Take a peek at one of our team Facebook ads training sessions to learn the ins & outs of Facebook’s special ad categories. Director of Client Services, Veronica Jackson, breaks down what the categories are, Facebook’s limitations, & tips you can’t miss!

There are 4 different types of special ad categories:

1. Credit
2. Employment 
3. Housing
4. Social & political

Under credit, that means ads that are under credit cards, loans or finance. Unfortunately, Facebook gets to dictate if you fall under that category. For example, with housing, we have a client, AmeriSpec. They do home inspections and sometimes they pass as a special ads category, next time we launch a campaign they say no. That is always a difficult part with these, but it’s important to always try to submit this even if they do fall in these categories without special ad categories to start. Just to see if they can get through and Facebook will approve it. 

The next is employment – any kind of job offers, professional advancements, or similar. This also applies to our franchise development campaigns. Those used to be very successful for us because we could target existing franchise owners with an ad offering to buy another franchise. Now, Facebook doesn’t allow that. We have to target Facebook users from ages 18 to 65 and can not target that specific job title. 

Housing is the same and has affected JLS (JustListed.Social) pretty heavily. You can now only target within a 15-mile radius of certain areas and you can’t get that granular zip code like we used to be able to. 

Last one is social or political which refers to ads about any social issues, elections, politics, etc. They are very strict on this one because with the campaigns last year, they weighed in heavily and really cracked down on these special ad categories. 

The limitations include that the ages must be from 18 to 65+ (you can’t edit or touch anything there). Gender must be male, female, or other. Zip targeting, lookalike audiences, and saved audiences are unavailable. Custom audiences can be applied to these but it is limited with how Facebook utilizes it. They do not disclose how, or if, they use it but you can add it in there and they will use it how they see fit. There are also stronger limitations to creative and copy – they don’t have a full definition of what those limitations are but they just tell advertisers, “we have more authority to deny these ads”.