An ad gets rejected, you appeal, it gets approved, the next one gets rejected for the same thing. Nobody at Meta explains it. Eventually people conclude the system is random.
It is not random. It is a small number of rules applied by a classifier that cannot read context, and once you know them the rejections mostly stop.
1. You wrote in the second person about a health condition
Meta's Personal Attributes policy prohibits ads that assert or imply knowledge of a person's personal characteristics — including their medical or psychological condition.
The trigger is almost always the word "your," and sometimes just "you."
| Rejected | Approved |
|---|---|
| "Struggling with your weight?" | "Weight loss that works for people who have tried everything" |
| "Tired of your acne?" | "Acne treatment in Tampa" |
| "Your hormones are out of balance" | "Hormone therapy, properly monitored" |
| "You deserve to feel confident again" | "Treatments that help people feel like themselves" |
The rule is not about whether the statement is kind or true. It is about whether the ad implies you know something about the individual seeing it.
Write about the treatment and the people who have it. Do not write about the reader.
2. Before-and-after imagery
Meta's health and wellness standards restrict transformation imagery. Side-by-side before/after comparisons for weight loss, and for anti-aging and wrinkle treatments, are the clearest prohibitions. So are close-ups of the kind that generate negative self-perception — pinching fat, zoomed-in wrinkles.
More recently the interpretation has widened toward implied transformation: a product shown next to an idealised body can be treated the same way as a literal split image.
This collides with state law in an awkward way. California's B&P § 651 effectively requires that any results image be a genuine, unaltered depiction of an actual patient — while Meta would rather you did not show results at all.
The resolution we use: results live on the landing page, not in the ad. The ad sells the consultation.
3. Negative self-perception
Any framing implying the viewer should feel bad about their body. This is the one that catches good-faith copy, because a lot of aesthetic marketing is built on a problem-agitate structure that Meta specifically disallows in this vertical.
Lead with the outcome, not the deficiency.
4. The landing page, not the ad
Rejections are frequently triggered by the destination rather than the creative. If your landing page carries before/afters, second-person health copy, or claims the ad avoided, the ad inherits the problem.
5. Prescription medication by name
Naming prescription drugs in ad copy is restricted, and enforcement on GLP-1-class medications in particular has been aggressive and inconsistent.
The reliable pattern is to advertise the program and the supervision rather than the molecule: "medically supervised weight loss," "a program run by a physician," "a consultation to see whether you're a candidate." That is also better advertising, because the molecule is a commodity and the supervision is not.
What to do about a rejection
Do not edit and resubmit immediately. Repeated rejections on one ad account accumulate, and account-level restrictions are far harder to unwind than a single rejection.
Read the specific policy cited. Meta names one. It is usually accurate, even when the application looks strange.
Rewrite rather than appeal, the first time. Appeals work, eventually, but a rewrite that removes the trigger takes ten minutes and a successful appeal takes days.
Appeal when you are genuinely right. Classifier errors are real. If you have removed every second-person construction and it is still rejected for personal attributes, appeal it and say exactly that.
If your account is in a rejection loop, the fastest fix is usually someone reading the copy who already knows which five things to look for. That is a short call and we do not charge for it.