How to Write a Service Ad That Gets Approved and Stays Live

A service listing is harder to write than a listing for a used bike. With a bike there is an object, a photo and a price, and the buyer can see almost everything that matters. A service often has no fixed price at all, which is a problem of its own. With a coaching course, a legal practice or a web development team, the buyer is being asked to trust a paragraph. That is why service ads are refused more often than product ads — and why nearly all of those refusals come down to the same short list of problems.

Write it in English

The site serves an English-speaking market, so ad copy in another language is refused with the reason Ad is not written in English. This is not a judgement about the language; it is that the buyers browsing these pages cannot read it, so the listing cannot do its job. If your ad is refused for this, translate the title and description and save it again — the ad goes back to active without you having to start over. Mixed copy counts too: an English title over a description in another script will still be caught.

Describe the service, not the company

The most common weak service ad is three sentences about how long the company has been established and how committed it is to excellence, and nothing about what you actually do. Buyers do not search for commitment to excellence. They search for “GST registration”, “online MBA”, “kitchen rewiring”. Lead with the specific service, who it is for, and what the buyer gets. If the ad promises one thing and the description delivers another, it is refused as Ad does not match the declared content.

Give it more than one line

A description under about sixty characters is too thin to be indexed properly, which means search engines will crawl it and decline to show it. That is the quiet failure mode: the ad is live, nobody refused it, and it is invisible. Aim for a few short paragraphs — what the service covers, who it suits, how the engagement usually works, what a buyer should send you to get a useful answer.

Do not paste the same description into forty ads

If you run a coaching institute with fifteen courses, it is tempting to write one description and reuse it, changing only the title. Duplicated content is refused, and even where it slips through it works against you: search engines pick one page out of a set of near-identical ones and drop the rest. Two genuinely different courses deserve two genuinely different descriptions. If you cannot write a different paragraph for the second one, that is a sign it should not be a second listing.

Keep contact details out of the text and out of the images

Phone numbers and email addresses in the ad body are refused with Ad contains contact details, which are not allowed, and this includes numbers burned into a poster or a banner image — images are read as well as looked at. It feels like an obstacle when your whole business is getting the phone to ring, but every buyer already has a contact route through the ad itself, and the rule exists so that route cannot be scraped in bulk by people who are not buyers.

Post it where the work happens

Pick the city where you actually deliver the service, and the most specific category that fits. Listings are grouped into browsable pages by category and city, so a training course filed under the right category in the right city sits on a page buyers reach on purpose. A course filed under a vague catch-all sits on a page nobody browses.

One service per ad

A single listing offering web development, digital marketing, SEO, app development and graphic design ranks for none of them and reads as a directory entry rather than an offer. Pick the one thing you most want work for and write the ad for that. You can post the others separately, with their own descriptions.

If it is refused, fix it and save it again

A refusal is not a ban. Every ad carries the reason it was refused, and each one has a specific fix:

• Ad is not written in English — translate the title and the description, not just one of them.
• Ad does not match the declared content — the description is selling something other than what the title and category promise.
• Ad contains duplicated content — the same description is on another of your listings; write this one from scratch.
• Ad contains contact details, which are not allowed — a phone number or email in the text, or burned into an image.
• Ad was flagged as spam — usually link-heavy copy, or the same ad posted repeatedly across categories.

Correct it, save, and the listing returns to active on its own. Ads also expire on a timer, so a listing that has quietly stopped bringing enquiries may simply have reached the end of its run and need reposting.