What are Meta's rules for a first ad on Facebook and Instagram?

What Meta's rules say

Each rule is in plain words, with a link to Meta's page. The Advertising Standards carry no date and say they can change at any time without notice.

• Every ad is reviewed before it runs, and can be reviewed again at any time. The standards say a violation found at any point gets the ad rejected, and the account may be restricted from advertising.
• No personal attributes. Meta's policy on personal attributes says an ad must not assert or imply, directly or indirectly, a person's race, ethnicity, religion, beliefs, age, sexual orientation or practices, gender identity, disability, physical or mental health, vulnerable financial status, voting status, membership in a trade union, criminal record or name. Nor may it ask for them.
• The ad must match its landing page. The standards say an ad must clearly represent the company, product, service or brand, and that the product in the ad must match the one on the landing page.
• No profanity, nothing sexually suggestive, nothing shocking. The standards forbid all three.
• Four kinds of ad must be declared when you create the campaign: housing, employment, financial products and services, and social issues, elections or politics. Meta's page on special ad categories defines each.
• Three kinds of product need Meta's prior written permission, the standards say: dating services, cryptocurrency trading platforms and related services, and online gambling and games.

In the European Union, ads about social issues, elections or politics cannot run at all.

What that means if you have just launched

• Describe the product, not the reader. Meta's own examples on the personal attributes page: an ad may say that depression counselling is available, and may not ask whether depression is getting you down. It may announce a new diabetes treatment, and may not ask whether you have diabetes. The word you is allowed until an attribute is attached to it.
• Submit a day before you need it. Meta's page on ads in review says a scheduled ad is reviewed when you submit it and waits for its start date. Editing the targeting, creative, optimisation or billing event of a running ad starts a new review. Changing the bid, budget or schedule does not.
• If the ad is rejected, edit it or ask once. Meta's page on a rejected ad says the reason is in Business Support Home. An edited ad is reviewed again automatically. Or request another review, once for each ad: asking does not count against you. Editing or deleting the ad does not remove the violation from your account, and severe or repeated violations can get the account restricted.
• Check the category before you write the ad. An ad for a job board, for homes to rent or buy, or for credit falls in a special ad category. Meta's page on special ad categories says those three limit or remove targeting by age, gender and postal code for advertisers based in or reaching the United States, or reaching Canada and certain countries in Europe.

The numbers Meta states

Read on 8 October 2026. The money is in US dollars because Meta's page on minimum budgets uses them, and it says minimums may vary by country and objective.

Meta's pages do not agree on the daily figure. About daily budgets states 75%. About budgets says the 75% is being introduced gradually, to some accounts. Meta's developer documentation on budgets still says up to 25% more. Plan for 75%, or use a lifetime budget.

What 50 results a week means for a small budget

Meta's page on the learning phase says a new ad set is learning until it delivers stably, usually after about 50 results in the week after its last significant edit. Until then performance is less stable and the cost per result usually higher. An ad set that cannot get there is marked Learning limited.

So the budget has to buy the results. Say one signup costs you $4 in ad spend. Fifty in a week is $200, about $29 a day. On $10 a day it buys about 17, short of the 50. Meta's page on minimum budgets gives one way out: optimise for a result that is easier and cheaper to get, such as landing page views in place of purchases.

Leave the ad alone while it learns. Meta's page on significant edits says any change to the targeting, the creative or the optimisation event, or adding a new ad, sends the ad set back into learning.

A cheaper result is not a customer. One case: on about £4 a day of Meta ads, Ancestorii got around four signups a day, and it has never had a paying customer. Should I run ads before anyone has paid? tells it. What a customer costs you is your customer acquisition cost, and how many visitors become one is your conversion rate.

How Sami uses it

In the ranked plan, free once you sign up, Sami ranks Meta Ads against the other channels for your product, such as Google Ads and Reddit Ads, and says why it is in or out. The plan puts free methods before paid ones. A paid step gets one week if your product is bought on the page, with its limit set before it starts.

AskSami never posts anywhere for you, never spends your money and never writes to your code. You do those things yourself. On Meta that means you create the campaign, set the budget and pay. The numbers you bring back, as a screenshot or an export from Ads Manager, become dated records.