Accidentally deleted a Facebook / Meta campaign – Here is how to to recover it

I have never earlier deleted any Facebook (Meta) campaigns, instead I always paused them or deactivated them.

Today while I was in a marketing video call I accidentally deleted the campaign, ad sets and ads which made me learn a very painful lesson. I didn’t realize it immediately and it took me 5-10 min before I realized I couldn’t find the campaign.

I tried recovering it in many ways and did even lookup online but the only thing I could find was the actual campaign which was empty without any ad sets and ads. I managed to get on a call with BM Support from Facebook and they were not able to restore the campaign because of their Policy. They showed me the same steps to instead recovering(copying) the campaign but were not able to figure out how to recover the ad sets and ads because they were not visible.

In the end I managed to find a solution myself that took 3-4 hours of my time but thankfully enough it god the graphics & copy back. Therefore in hopes of saving other people time I wanted to share the solution here.

Is it possible to fully restore deleted Facebook campaigns, ad sets and ads ?

I have both good and bad news. If you hope to click on couple of buttons and fully restore the campaign with all data so it can continue right away (running as earlier) then there doesn’t seem to be any solution for that at this very moment.

However, what seems to be possible is to duplicate the campaign / ad set and ads that are deleted and publish them again. This will restart the whole learning process, bidding price etc for those.

So while you will have to start from the beginning with learning phase you luckily will be able to recover the whole structure, graphics and the copy which should save you tons of time – but – it will have impact on your revenue because you are now going in to the learning phase process.

How to get the campaign, ad set and ads back if you accidentally delete them in Ads Manager ?

The actual process when knowing it is pretty fast and easy. You should use the filters in the Ads manager to display deleted campaigns, ad sets and ads, after that you need to duplicate them over and publish them again.

Here is step by step exactly how to do it.

Here is step-by-step exactly how to do it

1. Use Filters: Use the search and filter to look for deleted Campaign Delivery, Ad set Delivery, and Ads Delivery.
2. Duplicate Campaign: After you find the campaign, duplicate it over.
3. Duplicate Ad Set: Duplicate the ad set “to existing campaign” that you duplicated just before.
4. Duplicate Ads: Finally, duplicate the ads over to the ad set you just created.
5. Publish: Make sure they are published, wait for ads to be approved, and go through the learning phase.

Stay Connected and Reach Out

I hope this guide helps you recover your deleted Facebook campaigns and save valuable time. For more tips and insights on digital marketing, follow me on X / Twitter.

If you’re an entrepreneur or business owner dealing with similar issues and would rather have someone else handle it, feel free to reach out. I’m here to help you navigate and resolve your digital marketing challenges quickly and effectively.