Facebook Advertising Guidelines: Landing Pages

This is part of a series of blog posts covering Facebook Advertising Guidelines.

By now, you’re well versed on some key aspects of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines:

• Use of Imagery
• Acceptable Language
• Targeting

Now let’s talk about the proper use of a landing page or URL destination for your Facebook ad unit. More specifically, let’s lay out the violations that can get your ad rejected.

Once again, this is largely pulled from the Facebook Help Center.

General Landing Page Guidelines

Whether your ad sends users to a Facebook destination or an external URL, your landing page must accurately reflect whatever it is you’re promoting with your ad. No bait and switch, nothing deceiving. We actually discussed this briefly in the post about Acceptable Language.

The landing page also cannot contain any content, products or services that are prohibited by the Facebook Ad Guidelines. Check this out if you need more info.

External Landing Page

• Must function properly in all browsers
• Can’t be restricted to users in specific regions
• Can’t be under construction or lead to an error page
• Can’t trigger pop-ups or pop-unders upon arrival or exit
• Can’t result in malware, spyware or auto-downloads
• Can’t link to a file that requires other software to open the content
• Can’t lead to a page that has been flagged as abusive by Web of Trust

In other words, your landing page has to be clean, functional, honest and not spammy. Pretty consistent with what Facebook expects within their pages as well.

Facebook Destinations

There are two destinations that you can’t send users to with ads within Facebook:

• Can’t direct to a “Closed” or “Secret” Group
• Can’t direct to www.facebook.com

The second one is obvious. Why in the world would you do that?

But the first is one that people could potentially miss. While I’ve never promoted a Group, I’ve had people ask me about that before. You could promote an Open Group, but not one with any restrictions.

Double Check