ACE Warning: Meta's Hidden Asset Compliance Escalation System That Restricts Your Ad Performance

If your Meta ads have been stalling without reason CPMs spiking, ads stuck in review, delivery crawling despite solid creatives… well, you’re not alone. And you’re not imagining it either.

What you might be facing is something called an ACE Warning an internal enforcement flag that Meta never really talks about publicly, but one that can quietly cripple your ad performance from the inside out.

This isn’t a bug or a system glitch, it’s not bad luck.

It’s part of Meta’s hidden control system designed to keep advertisers in check without ever alerting them.

What is an ACE Warning?

ACE stands for Asset Compliance Escalation. It’s Meta’s internal system for identifying assets (Ad Accounts, Pages, and Business Managers) that it deems risky, suspicious, or potentially harmful to the platform’s integrity.

But instead of banning you outright, Meta takes a quieter route: It monitors your account closely for any signs of potential restrictions and throttles your performance behind the scenes. Rather than immediately suspending accounts that trigger concern, the platform implements invisible restrictions that gradually limit performance until the asset becomes fully restricted or effectively unusable.

You’ll still have access to your account and it maintains its “active” status.

Your ads might technically be “approved”.

Your dashboard will look normal - nothing out of the ordinary.

… but delivery drops. CPMs rise. Reviews stall. And scaling becomes impossible.

This is Meta’s way of limiting risk and exposure, but gives no clear indication or reason as to why your ads are not performing as they should.

The Hard Truth About ACE Warnings

With ACE warnings - you don’t get a notification, email, platform alert or warning banner in your account, making it that much harder to detect.

You just start noticing that your ad account and assets don’t perform like they did before. And that’s by design.

Meta doesn’t want this system gamed. It wants to change your behavior without you realizing what’s happening. That’s what makes ACE so dangerous to your performance — it operates entirely in the dark, leaving advertisers to guess what will work, tweak their campaigns, and keep increasing daily spend in recurring cycles without ever addressing the real issue.

How to Spot an ACE Flag (Before It Gets Worse)

Accounts under ACE typically show a few distinct patterns. If you’re seeing two or more of these, there’s a strong chance you’ve been flagged:

1. Ad Reviews & Approvals Don’t Work Like They Used To

• Your ads take longer to get approved — or they get rejected for vague and generic reasons.

• Even when you follow Meta’s policy to the letter, creatives get stuck in a manual review cycle, often repeatedly without a clear instruction of what needs to be fixed.

• Appeals may work in some cases, but you still experience these rejections and long review processes.

2. Campaigns Hit Invisible Ceilings

• You can’t scale, no matter how strong the creative or how broad the audience.

• Ad sets get stuck in Learning Limited — even when they meet the technical requirements for optimization and everything else looks fine.

• Performance plateaus and spend won’t go above certain thresholds.

3. Your CPMs Keep Rising

• You’re suddenly paying more to reach the same audience when compared to previous campaigns - or other accounts with the same strategy.

• You’re losing auctions you previously used to win easily.

• Even duplicated campaigns with identical settings perform worse than before.

4. Scaling Just… Breaks

• What used to be a $5K/day account now can’t spend more than $500.

• Campaigns that once converted profitably now struggle to break even.

• No amount of creative testing, targeting changes, or copy tweaks seem to make a difference to the results.

What Triggers an ACE Warning?

It’s not random - there are clear patterns that tend to lead to ACE enforcement — some that even the most experienced advertisers can overlook:

• Policy Violations

  Even if you win an appeal, that history sticks in your account. Meta doesn’t forget. The more violations on your profile history, the higher your long-term risk profile.

• Customer Experience Signals

  High refund rates. Bad feedback scores. High volume of chargebacks. If customers complain, Meta listens. These are red flags for trust and Meta views customer satisfaction as an indicator for advertiser reliability.

• Suspicious Asset Behavior

  Using recycled Pages. Ad Accounts, or Business Managers with a bad history of ownership can trigger an ACE. Domains with past restrictions and bans can get flagged. Even if it is a new account, the history of the assets can follow you and get flagged some time in the future by Meta.

• Unusual Advertising Patterns

  Rapid-fire creative cloning. Too many dark posts. Duplicated funnels across accounts. All of these can trigger unusual advertising behavior on Meta’s systems (even if it is technically compliant).

Why This Matters

Once you’re under an ACE warning, your entire ad ecosystem starts to erode quietly.

It doesn’t really matter how good your creative is and it has little to no benefit if your audience is already dialed in. You’re being algorithmically suppressed — not strategically underperforming.

Standard optimization won’t fix this - because this isn’t about CTRs or ROAS. It’s about trust and how Meta views your risk profile.

What You Can Do About It

Unfortunately, there’s no switch you can flip, form you can fill out or support number you can contact to reverse an ACE flag. But there are recovery steps you can take:

• Focus on rebuilding trust at the asset level.

  Clean up your Business Manager. Work on clearing any restrictions, penalties or bans. Remove any suspicious users or expired access credentials. Use fresh creatives and make your funnel and customer experience feel more legitimate.

• Improve your customer feedback loop.

  Implement strategies that lower your refund rates. Clean up your support channels and process to make it easier and more transparent for customers to contact you. Monitor your post-purchase flow and feedback scores to ensure they always stay positive and healthy.

• Stop behavior that triggers suspicion.

  Try to avoid or reduce rapid ad duplication. Avoid using recycled domains that have bad reputation. Keep your asset structure clean and compliant (check out Scoreify for help with this).

• Let assets “cool off” when needed.

  Sometimes, pausing ad spend for a little while or shifting campaigns to fresh, clean accounts can help reset your trust score over time and help you to rebuild trust on Meta again.

Final Thought

An ACE warning is the digital equivalent of being placed on silent probation.

You’re not banned — but you’re being monitored closely, and your performance is quietly throttled until you prove that you’re a safe advertiser again and that you’re not putting Meta, it’s platform or it’s users at risk.

If you’ve hit an invisible wall in your Meta ads, don’t blame the algorithm. Start asking deeper questions about trust, structure and signal quality — because when Meta flags you internally, no amount of media buying skills or ad budget spend can save you — unless you fix the root of the problem that is preventing you from scaling.

⚠️ Need help with checking your assets for any hidden penalties or restrictions?

Visit https://scoreify.net for more information on services and pricing.