The ad was not making a false claim. It was making a claim about the person reading it — and on Meta, that is its own rejection. Here is the rule, the six ways home-service copy breaks it, and the one rewrite move that fixes all six.
Our general Meta ad rejected guide covers the full fix-after process: every label, the image, and the campaign setup. This article covers one label in depth — Personal Attributes — because it is the rejection agencies least expect. The offer can be legal, the price can be real, and the claim can be true. The ad still fails, because of who the sentence says the reader is.
Meta publishes the rule as Privacy Violations and Personal Attributes in its Transparency Center. Its general guidance allows two things: ad creative that describes or shows the promoted product or service, and using words like “you” and “other” without referencing a personal attribute. It prohibits text that references or alludes to personal attributes or characteristics of the targeted group or individual, and using “you” or “your” to reference a personal attribute.
Meta’s own examples make the line concrete. Under health, it allows New diabetes treatment available and rejects Do you have diabetes? Under age, it allows Meet seniors and rejects Meet other seniors — the single word “other” turns a description of an audience into a claim that the viewer belongs to it. Under financial status, it rejects Are you bankrupt? The pattern is consistent: a question is enough. The ad does not have to state the attribute; implying that you know it about the viewer is the violation.
That is why this rule catches home-service advertisers so often. Google copy is written as a conversation with a searcher who just typed their problem. Carried across to Meta unchanged, that conversational style reads as the advertiser announcing what it knows about the reader.
Our rule library holds 6 Personal Attributes patterns. Each one below is a real pattern the checker runs, with the fix the library attaches to it. Every fix uses the same move: assert the service, not the person.
Do you own a home?, Are you a homeowner?, Are you struggling with bills? A direct question asserting the viewer’s situation or struggles is the clearest form of the violation. It is also the most common opening line in home-service copy, because it works as a hook everywhere else.
Tired of your old AC?, Sick of your drafty windows? The sentence asserts the viewer’s personal situation and their feelings about it. It feels softer than a direct question, which is why it survives editing rounds — but it points at the reader in exactly the same way.
Telling the viewer you’re overpaying asserts their financial status — specifically, a vulnerable one. Meta lists vulnerable financial status among the attributes its standard covers, and its own rejected example is a bankruptcy question. A claim about what the reader currently pays is a claim about the reader, not about your price.
This construction groups the viewer into an attributed class before making its point. The grouping itself is the assertion: the ad has decided who the reader is and what their home is like. Remove the grouping and state the fact about the service or the problem in general terms.
Like you does the same work as Meta’s rejected word “other”: it attributes class membership to the viewer. The fix is deletion, not replacement — the sentence almost always works without the phrase, because the targeting is already deciding who sees it.
Invoking your family’s safety or your family’s health asserts the viewer’s family circumstances, and it usually travels with a fear appeal. Describe the product’s safety features and directions factually instead. The factual version is also the safer copy on the merits: it says what the service does, rather than what might happen to the reader’s children if they wait.
Three things stay available, and knowing them keeps rewrites from going bland. First, you and your themselves are allowed when no attribute is attached — Meta’s guidance says so directly. “You get a written quote before work starts” describes your process, not the reader’s attributes. Second, a passing reference to an age group is allowed: Meta’s examples approve Meet seniors and A service for teens. What fails is claiming to know the individual viewer’s age or group. Third, describing the problem in general terms is always available. “Old water heaters cost more to run” reaches the same reader as “Tired of your old water heater?” — the targeting sees to that. Only the sentence changed.
One boundary to keep separate: this article is about copy. Who an ad may be shown to is governed by different rules, including Meta’s Discriminatory Practices standard, which covers using audience selection to wrongfully target or exclude groups, and the Special Ad Category rules for housing, employment, and credit. Clean copy does not fix a targeting problem, and clean targeting does not rescue pointing copy.
are you, do you, tired of your, you’re, like you, like most, and your family. Each hit gets the assert-the-service rewrite.The honest limit, stated plainly: a text check can find the six patterns in the words you give it. It cannot promise approval. Meta reviews the whole ad — copy, image, targeting, and account history — and makes the final call. What the check removes is the most predictable cause of this particular rejection: sentences that tell the viewer who they are.
Meta’s Privacy Violations and Personal Attributes standard prohibits ad content that asserts or implies personal attributes of the person seeing the ad. A question can do it without stating anything: Meta’s own examples reject “Do you have diabetes?” and allow “New diabetes treatment available.” The first line claims knowledge of the viewer. The second describes the service. Home-service copy fails the same way when it claims to know the viewer’s home, finances, or family situation.
No. Meta’s own guidance allows using words like “you” and “your” without referencing a personal attribute, and allows ad creative that describes or shows the promoted product or service. What is prohibited is using “you” or “your” to attach a personal attribute to the reader: their situation, their finances, their family, or a group the ad says they belong to.
Targeting and copy are different things. This article is about what the words say. The copy is not allowed to announce what the targeting selected: “Are you a homeowner?” and “Homeowners like you” both assert the viewer’s attribute in the text itself. Describe the service in general terms and let the targeting do its work silently. Separately, housing, employment, and credit offers sit under Meta’s Special Ad Category and discrimination rules, which govern the targeting itself.
Change the subject of the sentence from the reader to the service. “Tired of your old AC?” becomes a statement about old units: “Older AC units often cost more to run.” “You’re overpaying for pest control” becomes a price: “Quarterly pest service from $129, confirmed in writing before the first visit.” Run the rewritten text through a check before resubmitting, because softer forms like “homeowners like you” trip the same rule.
Each trade has its own page with the full Meta ads rule set that runs on its ads, the risky claim examples we see most in that trade, and the fixes:
Free, no account. Paste the rejected ad and the reason Meta gave; get each pointing sentence flagged, the assert-the-service rewrite, and a re-check of the rebuilt ad.
Fix a rejected ad