large shortfall means events are missing; a large surplus means pixel and server events are not deduplicated. Our Meta CAPI audit walks through each check.

Ads that worked and then slowed are often fatigued. Meta shows Creative limited when an ad's cost per result is above that of your past ads but less than double, and Creative fatigue when it reaches double or more. It counts recent exposures of the same image or video across your Page's campaigns.

Meta's recommended fix is a new ad with materially different creative, keeping the original running rather than pausing it, or a broader audience that has not seen the ad yet. Rewording the headline on the tired ad rarely helps, because the image or video is what the audience has seen too often.