How to solve errors with Facebook Messenger campaigns not running

Recently Facebook announced that it would be changing how Messenger / Messages campaigns run within the European Union space. The reason for this being General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) which apply within the EU states.

You may have found that your Facebook Ads Campaigns which had Messenger as their destination have been paused late last month or at the begining of December. This is because Facebook eliminated the option to optimize the ads that click to message for conversations.

Here is what Facebook has officially announced so far:

“Due to new privacy rules in Europe, some messaging campaigns have been paused. This means that certain messaging-related ads, targeting, and audiences for ads delivered to and from Europe will be unavailable.“

So what can you do to continue to run Messages / Messenger campaigns? Well there are 2 issues you need to solve.

Switch the conversions / optimization objective

Whether your ongoing campaigns got paused/disabled or you set up a new campaign which keeps getting rejected, the first step is to switch to the new conversion objective.

“You can still run ads that click to message using the following substitutions. Changes to your campaign may affect performance.

• The Link Clicks optimization can be used instead of the Conversations/Leads optimizations.
• The Start Conversations template can be used instead of the Lead Generation template.“

We used to run click to message campaigns with the Conversation objective. Now that isn’t allowed any more. So this is the reason you will receive your first error, which sounds like this:

“Optimization Unavailable: The Conversations optimization is not available right now for messaging campaigns that target Europe. To continue with this optimization, remove European locations. Or, select a different optimization. (#2446670) “

Now the obvious solution would be to just switch to the new allowed objective of Link Clicks. But that isn’t allowed either.

SOLUTION: What you need to do is to create the campaign all over again. Duplicating it doesn`t work, you will get the same error!

Create a new message template

Even if you recreated the campaign and switched to the new allowed conversions objectives you might find that your Facebook Ads Messenger campaign will still get rejected.

The new error message has to do with the ad itself this time and sounds like this:

“Invalid Page Welcome Message for Messenger Destination Ads: The Message Text (page_welcome_message) is invalid for ads with Messenger as destination. (#1815471)”

Apparently this had been an issue before and was related to custom Message Templates that we’re using custom JSON code. Here is a thread about it on Stack Overflow from 2018.

And the solution which was working back then:

But this time around the error is shown even for templates created within the Facebook Ads Manager platform, without using any JSON code or chatbots.

SOLUTION: In order to fix this you need to create a new Message Template and make sure that you have selected “None” for the Customer Actions. Do not edit or duplicate preexisting templates, or you will get the error again!

If you ecountered other errors with click to message campaigns or found other solutions, please leave a comment.

Good luck!