April 5, 2017
When Facebook created the placements Instant Articles, Audience Network, and in-stream video, it had one goal in mind: to give you more platforms to place your ads. When these placements launched, you could advertise beyond Facebook news feed and the right column. You could place ads within websites and apps outside of Facebook, articles, and videos. However, these placements produced one problem: your ads may appear alongside certain content that isn’t appropriate for your brand or business.
[bctt tweet=”New @facebookads Manager features: category blocking & block lists. #digitaladvertising #digitalmarketing” username=””]For example, if you’re an agency advertising your financial services, you might not want your ad to appear within the Tinder app. If you work for a university and you want to offer educational services, you might not want your ad to appear within a Cosmo article that talks about sex.
Featuring Category Blocking Controls
To combat this problem, Facebook is rolling out category blocking controls, a tool that allows you to opt your ads out of certain topics. Don’t want your ad to appear within college humor videos? No problem. Don’t want your ad to appear within political articles? Don’t worry about it.
You’ll find this new category blocking tool under the “Placements” section of Ads Manager.
Once you click the text box, a list of categories that you can block will appear.
The five categories that you can opt out of Instant Articles, in-stream videos, and Audience Network are the following:
- Dating
- Gambling
- Mature
- Tragedy and conflict
- Debatable social issues
Featuring Block Lists
If you don’t want your ads to appear in specific websites or apps, you can do so by creating a block list.
Click “Create Block List” to create your list.
You can upload a text file (.txt or .csv) that contains up to 10,000 website domains and app store URLs that you want to block.
What do you think of Facebook’s new category blocking and block lists tools? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below. Also, share this update to friends.
