Facebook special ad category overview

The Special Ad Categories setting on Facebook applies to ads that promote content related to sensitive areas such as:

• Housing — Ads about real estate, home rentals, or housing-related services.
• Financial products and services (expanded category as of October 2024) — Ads offering credit cards, loans, or other financial services such as insurance and investment advice.
• Employment — Ads about job opportunities or career services.
• Social issues, elections, or politics — Ads related to social causes, political campaigns, or elections.

Why the Setting Exists

This feature ensures compliance with laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination based on factors like age, gender, ethnicity, and location. If your company’s ad falls under these categories, Facebook limits your targeting options to promote fairness and equal opportunity.

Key impacts on ad targeting

• No targeting by age, gender, or ZIP code.
• Location targeting is restricted to a 15-mile radius.
• No Lookalike Audiences: You cannot use Lookalike Audiences for Special Ad Categories. Instead, Facebook offers “Special Ad Audiences” based on similar behaviors but without using protected characteristics.
• Custom Audiences are allowed, but with additional restrictions: you can still use custom audiences, but you must certify compliance with Facebook’s advertising standard.

Facebook’s October 2024 special ad category announcement

In October 2024, Facebook announced a few significant changes to special ad categories:

1. A new special ad category “Financial products and services” was introduced, replacing the previous Credit ads category. This expanded the type of companies and ads that were subject to special ad category limitations.
2. Certification that any ad set based on a customer list complies with Facebook’s advertising standards.
3. Restriction on usage of shared custom lists for custom audiences.
   1. Ad accounts within the same business portfolio that share customer list custom audiences should make sure that all people with permissions to manage ad campaigns have the same business email domain. If the domains don’t match, then those shared customer lists will be unavailable for ads about housing, employment, and financial products and services.
   2. Usage of shared audiences from different business portfolios will not be permitted for ads about housing, employment, and financial products and services.

Use of Faraday in Compliance with the Special Ad Category

Since the emergence of the Special Ads category, Faraday has supported businesses whose ad sets are subject to its rules and restrictions. The primary impact of Facebook’s October 2024 announcement is to increase the type of businesses that will be subject to these rules and restrictions.

If you are a business, whose Facebook ad sets are labeled a special ad category, Faraday recommends the following steps to ensure compliance of any custom list generated through the Faraday platform:

1. Segmented audiences — If you are using Faraday cohorts to generate a custom list, you should avoid building cohorts that specifically segment on restricted traits like age and gender, restricted locations like zip code, or other prohibited information.
2. Modeled audiences — If you are using a Faraday outcome (aka predictive model) to generate a modeled audience, you should:
   • Use trait blocking when you build your outcome to ensure that all traits associated with protected classes (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, religion marital status, etc.) are not considered when building a predictive model. This ensures that your models will not knowingly consider any data that would violate Facebook’s policy against discrimination.
   • Use Faraday’s built in bias mitigation to account for implicit bias. Simply blocking traits from model training, does not account for the fact that there is often a correlation between other Faraday traits and certain protected class traits. Faraday’s bias mitigation, allows a user to neutralize or even correct for historical bias within their lead and customer base.

Please see this blog post, for a more in depth look at common Faraday supported ad strategies that comply with financial regulations.