[Deprecated] A Simple Fix For Why Your Facebook Ads Aren’t Being Served

This post is from 2013, and is blocked from searching engine indexing as it is no longer relevant. You wanted to run Facebook ads so you set up a new Facebook ads account, added a payment method, installed tracking pixels for every conversion goal on your website.  Heck, you went all out, did your research,…


MasonPelt.com on June 24, 2015.

This post is from 2013, and is blocked from searching engine indexing as it is no longer relevant.

You wanted to run Facebook ads so you set up a new Facebook ads account, added a payment method, installed tracking pixels for every conversion goal on your website.  Heck, you went all out, did your research, and installed a remarketing pixel installed on your site, uploaded custom audiences, and spent two weeks building creative that both followed Facebook’s 20% text rule and made everyone on your team happy you finally launch your campaigns. Shortly after you get the notification that your ads have been approved!

But… Somethings not working

You check back a few days later only to see that your ad hasn’t spend any money and hasn’t been shown to anyone. So you look over Facebook’s troubleshooting guide and find you have done everything correctly.  The ads, ad sets and campaigns are all turned on, your audience is not too broad for your budget and you even have a high relevance score. The ads just aren’t working. Whether you have a six letter masters in analytics you’ve done enough of your homework to know that you need at least 10,000 impressions for statistically relevant data, you find yourself stuck. With no impressions and no spend… What can you do?

I’ve had this happen four times recently on new accounts.  Always with the same answer. The Billing Threshold was set to $25

In February 2014 Facebook rolled out billing thresholds and in a blog post explained:

“Billing thresholds are set based on how much you’ve paid in the past. For example, if you are a first-time advertiser on Facebook, you will be billed once you reach $25 or if you reach the end of the month. After that first payment, you’ll be billed in $25 increments or when you reach the end of the month.:”

All accounts start with an initial threshold will start at $25 and increase with each successful payment to $50, $250, $500 and $750 USD. If you were running only boosting posts a few dollars at a time this likely won’t affect your ads serving.  :

Facebook (to my knowledge) has never listed billing thresholds as a reason your ads won’t run. However in the last two months I’ve helped four people launch new ads accounts and immediately tried to start spending $200 or more a day.


Every single time the ads would not serve with a $25 billing threshold. Every single time when we manually increased the billing threshold to the maximum $750 allowed for new account the Facebook ads began serving within hours. Clearly four times is a lot less than the 10,000 cases it takes for statistical significance, but I can notice the beginnings of a trend when I see one.

Updated 2016. Facebook has limitations on increasing the billing threshold on new accounts in an Business Manager.


Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on June 24, 2015. Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash