What's RBI's e-mandate and how is it affecting your ads?
Reserve Bank of India has revised its guidelines on automatic recurring payments by introducing an Additional Factor of Authentication (AFA). All the payments beyond a sum of Rs. 5000 are now supposed to get authenticated via an AFA like OTP. Now the banks are required to notify the customers about the payment, 24 hours prior to the payment. Due to this, the standing orders on the cards can also not be processed. For cards expiring at or before the end of the month, the standing orders shall expire too.
This is causing payment failures and temporary account disablements in Facebook and Google.
What are the resolutions?
Facebook:
Facebook has come up with a prepaid model option that will allow you to make manual payments or add funds to the ad account to spend as per the budget. The Facebook account will be moved to the prepaid model automatically by the end of this month. This can be done by using credit cards, UPI, net banking, or Paytm.
The ads will continue to run with no change in amount spending. Facebook will deduct these funds daily to pay for the ads. You can keep adding more funds to your account using the steps below:
1. Go to the ads manager.
2. Go to the billing.
3. Click on 'add funds' to add funds to the ad account.
In case the account has not been moved to the prepaid model yet, you can get in touch with the Facebook chat support using the link here to escalate the same. The campaigns will generally get paused for the next 48 hours for a smooth transition. You'll be able to resume them once the account gets moved to the prepaid model.
Few things to keep into consideration:
> You should be an admin to make the payment or manage an ad account's billing information.
> You have got the Bank Card (Credit/Debit) added that comes under the list of approved banks by Facebook (that supports eMandate).
Link to find the same: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/3536169639844756
> Your card (payment method) should be verified. (if you've multiple cards added, all the cards need to be verified. Remove the card that you are not able to verify completely).
A lot of times it may happen that the payment setting page on Facebook Ads Manager will show the payment as ''Processing'' & your account will show a delivery error till the time the payment is processed completely.
> Under such circumstances, As suggested by the Facebook Team, wait for 24 hours for the payment to be processed. While the payment is being processed, please do not try to add or verify the card used to make this payment. New verification attempts on this card will cause the processing payment to fail.
> Sometimes, even after 24 hours have elapsed, the payment status still remains ‘processing’. Under such circumstances, we recommend getting in touch with Facebook Chat Support. Use this link for the same here.
Google:
Google has made two changes: From 30th September 2021, the threshold of 25k will be lowered to 5k, due to this, you might encounter some errors.
To avoid any service interruptions, sign in to your Google Ads account using the instructions below to enable automatic payments.
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Click Fix Now in the Red Alert (if any) at the top of the page to fix your recurring payments and prevent service disruption.
If your account has stopped running due to a decline of your automatic payment, follow the steps below:
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Click the tools icon and then under "Billing" choose Summary.
- Click Make a payment.
- Complete the flow and pay for your owed amount (or more than your owed amount if you’d like) manually.
- Click Payment Methods.
- Look for your primary card and check if there's a "Fix" option link below it. If so, click Fix.
- Check to make sure that all the card details are correct and click Update.
Here is where the role of adding a backup payment method comes into the picture, even if the primary payment method gets declined, the ads will continue running uninterruptedly.