Ad account restricted for a client's landing page: how to prove it was not you

The ad was approved. The campaign ran for six weeks. Then the ad account was restricted for “misleading claims” on a landing page, and the agency that ran the ads discovered that the client had rewritten the page a fortnight earlier to add a before-and-after gallery and a “clinically proven” line, without telling anyone. Meta’s system did not care who wrote the page. It cared which ad account sent people there.

That is the shape of nearly every landing page restriction we see. The fix has three parts, and the order is not negotiable.

How landing page policy actually works

Meta’s advertising policies cover the destination, not just the creative. Reviewers and classifiers look at the page the ad links to, and they re-check it periodically after approval. The common triggers:

• Claims that are prohibited or require substantiation: health results, guaranteed income, “clinically proven”, “doctors recommend”, before-and-after imagery in restricted categories.
• Mismatch between ad and page: the ad promises one thing, the page sells another, or the page changes after approval.
• Missing business information: no contact details, no privacy policy, no terms, no returns policy for a shop.
• Deceptive functionality: fake countdown timers, disabled back buttons, pop-ups that trap visitors, forced downloads.
• Restricted content: supplements, financial products, dating, gambling, cosmetic procedures, each with specific page requirements.
• Malware or redirects: a compromised site sending visitors elsewhere.

A page that was compliant at approval and drifted afterwards is treated the same as a page that was never compliant. That is why the timeline matters.

Part one: fix the page

Before writing a word of the appeal, make the page compliant now. Remove or substantiate the claims, restore the ad-to-page match, add the business information, remove the deceptive elements. Keep the previous version’s screenshots for evidence. If the client will not change the page, the appeal cannot succeed and the ad account should stop sending traffic to it; that is a client conversation, not a Meta one.

Part two: build the timeline

The appeal succeeds on a documented sequence:

1. Date the ads were approved, with the page as it was then. Web archive captures, your own QA screenshots, or the client’s CMS revision history.
2. Date the page changed, and what changed. CMS version logs, the client’s emails, a developer’s commit history.
3. Date the restriction, and the notice wording.
4. Date the page was corrected, and the corrected version.

Four dates and four sources. A reviewer can verify that in one pass. A paragraph about how the client went behind your back cannot be verified and does not help.

Part three: the appeal, filed once

Open Account Quality, find the restricted ad account, and use the request- review option if it is available. The submission:

Ad account [id], owned by [client business, verified] and managed by [agency, verified] under partner access. Restricted on [date] for [stated reason] relating to [landing page URL]. The page was compliant when the ads were approved on [date] (evidence attached). It was edited by the client on [date] to add [element] (evidence attached). The page was corrected on [date] and now [describes compliant state] (current version attached). Requesting review of the restriction.

Attach the four pieces of evidence and nothing else. If the ad account is the client’s under partner access, file from the highest role available and mention that the agency manages under partner access; it frames the relationship correctly. If the restriction cascaded to a Business Manager, the sequence in our Account Quality appeal guide applies.

The agency’s exposure

Enforcement does not distinguish between who wrote the page and who ran the ads. Contracts can. Three clauses that agencies without them regret:

• The client warrants that landing pages comply with platform policy and notifies the agency before changes.
• The agency may pause campaigns immediately if a page becomes non-compliant.
• The client owns the ad account and Business Manager; the agency operates under partner access, so that a restriction stays with the client’s assets. The structure is described in our agency Business Manager guide.

None of these change what Meta does. They change who pays for it.

Preventing the next one

• Re-check every live landing page monthly against the policy for its category; a five-minute review per page.
• Capture a dated screenshot or archive of each page at approval and keep it.
• Ask clients to route page changes through you before they go live, or at least to tell you.
• Set up change monitoring on client pages; free tools will email you when a page’s content changes.
• Keep the change log that every one of our restriction guides mentions. It writes the appeal.

When to get help

A single account, a clear page edit, a client who cooperates: fix, document, appeal, done. Help is worth it when the restriction has cascaded across accounts, when the client disputes the timeline, when the category is restricted and the page needs rebuilding to policy, or when a first appeal has already failed. That is the work in our Business Manager and ad account appeals service: the timeline assembled from sources, the page reviewed against the policy that actually applies, one appeal per asset, and the contract conversation that stops it recurring. Official channels only, no guaranteed outcomes, and a free case review first.