Why is My Instagram Ad Not Running?
You’ve launched the perfect Instagram ad. The creative is compelling, the copy is sharp, and you've dialed in your audience. You hit "Publish," eager to see the impressions roll in, but an hour later, your dashboard is still sitting at zero. Annoying? Yes. An uncommon problem? Not at all. This article walks you through the common reasons why your Instagram ad isn't running and provides a clear checklist to get it live and delivering.
Is Your Ad Stuck in Review?
The moment you submit an ad, it enters Meta's ad review system. This is an automated process, often supplemented by human review, designed to ensure your ad complies with all of Meta’s Advertising Policies. It’s the most common roadblock for a new campaign.
Before you start digging through complex settings, check your ad’s delivery status in Meta Ads Manager. Navigate to your ad and look at the "Delivery" column. If it says "In Review" or "Processing," your only job is to be patient.
Why the Holdup?
While many ads are approved within minutes, the review process can sometimes take 24 hours or even longer. Several factors can slow it down:
New Ad Account: If your ad account is brand new or has very little history, your first few ads will likely undergo more scrutiny. Meta is essentially building trust with you as an advertiser.
Sensitive Topics: Ads related to special categories like Credit, Employment, Housing, or Social Issues/Elections automatically trigger a more rigorous review process.
Past Policy Violations: If you've had ads rejected in the past, your account might be flagged for closer inspection on future campaigns.
Weekend or Holiday Volume: Ad review queues can get backed up during peak times, holidays, or weekends when staffing might be lower.
A quick pro-tip: avoid making multiple edits to an ad that's already in review. Every time you change the creative, copy, or targeting, you reset its place in the review queue. It's best to get everything right before you publish and then let the system do its work.
Your Ad Was Disapproved: Common Policy Violations
If the delivery status shows "Rejected," Meta's review system found something that breaks their rules. This is another extremely common reason for dead-on-arrival ads. Don’t panic - Meta usually provides a reason next to the rejection notice, which gives you a clear path to fix it.
Here are some of the most frequent policy tripwires marketers run into:
Misleading Claims or Sensationalism
This is a broad category that catches a lot of advertisers off guard. It includes things like "get rich quick" schemes, unsubstantiated health claims, or imagery that sensationalizes results.
How to Fix It: Rewrite your copy to be honest and realistic. Focus on the benefits of your product or service without guaranteeing specific, unlikely outcomes. If you're promoting a health or wellness product, stick to claims supported by evidence and avoid dramatic, clickbait-style images.
Landing Page Issues
Meta's review team doesn't just look at your ad creative, they also analyze your landing page. The user experience after the click matters.
Non-Functional Page: The URL leads to a 404 error page, is under construction, or doesn't load correctly on mobile.
Misleading Content: The landing page doesn't deliver on what the ad promised. For example, your ad promotes a 50% off sale, but the landing page has no mention of the discount.
Disruptive Experiences: Pages with aggressive pop-ups, auto-playing videos with sound, or an excessive number of ads can lead to rejection.
How to Fix It: Double-check your URL and make sure the page is live and fully functional. Ensure your offer is clearly visible on the landing page, and create a smooth, user-friendly experience.
Text in Image Rule
This "rule" is more of a strong recommendation now, but it can still impact delivery. A long time ago, Facebook would outright reject ads where text covered more than 20% of the image. Today, they allow it but warn that images with less text perform better and may get priority delivery. If your ad has extremely low or zero impressions, excessive text overlay could be throttling its delivery.
How to Fix It: Move as much text as possible from the image into the ad copy. Try to make your visuals speak for themselves.
Incorrect Use of Brand Assets
Referencing Meta's brands (like Instagram, Facebook) in your ad is tricky. You cannot use their official logos, use "Instagram" or "Facebook" in a way that implies partnership or endorsement, or make it the most prominent feature of your ad. A common mistake is simply writing "Facebook" with a lowercase "f."
How to Fix It: Review Meta's official brand guidelines. If you need to mention the platform, do so in plain text and make sure your own brand is always the main focus.
Budget and Bidding: Are You Telling Instagram to Spend Enough?
Sometimes, your ad is fully approved, but the settings you’ve chosen for the budget and bid strategy are effectively preventing it from entering the ad auction. The Instagram algorithm needs clear signals that you're willing to pay a competitive rate to reach your target audience.
Your Daily or Lifetime Budget is Too Low
Platforms like Instagram thrive on data. If you set a daily budget of just $1, the algorithm has very little room to experiment, learn, and find the right people to show your ad to. It may struggle to get any traction against advertisers with larger budgets competing for the same audience. The system may predict it won't be able to achieve an outcome within that budget and deprioritize its delivery altogether.
How to Fix It: For a new ad set, it's generally a good practice to start with a minimum daily budget of $5-10. This gives the learning phase enough data to work with. If your campaign budget consists of multiple ad sets, make sure the total budget is sufficient to be distributed effectively across them all.
Your Bid Cap is Too Constraining
When you set up an ad set, you can choose a bid strategy. "Highest Volume" is the default and tells Meta to get the most results possible for your budget. However, if you opt for a manual bid cap or cost cap and set it too low, you're tying the algorithm's hands.
For example, if the average cost per click for your audience is $1.50, but you've set a bid cap of $0.20, Instagram will never be able to win an auction placement for you. Your ad will be approved but won't deliver because you're consistently being outbid.
How to Fix It: If you're not an advanced media buyer, stick with the "Highest Volume" bid strategy. It's the simplest way to ensure you're bidding competitively. If you must use a bid cap, start with a more generous amount and gradually lower it once you have some performance data.
Audience and Targeting: Is Anyone Actually Seeing Your Ad?
Your targeting parameters define who is eligible to see your ads. If you set them too narrowly or create conflicts between ad sets, you can starve your campaigns of delivery.
Audience Size is Too Specific
It’s tempting to be extremely precise with targeting. You might target users aged 30-31 living in a single postal code who are interested in both "paddleboarding" and "1980s synth-pop." While specific, this might only result in a potential reach of a few hundred people.
The ad delivery system needs a reasonably sized audience to effectively find people who will take your desired action. If an audience is too small, Meta may not deliver the ad at all to protect user privacy and avoid ad fatigue.
How to Fix It: When building your audience in Ads Manager, keep an eye on the "Audience Definition" gauge. If it indicates your audience is too specific, try broadening it by adding more interests, expanding the age range, or including more locations.
Significant Audience Overlap
This happens when you run multiple ad sets targeting very similar audiences at the same time. For example, Ad Set A targets people interested in "Marketing," while Ad Set B targets people interested in "Digital Marketing." A large number of users will be in both audiences.
When this occurs, your own ad sets are forced to compete against each other in the ad auction. Meta's system tries to prevent you from driving up your own costs, so it may stop one of the ad sets from delivering to avoid the redundant competition.
How to Fix It: Use Meta’s Audience Overlap tool. It allows you to compare two or more saved audiences to see the percentage of users they have in common. If the overlap is high, consider consolidating your ad sets into one. This gives the algorithm a larger pool to work with and a healthier budget.
Check for Account-Level Problems
Finally, the problem might not be with your ad, your budget, or your audience. The issue could be an administrative problem with your ad account itself.
Billing and Payment Issues
This is a surprisingly frequent culprit. A failed payment attempt can pause all ad delivery across your entire account until the issue is resolved. Check your billing settings for:
An expired credit card.
A card that was declined by your bank for any reason.
Hitting your account spending limit, a threshold you manually set for your account's total ad spend.
How to Fix It: Go to the "Billing" section of your Ads Manager. You will see prominent notifications if there's a payment-related problem. Update your card details or pay your outstanding balance to reactivate your account.
Simple Scheduling Errors
It happens to the best of us. In your rush to launch a campaign, you might have accidentally set the start date for sometime in the future. Double-check the campaign start and end dates in your ad set settings to make sure your ad is actually scheduled to be running now.
Final Thoughts
Troubleshooting an Instagram ad that refuses to run is almost always a process of elimination. Start with the most common issues - ad review status and policy compliance - before moving on to more nuanced settings like your budget, bidding strategy, audience definitions, and finally, account-level basics. By checking these key areas, you can pinpoint the blocker and get your campaign back on track.
When our ads are finally running, the last thing we want to do is get lost trying to analyze performance inside Ads Manager's complex interface. We use Graphed to connect our ad accounts and create real-time performance dashboards just by asking questions. Instead of clicking through menus and building reports manually, we can simply ask, "What's our cost per purchase and ROAS for the new campaign?" and get an instant, sharable dashboard. It helps us spend less time wrestling data and more time acting on it.