Why Is My Facebook Ads Not Delivering? Expert Tips To Fix [2026]

Facebook ads not delivering usually occur when your ad is active but receives zero impressions because it fails Meta’s auction or AI retrieval process. In 2026, the era of Meta’s Andromeda algorithm, “not delivering” is no longer just about a rejected ad or a low budget, but has become more complex. So how can advertisers get rid of it? Let’s explore 15 reasons why your Facebook ads not delivering and expert tips to fix delivery issues to maximize ROI!

What Does Not Delivering Mean On Facebook Ads?

“Facebook ads not delivering” means that your ads are active but not being shown to your target audience. In simple words, Facebook is not spending your budget, so your ads can not generate any impressions or drive sales because something is blocking the delivery.

Let me help you imagine this problem easily via a classic case of ads not delivering example:

You launch a test campaign for a conversion object to sell a skincare product with a small daily cap of $25. Your Target Audience is women from 18 to 35 in the US, and you publish your ads. For the first few days, your ads run normally, spending their full daily budget, and you get good results. 

However, when you increase the budget to $250 to scale faster, they no longer spend, though you are paying money for them, and your ads are still marked as “Active”.

When your Facebook is no longer spending your budget, and your ads get 0 impressions, this means your Facebook ads are not delivering.

Though this problem can happen in both new and existing ad accounts for multiple causes, there is always a way to fix it. Let’s explore the top reasons first!

15 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Not Delivering

As a certified Meta Business Partner, GDT Agency conducted an internal workshop in December 2025 about Facebook ad account problems and analyzed over 1,200 ad accounts.

Our research revealed that 50% of ad accounts (600 accounts) faced the Not Delivery status during scaling. We have discussed together and finally released the top 15 reasons leading to the Not Delivering status of Facebook ads:

Reason #1: Your Ad is Still Being Reviewed

To ensure all ads comply with the ad policies and terms of service, Facebook will review every ad before it goes live, whether by automated reviews by the system or manual review by actual members of Facebook’s support staff. 

According to Facebook’s Business Help Centre, most ads are reviewed within 24 hours. Nevertheless, some cases can take longer. That means, sometimes it will take longer than 24 hours to review, especially during holidays like Christmas or Black Friday.

How To Fix:

Planning and scheduling your ads in advance is one of the optimal solutions to ensure that you don’t get this status. 

In the Budget and Schedule section, you can choose a start and end date for your ad creation process. This allows you a few more days, just in case your ad needs to be manually approved by Facebook’s team.

However, the changes to previously scheduled or current ads can trigger a new review process:

• Ad creatives (text, images, videos, or links)
• Audience targeting
• Optimization
• Billing event

Since these changes force the review process to start again, remember not to edit your ads til they’ve been approved (or rejected).

>>> If you are waiting for more than 24 hours or even longer, but your ads are still stuck in review, you can refer to this article to refer to our dedicated blog to learn how to escape:  Facebook Ad Stuck In Review? Here’s How To Escape.

Reason #2: Your Ad Was Rejected

If your ad doesn’t comply with the Facebook advertising policies, it will be rejected and won’t be delivered to audiences. Being rejected is quite a common status. When your ad is rejected, you’ll receive an email that contains the reasons for the rejection, such as:

• Prohibited content: Advertising products or services that are illegal or harmful. For example: drugs, weapons, tobacco, cryptocurrency, etc.
• Misleading claims: Making false or exaggerated claims, using deceptive tactics to attract clicks.
• Personal attributes: Targeting audience based on sensitive personal attributes. For example: race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or health conditions.
• Low-quality or disruptive content: Promoting irrelevant, spammy, or disruptive content. This can worsen the user experience.

You can also confirm the status by checking your ad’s status in Ad Manager.

How To Fix:

I’ve been managing Facebook ad campaigns since 2019, and based on more than 6 years of experience working with Facebook ads, there are 2 ways to solve this issue: changing your ad or submitting an appeal.

• Changed: If Facebook says that they disapproved of your ad because of the use of profanity, change the ad copy and landing page to contain a product or service that complies with the policy. Save the ad and resubmit. Hopefully, Facebook will approve it.
• Submitting an Appeal: If you feel that Facebook made a mistake and your ad has been wrongfully disapproved, you can submit an appeal in Account Quality.

If your ad falls into a unique category, such as employment opportunities and social issues, your targeting will be limited (by age, gender, or location). Therefore, make sure you choose the category that best describes your ads so that your reach will not be reduced unnecessarily.

Reason #3: The Post Associated With Your Ad Is Not Available

This is a common headache for advertisers running PPE (Page Post Engagement) campaigns.

No matter whether you accidentally deleted the post or your ad violated Facebook’s Community Standards, your ad delivery will come to a screeching halt if it has been deleted or removed from Facebook.

How to Fix

The best way to fix this is to choose a different post or adjust permissions. Depending on the reason for this, you can:

• Choose a different post
• Create a new offer and ad in a different ad set
• Get permission from the page Admin or Editor

After making the necessary changes, toggle the ad set back to active. If it worked, the “Update required” sub-status would no longer show.

Reason #4: You’ve Hit Your Account’s Spending Limit

Your account spending limit is the budget threshold for all the ad campaigns run with your account. Once you hit that threshold, Facebook will stop showing your ads.

How to Fix:

Fix this problem by changing, resetting, or removing your limit. To do this, go to Ads Manager > Settings > Billing and Payment Methods

On the right side of the screen, you’ll find the account spending limit box, as well as the amount you’ve spent out of the total limit.

When you increase, reset, or completely remove the limit, your ads should resume delivery.

Reason #5: Your budget/bid is too low

When you set your audience targeting, you’re telling Facebook’s ad algorithm the kind of people it should deliver your ads to.

If your budget is too restrictive, Facebook will reduce your ads’ delivery to an audience that is so tiny that the algorithm can’t gather any significant data from it.

GDT Agency used to work with a B2B software client that ran conversion campaigns for demo bookings with a $30/day budget. Their average cost per demo was $180, and they’d get one demo every 6 days. However, Facebook’s algorithm refused to deliver the ads because it couldn’t gather enough data to optimize.

How to Fix

To avoid this issue, keep your bid and budget high enough to give the algorithm time to optimize your ads.

Instead of setting daily limits, set a lifetime budget. This way, Facebook will spend your budget as necessary and spread the amount over the entire run time of the ad campaign.

Another tip is to start with the lowest cost bid strategy (automatic bidding) as it drives the best results at the lowest possible cost. This ensures that your bid price will never be too low. Then, you can adjust daily bid caps based on initial performance.

Reason #6: The audience size is too small

Facebook requires a minimum number of target audiences to deliver ads effectively. If the audience is too small, there aren’t enough users for the ad to reach and display, leading to no delivery.

Besides, Facebook uses algorithms to display ads to responsive people (Facebook requires at least 1,000 users in a given target audience). When the audience size is too small, the algorithm cannot learn to function properly.

How to Fix

The best way to fix this is to expand your target audience. Here are some ways to do that:

• Add more behaviors and/or interests
• Edit your geographical restrictions
• Add more users to your customer list
• Allow Facebook Pixel to collect more data before you launch retargeting campaigns
• Use Lookalike Audiences to help Facebook use a source audience (email list, site visitors, etc.) to find similar prospects based on demographics and interests.

Reason #7: Wrong ad scheduling

Ad Scheduling is directly related to your budget and ad delivery. If you accidentally set the wrong ad schedule, your ad will not be delivered.

How to Fix

Pay attention to Ad Scheduling under ‘Budget & Schedule’. You need to make sure that the start and end dates have not passed. While the ad is running, you also need to monitor how it performs to ensure it runs and spends the budget properly.

Reason #8: Audience overlap

Basically, when you run a Facebook ad campaign, your ads compete against other advertisers to reach a specific target audience. However, when you have multiple ads targeting the same audience, you may start competing against yourself.

Facebook will try to prevent your ads from competing against each other during the auction process by letting the ads with the highest total value win the auction and pausing the ads that have a lesser value.

Though this is a great preventative feature to reduce costs and maximize the use of the budget, it can cause your ad sets to underperform or not deliver at all.

How to Fix

Go to the Audience section in Meta Ads Manager and check the audience overlap percentage.

Tick the Audience List boxes of not delivering ads, then click Show Audience Overlap.

Right here, you can see how many percent overlap the selected audience has. If this number is higher than 40%, you need to eliminate these overlapping audiences. However, according to leading advertising experts, it is best to keep this number below 20%.

Reason #9: Wrong Target Audience

Targeting the wrong audience can be a major culprit behind your ads not delivering. To understand why, let’s take a quick dive into how Machine Learning works:

After you create your ad and hit Publish, it enters the Machine Learning Phase. Facebook uses your goal to analyze user behavior and find the perfect audience. Besides, Facebook requires 50 optimization events to complete the learning phase.

During this learning phase, your ad is shown to a few different audiences. If your campaign is optimized for conversions, then it’d take 50 conversions, or if the campaign is optimized for link clicks, then it’d take 50 link clicks to exit the learning phase.

If they don’t interact, Facebook considers your ads to be not qualified and relevant. This leads to poor delivery.

You might be wondering why they wouldn’t interact. It’s very likely because your ad is targeting the wrong people. If your audience isn’t interested or engaged, your ad won’t get delivered.

How to Fix

Revisit your potential audience research. You’ll need a solid strategy and the right tools for this, like Ad Relevance Diagnostics and Quality Ranking.

They help understand your potential audience’s behavior, interests, and demographics.

Additionally, to improve your ad score, you can follow Facebook’s guidelines below:

Reason #10: Wrong ad goal

Your Facebook ad optimization goal is the action you want your target audience to take. Choosing the right goal is crucial for ad performance.

Facebook uses your goal to analyze user behavior and find the perfect audience.

For example, with Add to cart, Facebook will target people who used to add similar products to their cart. Experts often call this Audience value signals, and it works like this:

If there are no signals, in other words, your audience doesn’t take the action you want, then your ad won’t deliver.

How to Fix

Switch to a more easily achievable goal, you can choose different CTAs.

Temporarily change the optimization goal to Link Clicks. This allows Facebook to optimize ad delivery to people who usually click through ads.

Reasons #11: Low Signal Density & Broken Data Loops

By 2026, the Meta Pixel alone will no longer be sufficient because Meta’s algorithm requires high Signal Density to function.

If you haven’t implemented the Conversions API (CAPI) or if your server-side data is inconsistent, the AI suffers from “data blindness” and will limit delivery of your ads to prevent budget waste.

How to Fix

To improve the density signal, you can:

• Deploy a CAPI Gateway to send server-side events directly to Meta.
• Aim for an Event Match Quality score of “Good” or “Excellent.”
• Enable Advanced Matching to help the AI reconcile user identities across privacy-compliant layers.

Reasons #12: Retrieval Stage Failure (The Andromeda AI Factor)

In 2026, with the heart of Meta’s control system lying in the Andromeda AI architecture, Meta’s AI uses deep learning to scan Visual Nouns (objects, settings, and symbols) within your media to assign an Entity ID.

If the AI cannot “read” or categorize your creative content, your ad gets stuck in the Retrieval Stage. According to the Engineering at Meta, the Retrieval stage is the phase where the AI decides which ads are eligible for the auction.

How to Recognize Your Ads Are Stuck in The Retrieval Stage

In the Andromeda (2026) landscape, $CPMr$ (Cost per 1,000 Reach) has replaced traditional CPM as the “health monitor” for how the AI perceives your ad’s quality.

When your $CPMr$ spikes or stays flat while delivery dies, it is a signal that the Retrieval Stage has failed.

How to Fix (Visual Entity Optimization – VEO):

• Ensure your main subject is clear and not obscured by excessive text overlays.
• Use high-contrast visuals that allow AI to easily identify the product/service.
• Check “Ad Relevance Diagnostics” to see if the AI is misclassifying your industry.

Reason #13: Stale Creatives

Over a period, Facebook’s system gets to know the users who react to your ads. When you have been using the same ad creatives (all the elements: image, video, headline, copy) for weeks or even months, the algorithm might stop giving it priority because:

• The target group has viewed the ad too many times.
• The interaction and click-through rates go down, indicating that the ad is no longer attractive.
• The delivery system of Facebook begins to give preference to newer ads that are showing stronger engagement signals.

This leads to the situation when your ads are still running technically, but they do not receive impressions or budget spending because the system no longer considers them “competitive” in the auction.

How to Fix

• Refresh Your Creative: You can change the visuals or copy, change the hook or layout, or the images and videos inside to reset the engagement.
• Test New Hook and Formats: You can try short videos if you’ve been using static images or test new headlines that highlight a different benefit or pain point. This allows Facebook to have a new learning phase and possibly restart delivery.
• Use Dynamic Creative or Advantage: Let Facebook do the work and automatically mix and match visuals and copy to find the best-performing combinations.

Reason #14: Temporary Platform Disruptions:

Temporary disruptions to the platform can sometimes lead to your Facebook ads not delivering. Meta’s various systems can experience these short-term problems, e.g., Ads Manager bugs, ad delivery, or reporting outages, Pixel or Conversion API slowdowns, billing system malfunctions … In such cases, your ads might be marked as active, but no spending will occur

The delivery system of Facebook relies on uninterrupted communication among various layers. Therefore, when one of these layers fails temporarily, your ads do not enter the auctions, and the system stops delivery to prevent overspending.

What You Can Do:

• Don’t overreact: Refrain from switching off advertisements or introducing any unplanned changes throughout the interference. This can lead to resetting learning or even deteriorating performance when the situation becomes normal.
• Document and Report: Keep taking pictures and get in touch with Meta Support if the outage persists for more than a day.
• Monitor after recovery: When things get back to normal, check the results for a day or two. The algorithm might require some time to re-adjust its settings.

>> You also may like: Why Is My Facebook Ads Not Spending? How To Fix It Quickly?

Reasons #15: AI Risk Purge & Account Trust Score

The “AI Risk Purge” (Hidden Delivery Blocks) Meta’s 2026 security AI now calculates a real-time Trust Score for every ad account. You might see an “Active” status, but experience zero spending if the system flags your environment:

• Unstable Environments: Using “dirty” IPs, low-quality VPNs, or blacklisted proxies.
• Device Fingerprinting: Frequent switching between devices or locations can trigger a silent delivery halt.
• Payment History: Even minor payment failures can lower your Trust Score, causing the AI to deprioritize your ads in the auction.

How to Fix

The only way to fix this problem is to run ads in a clean, consistent environment. If your Trust Score is permanently damaged, the most efficient solution is switching to a Facebook Agency Account. You can buy or rent Facebook agency accounts as a cost-saving and effective solution.

These accounts come with pre-verified trust levels and high-priority delivery status, with an unlimited daily spending limit and fast ad approval time. Besides, these accounts also lower the risk of Facebook restrictions to ensure the success of the scale process.

How To Check Facebook Ads Delivery Status?

To check the delivery status of Facebook ads, log in to Facebook and go to Ads Manager. From the Dashboard, look at the message in the delivery column as in the screenshot below.

If it says Active or Learning, your ads are running smoothly.

If it states as one of the following, there may be something unusual that has happened for your ad or account. Let’s see the explanation for these statuses:

• Not delivering: active ads are not being served to the target audience you specified
• Rejected: The ad can’t run because it doesn’t comply with Meta Advertising Standards.
• Learning Limited: The ad set didn’t generate enough results to exit the Facebook learning phase.
• Scheduled: The ad set is scheduled to run in the future. You can edit the ad set to change its schedule
• In review: The ad is in review to make sure it complies with FB Advertising Policies. Following this review, your ad will become active and begin running as scheduled.
• Processing: the ad is being updated with the changes you made. This usually takes a few minutes, but some updates may take up to 8 hours. Once processing is complete. Your ad status will be updated to confirm if it’s now active, in review, or has errors.

Keep in mind that these delivery statuses can also apply to an Instagram ad that is dealing with a “not delivery” error. Besides, these delivery statuses also don’t really clarify what needs to be fixed.

Step-by-Step Process To Fix Facebook Ads Not Delivering

The flowchart below shows step-by-step instructions when your Facebook ads are not delivering.

Here is the detailed guide.

Check your ad again

There are 4 important things you need to review if you encounter an ad that is not delivering or being rejected. It includes:

• Ad content: This includes everything in your Ad Copy: images, videos, and primary text. You need to review and make sure they don’t violate Meta Ads Policies. You can also use ad compliance checker tools to double-check.
• Audience: Your target audience is the next thing to consider. If you’re targeting children, minors, or sensitive groups, your ad won’t be delivered.
• Budget and bidding: This is another aspect you need to review. Make sure your bid is competitive enough compared to other advertisers. Also, ensure your budget is sufficient for the ad to be delivered and function normally.
• Website link and landing page: Finally, double-check the link in your ad. Is it working properly? Does it contain any elements that might violate Ads Policies? If so, modify the information accordingly and ensure your link is fully functional.

After reviewing and editing your ad, resubmit it and wait for Facebook to review it. If the status persists, continue reading the next section right below.

Send a request to the Facebook support team

You can send a request to Facebook to check your account. I will share the steps to do this below:

Please be specific, have IDs ready, and try to upload a picture of the condition you are experiencing. At the same time, describe carefully the duration of the problem and the remedies you have tried but to no avail. You can use my sample below:

“Hi, ad set [your ID] shows Active status but has zero impressions for 24+ hours. I’ve checked budget ($500/day), audience size (2.1M), and Delivery Insights shows no errors. Can you check for platform issues or account-level blocks?”

You have to wait about 1 day for Facebook to approve the request and contact you via Email.

>>>Learn More: Main Facebook Ads Account Problems and How To Solve Them

How To Prevent Facebook Ads From Not Delivering?

Now that you know about the most common reasons your Facebook ads are not delivering, and the way to get your ads back on track. In this section, let’s take a look at some proven tips to prevent Facebook ads from not delivering.

Understand and comply with Meta Ads Policies

To avoid violating Facebook’s advertising policies, familiarize yourself with their policies and guidelines. They are mandatory to follow to ensure a clean and civilized Facebook environment.

Pay attention to audience size when targeting

When targeting, don’t be too specific or too broad. Let’s aim for a green balance.

You need to try to adjust the audience so that it is neither smaller than 1000 people nor too large.

The important thing here is to target enough so that the ad can be delivered to the right people at the right time.

Set reasonable budgets and bids

Research your target audience and campaign goals thoroughly. Start with a minimum budget and gradually increase it based on performance data.

Choose the bidding type that suits your experience level and campaign objectives.

Next, you can utilize Facebook’s suggested bids and automated features for optimization.

Continuously monitor and adjust your budget and bids based on real-time performance data.

Join Facebook groups to find support

Join groups about advertising for troubleshooting guides, new updates, and Q&A sessions. This is a treasure trove of knowledge that you shouldn’t miss.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article can help you overcome the Facebook Ads not delivering status, as well as avoid this status in the future. If you have any questions or need additional help, feel free to contact GDT Agency. Our expert team is always ready to help you.

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