If you’ve ever tried to run Facebook or Instagram ads for a business, you’ve probably had a moment where you stared at the screen and thought: how is this possible? How can a multi-billion-dollar company that depends on advertising revenue ship something this broken?
The answer is Meta Business Suite — and it deserves to be talked about honestly. It is, by some distance, the worst major marketing tool I use regularly. It blocks more campaigns than it enables. And the way it fails is not random — it’s structural.
The five things that go wrong
Most ad accounts go through some version of these problems, sometimes weekly.
1. The login and 2FA spiral
You’re trying to access an account. Meta asks for 2FA. The 2FA code goes to a phone you don’t have anymore. You try to recover it. Meta sends you to a help article that doesn’t apply. You contact support. The chatbot loops you back to the help article. Two days later you finally get a human, who tells you the account is locked for a reason they can’t disclose.
This is not a rare experience. It’s most people’s experience.
2. The asset and permissions nightmare
Facebook Pages, Instagram accounts, ad accounts, pixel/dataset, business accounts, business portfolios — all of these are separate things, and any one of them being misconfigured will break your ads. Half the time when a campaign won’t launch, the issue is that an Instagram account is connected to the wrong Page, or a Page is owned by a personal profile instead of a business, or someone left the company and took their permissions with them.
Meta’s documentation is contradictory across pages. Different help articles tell you different things. The support team often doesn’t know either.
3. Business Suite versus Ads Manager
These are different interfaces for what is supposedly the same product. They expose different settings. They give different reports. Things that work in one don’t work in the other. New features sometimes only appear in one — sometimes in both — sometimes in neither for accounts older than a certain date.
Most agencies that run Meta ads seriously have given up on Business Suite entirely and use Ads Manager. Business Suite is the interface Meta wants new businesses to use, and it’s optimised for Meta’s revenue, not for the advertiser’s.
4. The Boost button trap
The single most expensive button on the internet for small businesses is the blue “Boost Post” button on Facebook and Instagram. It looks like the easy way to advertise. What it actually does is launch a campaign with the worst possible default settings — broad targeting, brand awareness objective, no conversion tracking, no clear goal. Money gets spent. Almost nothing happens. The post gets a lot of likes from people who will never buy anything.
If a small business owner has been “running Facebook ads” and getting no leads, this is almost always what’s happening.
5. The audit and policy maze
Meta will randomly flag accounts, ads, pages, or businesses for “policy violations” that they won’t fully explain. The appeal process is the chatbot loop again. Some accounts get permanently restricted with no recourse. Others get back to normal after weeks of trying to talk to a human.
There’s no consistent logic to what gets flagged. We’ve had the same ad approved on one account and rejected on another, ten minutes later.
Why this is the way it is
The simplest explanation is that Meta Business Suite is optimised for Meta, not for you.
The Boost button is profitable for Meta even when it’s worthless to the advertiser. Locked accounts mean fewer fraud investigations. Confusing permissions push small businesses toward agencies (who pay more) or away from advanced features (which Meta keeps for premium spenders).
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s the predictable shape of a tool built by a company whose revenue comes from advertising spend, not from advertiser success. The incentives don’t line up. They’re not supposed to.
What to do about it
A few practical things help.
Use Ads Manager, not Business Suite, for anything serious. Business Suite is for posting to Facebook and Instagram from one place. It’s not for running ad campaigns properly. Anyone managing more than £500/month of ad spend should be in Ads Manager.
Set up a Business Portfolio (formerly Business Manager) properly. This is the foundation. Your Facebook Page, Instagram account, ad account, and pixel should all sit inside a Business Portfolio you own. Personal profiles should not own assets. If they do, fix it before it causes a problem.
Implement server-side tracking. The Meta Pixel alone is increasingly unreliable. iOS 14+ broke it. Ad blockers and browser changes keep breaking it. Server-side tracking through the Conversions API (CAPI) is the only way to maintain accurate attribution. It’s more work to set up, but it’s not optional anymore.
Never use the Boost button. Not for awareness. Not for engagement. Not for any reason. If you want awareness, run a proper awareness campaign in Ads Manager with proper targeting and tracking. The Boost button is a tax on businesses that haven’t learned this yet.
Document your account structure. Who owns the Page. Who owns the ad account. Who owns the pixel. Where the 2FA codes go. What email is on the account. Write all of this down. When something breaks — and it will — you’ll need it.
The honest framing
It shouldn’t be this hard. The fact that running Facebook and Instagram ads effectively requires this much defensive engineering is a Meta problem, not a user problem. But this is the world we’re in, and pretending otherwise costs businesses real money.
If you’re running Meta ads in-house and feeling like you’re constantly fighting the platform — you’re not doing it wrong. The platform is doing it wrong. Build your structure properly, use the right tools, and ignore the friendly-looking suggestions Meta keeps showing you.
The platforms that work for advertisers — Google’s, mostly, despite its flaws; LinkedIn for B2B; even Bing in specific cases — are getting better at this. Meta has been getting worse for years. It’s the most frustrating thing in modern marketing, and there’s no sign of it improving.