Ads made from the WhatsApp Business app: making one, review and rejections, and the numbers Meta shows

WhatsApp's Help Center says the app can create Facebook and Instagram ads that lead to a WhatsApp chat with the business, with the owner choosing the photos, budget, how long it runs and who sees it. Its steps are for the app on WhatsApp Web:

Start

Click the Ads icon in the left menu, or Tools, then Advertise, then Create ad.

The ad itself

Add one or more photos and write a description. On Android, Meta adds design templates whose colours and layout can be changed.

Who sees it

Choose a saved audience or make a new one. Meta's examples of what an audience can be based on are age, gender and location.

Where, how much and how long

Pick where the ad shows, a daily budget and how many days it runs, then a payment method.

Making an ad shares the business's profile name with Meta to show in the ad, and its profile photo too if the photo's privacy setting is Everyone.

Separately, the app can share some customer activity with Meta to help ads reach the right people: order details such as an order's status and when it was created, updated or paid. WhatsApp's Help Center says the content of messages and calls is not shared, and neither are customers' names, email addresses or phone numbers. The setting can be changed at any time under Tools, then Your customers' activity.

A running ad can be paused and resumed at any time. Deleting it is permanent. The Help Center gives two common reasons an ad stops showing on its own:

Spending limit reached

Ads pause once the account spending limit is reached. The limit is changed in Ad account settings.

Payment problems

A failed payment or an unpaid balance stops delivery straight away.

Each ad carries a status: active, in review, not delivering, completed, paused or rejected. Not delivering is the one to watch; Meta's description of it points to the daily budget or the payment.

Payments sit under Advertise, then Ad account settings, then Ad payments. The Help Center says a card is not required: depending on the country and currency, the choices include cards, PayPal, direct debit from a bank account and local manual payment methods. Prepaid funds are used before any other method. Meta may place a temporary hold on a payment method to check it, which it removes automatically. The payment threshold sets how often the business is billed, and the account spending limit pauses every ad once it is reached, until the limit is raised, reset or removed. Refunds are requested from the same screen, under Get payment support, with updates sent by email.

Meta's help article on that review gives the steps: in Business Support Home, open Account status overview, choose the restricted account, then select Request review under What you can do. Only an admin on the account can ask. Meta says a review is typically finished within 48 hours, though some take longer. If the restriction is lifted, ads that were running before it do not restart by themselves; they have to be switched back on in Meta Ads Manager. The number of reviews is limited, and once a review is finished, the decision is final.