Why Your Ad Was Rejected

The short version

Most ad rejections come from a small set of causes. In rough order of frequency:

A claim the ad cannot support, especially about results, health, or income.
Landing page mismatch — the page does not deliver what the ad promised, or is broken, or is missing required information.
Restricted category rules the advertiser did not know applied.
Personal attributes — copy that implies knowledge of who the viewer is.
Text, image, or format policy on the creative itself.

The stated reason in the rejection notice is frequently a category label rather than the specific problem, which is why re-reading the ad against the actual policy usually finds it faster than reading the notice again.

Read the notice, but do not stop there

Rejection notices name a policy, not the offending element. "Misleading claims" does not tell you which line triggered it.

Two things help:

Check the landing page first, not the ad. A large share of rejections labelled as creative problems are actually page problems. Reviewers evaluate the destination, and an ad can be entirely compliant while the page it points to is not.
Read the ad as a stranger would. Policy is enforced on how a claim reads, not on whether it is true. "Lose 10kg" is a claim regardless of whether someone did.

The five causes, and what to do

Unsupportable claims. Specific results, guarantees, before-and-after framing, income figures. Fix by softening to what you can demonstrate, or by moving the specific claim to the page with evidence beside it.

Landing page mismatch. The page must deliver what the ad promised, load properly, and carry whatever the category requires — contact information, terms, pricing where relevant. A page behind a login or an interstitial is a common silent cause.

Restricted categories. Health, finance, dating, employment, housing, credit, politics, alcohol. These carry extra rules and sometimes require certification. Advertisers usually discover they are in a restricted category by being rejected.

Personal attributes. Copy that implies you know something about the viewer — their health, finances, group membership, or situation. "Struggling with debt?" reads as an assertion about the person. "Debt consolidation options" does not. This one catches people because the intent is innocent.

Creative format policy. Text density, prohibited imagery, misleading interface elements such as fake play buttons or fake close buttons, and dimension or duration rules.

When to appeal and when to edit

Appeal when you believe the automated review misread the ad and you can point to why. Appeals are reviewed and do sometimes succeed.

Edit when you can identify a plausible cause. Editing is faster than appealing and does not risk the account.

What not to do is resubmit the same ad repeatedly with cosmetic changes. Repeated rejections accumulate against the account, and account-level restrictions are far more expensive than a single rejected ad.

Preventing the next one

Keep a compliant version of each claim, so replacing a rejected line takes minutes.
Fix the landing page once rather than per-ad. Page problems reject every ad pointing at it.
Check whether your category is restricted before building the campaign, not after.
Avoid second-person copy that asserts something about the viewer.

Practical rule

Check the landing page before the creative, and read your copy as an assertion about the viewer rather than as a description of your product. Those two checks catch most rejections before they happen.