Your Brainpower Needed! ;) (12)
Hey guys 
1st let me thank you all for putting together such an amazing forum & community. There's so much useful content.
Let me briefly introduce our business.
We're selling CBD online in Europe and we're quite successful. Our traffic comes mostly from SEO and now we would like to scale our business with FB Ads. But as you know it's a tricky thing to do since FB doesn't allow CBD ads.
We've had some success in the past with FB ads and this funnel, but we're constantly having trouble with ad acc bans. This is where I'd like to borrow some of your Brain Power 
Our funnel looks like this:
1. FB Ad --> free tester offer
2. Landing page --> optin
3. Email marketing --> we sell them tester in an email flow. If they buy tester (free+shipping) we try to upsell them a regular product.
Other important info:
CC: We use revolut virtual credit cards - different CC for each ad account.
Accounts: We have bought some FB accounts that were used for years on a regular basis
Each ad account is used on a separate laptop
we access the internet via hotspot (separate phone and number for each account).
Ad accounts get warmed up slowly - first we only boost posts for a couple of days, than create business manager, etc. We spend around 50-100€ on warming up (post engagement campaigns, no links).
How we do it:
STAGE 1:
We run wh creative, we don't mention CBD anywhere. We run this campaign for a few days. We use 1 domain/url for 1 ad account.
*we get a lot of leads, but no conversions :/
STAGE 2:
Meme - we use a meme of a couple & girl, where we wrote CBD on the picture. It worked in the past, but now the ad gets disapproved immediately when we try to run this ad (Ilegal products or services)
*Copy doesn't focus on "characteristics", but on free samle and social proof.
LANDING PAGE:
There's a video that "sells" people on opting-in. We only mention "oil", not "CBD oil" in the video. There is no CBD text on landing page. If the ad gets disapproved or ad account banned I buy new domain for Clickfunnels landing page and copy funnel on new domain.
We have come only that far.
We run ads for few days and then we get our ads rejected (even the runing ones) or banned ad accounts.
We hide negative comments on ads regularly, etc. We don't spam people because budgets are low (50 eur/day max) and frequency is low.
We get accounts banned often now. I have posted an appeal in the past and they returned ad accounts (even though on creative there was CBD text 
), but I can't do this for ever because they will ban our BM sooner or later.
Do you have any propositions what are we doing wrong or how to do things better?
The problem is that if we dont mention "CBD" on facebook ads, the conversions on buying sample suck - we don't make profit. If we mention CBD in the creative, we get ton of leads, and conversions are good enough to be about break-even on front end.
But if we do that, we get banned sooner or later.
We are trying new things regularly but nothing seems to work the way we want it to. I am afraid that we will get our BM banned and it will be game over :/
I am looking for your help because you got way more experience in black/greyhat advertising, and would really appreciate some help/tips.
Thank you for your help, I appreciate it.
What is the most common reason for banning - policy violation or unusual activity? If the last one it's probably the VCC/revolut has been flagged and you need to find better payment methods.
Without seeing your ad + lander it's hard to see what's triggering them. So many words are touchy, not only "CBD oil", also mentioning effects etc
We got banned/rejected ads for both reasons - unusual activity and policy violation (last time it was Ilegal products or services). There were policy violation reasons noted, everytime something else.
Sure, here's the ad. This is the latest ad, that got rejected for "Ilegals products or sevices" reason.
Nice setup guys, majority of SEO traffic solid effort!
FB ads can definitely add another dimension to your business - got a few mates doing well with it atm
*Copy doesn't focus on "characteristics", but on free samle and social proof.
You're also going to plain and simple run into account bans so its good you've looked into sorting that. I believe Revolut is a more high risk bin for FB, like Stickup suggested do you ever get unusual activity bans on accounts?
Whats the average lifetime spend per account you've ran so far, curious because then can suggest what direction to think of but chances are more accounts = more scale and less downtime overall.
Originally Posted by maynzie
When it comes to creatives, we always edit the images in PS after they get banned. We used a very popular meme, which plenty of advertisers are using regularly, so don't think they can flag it automatically through image recognition?
To give a bit more information about the accounts.
Account #1 , was a fake account created 3 years for Amazon reviews and we started advertising last December. It started out advertising FB groups and after 200e ad spend, we started running meme campaign. We also ran different creatives and video ads, without any problems.
This account lasted 2 months and had ad spend of 7k in total. It was banned because of complete stupidity on our part. We started duplicating ad targeting and it has gotten through their compliance procedure once too many.
It was banned because of promoting "Illegal products or services".
*My guess would be, it was banned because of the creative, which clearly stated "CBD Oil". Our BM was banned, but we have gotten it back afterwards after account review (So don't think it was a "hard" ban).
After this episode, we tried to replicate the story above on new FB ad accounts. The whole process after the transaction is completely WH. So we're trying to go a grey hat route, but in order to be breakeven we need the FB accounts to work for at least a month.
Needles to say, other accounts didn't work as well as the first one.
Account #2 . Is a real FB account 8+ years old. We have gotten through initial phase of warming up the account through engagement ads, but was instantly banned, when we tried to send traffic to our own landing page.
After we've gotten the account back. We did the same process in Poland. We have 4 campaigns running (with a creative from the previous post). Current ad spend is 400e.
Account #3 . Real account. 5+ years old. It has gotten rejected banned for various reasons. At the end the account was banned with the meme campaign for "Illegal products or services", fb page was banned, but they gave us back the account, but won't let us run a campaign sending traffic off FB.
Account#4 . Fake Account 3+ years old. Gone through warming up phase, but was banned after running for 3 days with meme campaign. Not sure about exact reason, but since we have gotten it back and been running for 3 days.
Account #5 . Real account 3+ years old. Ad account banned for "unusual activity", requires business verification.
Account #6 . Fake account 3+ years old. Ran from same computer as account #4 . BM ban.
These have been our experiments so far. Hope it gives a bit clearer picture, what we might be doing wrong and areas to improve.
Yeah I get the GH feels haha, but seems FB thinks otherwise as many people do abuse CBD offers on their platform.. at least at the ad level they see - not further down the funnel.Think its more a security flag level, so recognised image + low bin CC + low quality accounts = bans or instant rejections.
Are you getting your BM's verified before running?
Have you guys heard of MLA - multi login app? (multilogin.com)
Are you creating 5 ad accounts per BM or just running the single till banned?
Is the product being sold in english or intl language? intl language you seem to be able to get away with much more lenience
**
- Basically a kink you're going to have to solve to run CBD consistently on FB is a way to get accounts - you will 110% face bans with CBD at some point. In time you'll probably notice a more average account spend you see, as you might get some miracle accounts spending $50k and then 10 in a row spending $500 with appeals denied - such is FB lol
- I would start verifying BM's before running (people sell as a service can cost about $100 or so seen a few comments on the boards of people doing it but also remember the internet is the wild wild west start small and gain trust it works first)
- A first ban seems you likely get it back, should see a bit more spending after the first ban which is good sign.
- Scale slowly, you can start with $300 budgets across a few adsets but don't ramp up too fast maybe 20-30% every 1-2 days
- If you notice comments taking a spin to negative, just duplicate the campaign and uncheck the duplicate with social comments etc. Turn the old campaign to $1 daily budget and let the new one run - you will get longer lasting accounts from keeping on top of this
- 80/20 rule.. 80% spent scaling what you know works (at least similar memes/adcopies) I would still refrain from exact copies but always throw in new content 20% minimum of the time, don't get locked into a box which is so easy with FB
- Retarget the users who clicked the ads, who add to cart etc in seperate campaigns to further bottom line
Thanks for feedback so many good information in there.
Originally Posted by maynzie
Originally Posted by maynzie
Originally Posted by maynzie
Originally Posted by maynzie
Originally Posted by maynzie
***
To give a quick follow up. Our goal on the front end is to break even and then make profit on the backend with email marketing and cross selling. Since our domain are new, it is going to help us rank on Google as well with site active and real users on webpage.
Just getting to the breakeven point seems to be quite difficult on most markets (There is problem with local languages, because you never know how much is lost in translation).
On the front end we're running a typical Free+Shipping campaign. FB Ad -> Opt-in -> Email -> Free + Shipping -> Upsell.
In some GEOs we're completely off with the numbers and some GEOs are performing very well. So we're fighting a battle on 2 fronts. With FB to not ban our accounts and optimizing the GEOs to make campaigns profitable.
If you can't add the CC or you're getting unusual activity bans then its CC related (or potentially IP changing too)**
Yeah, some geos just work better then others dude. I would really emphasise on keeping your campaigns fresh don't get stuck using the same images/memes all the time with exact adcopies try to spread it over more and more accounts as well. Its really what that game has come to if you want to run anything like nutra/cbd/casino etc Not a matter of IF you ban, just when lol. Really want to emphasise constantly finding new advertising material as you will be shaking your head to why an ad is disapproving but a new image bang straight to active.
Are you using the same domain on all accounts for your store?
Also your current strategy is using CBO or ABO?
I'm on it. Will definitely check with local banks, if we can get at least 10-20 plastic cards.
Got it, will definitely test out more angles going forward. One of the GEOs is not performing, so it seems like a good place to test new creatives on it.
We're using different domains for all AD accounts and GEOs; however, we're using .club and .online domains. Should we switch to more reputable ones?
We're currently using ABO.
Otherwise we're in a bit of a different situation, because we have our own CBD brand and would like to scale it to all EU markets, so we're focusing solely on one vertical at the moment and try to make it breakeven on the front end. On the positive note GEO 1 is performing very well and we're very close to breaking even with our Free+Shipping -> Upsell offer.
1 - dont use a virtual CC / use a real CC or link it to your bank account / FB sees things like virtual / prepaid CC's or Paypal as what blackhat people do, so you'll get banned faster
2 - Don't use clickfunnels, use a domain with hosting and html pages. Clickfunnels would have been associated with banned accounts in the past
3 - Do your fan pages have any content on them? if not, you need to build your page up to 5k likes by running a likes campaign and post DAILY content
4 - do you have a multi page website behind your domain? if not, again, its a RED flag for FB
Hey
@janigmoney thanks for reply. Will apply it asap.
One more question...
Is it OK if we paste url directly to cbd website (our main website) in comments under our Ad ? Can FB ban our ad acc because of that?
Thanks for your help.
Hey
Quick update.
We are killing it on GEO 1, but have troubles on GEO 2 & 3...
GEO 2 just doesn't convert - neither FB traffic nor organic traffic. We already ranked well on google, and we are getting some traffic but (almost) 0 conversions. I guess the demand isn't right.
On GEO 3 we have troubles with facebook - we are constantly getting ad acc disabled. We got the same, generic answer on both accounts. They said sth like that we violated policies too many times and they disabled our ad acc (which is complete BS because they disabled our new account the very first time we tried to run ads )
Then I appealed again, and they send a message they looked again and that they are sorry but they can't return our ad account and we should have a look at FB blueprint course, lol.
Anyone else experiencing same problems?
P.S. We also have to make a business verification on both banned ad accounts... Does anyone of you offer a service or knows someone who does to make a business verification for us?
Thanks.
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