The goal of this guide is to help businesses understand how to keep templates in good standing on the WhatsApp Business Platform. Message templates are reviewed daily by a Meta team. In a future release, we will be rolling out new template workflows and improvements to the review process.
If your message template(s) have been rejected, it may have been for one of the following reasons:
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(newline character).The template quality rating and status for your WhatsApp business account are listed in the Message Templates tab in WhatsApp Manager.
Your template’s quality rating is based on how messages were sent in the past 24 hours, using your template, and have been received by recipients. It is determined by a combination of quality signals we get from users on your template. Examples include user feedback signals such as blocks, reports, and the reasons users provide when they block a business.
We show it in three different states:
If we do not have enough quality signals from conversations between your business and customers, your quality status will be marked as Quality pending in WhatsApp Manager. In contrast, in the API it will be displayed as unknown
.
Starts September 7, 2022 for Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, and will be available globally in October.
If a template reaches the lowest quality rating (red), we will pause the template to protect the phone number’s quality rating.
Each instance of pausing a template will gradually increase in duration and look as follows:
A business will be notified that a template is paused through alerts delivered through WhatsApp Manager notifications. Additionally, email notifications will be sent to the admins set in Business Manager. You can also subscribe to all message template status updates through the message_template_status_update webhook
, which provides a Paused update with the amount of time the template will be paused. The status of the template will also change to Paused in WhatsApp Manager, and the quality will default to red.
When a template is paused, a business may make modifications to the template’s targeting, delivery parameters or other such changes, or simply wait until the pause period is completed. Once the pause period is completed, the business will have to call the messaging APIs in order to begin sending messages again.
Businesses may also unpause a template by editing content through the WhatsApp Business Management API (available Sep 7 2022) and send your edited message template for approval. Once approved, businesses will need to call the messaging APIs to begin sending out messages again. We send notifications when the template is available again through WhatsApp Manager alerts, email alerts and notifications on the message_template_status_update
webhook.
There are different statuses for templates:
Occasionally, a template may show one of two particular statuses that are related to quality: Paused and Disabled. The Paused status will be visible once the template pausing feature is available for businesses (Available in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico on September 7, 2022, and will be available globally in October).
You will receive an email notification if a template status from your WhatsApp business account(s) changes to Flagged or Disabled.
We highly recommend adding a sample to your template submission for approval. Keep in mind they are mandatory for the appeal process.
During message template creation, you can add a sample message template by clicking the Add Sample button. This helps us better understand the use case during the review process:
After clicking on Add Sample, a dialog helps you add the information:
After adding the sample, your header looks like this:
You cannot file an appeal on a rejected message template unless your message template containing parameters has a sample attached.
If your already created message template was rejected, and you need to add a sample follow these steps:
In addition to the above, please consider the following to accelerate the approval process.