About advertising to teens

We will temporarily stop showing ads to teens in the EU, the EEA and Switzerland as we continue to evaluate the impact of EU regulation. During this temporary pause in ads delivery, businesses can continue to connect with teens organically on Facebook and Instagram. We'll share more details in the coming months about how the EU teen ad experience may change. Advertisers running campaigns targeting teens don't need to take any action, but you may want to review your campaign setup in light of these changes. Our ads system will automatically stop delivery of ads to teens starting from the week of 6 November 2023.

Some targeting and campaign options are not available when you create ads that include people under the age of 18 globally (under 20 in Thailand and under 21 in Indonesia) in your desired audience. These changes are part of our overall efforts to strengthen the privacy and safety of teens across our platforms.

Starting as early as the week of 6 November 2023, ads with locations in the EU, the EEA or Switzerland will temporarily no longer deliver to audiences under 18. Ads with these locations will continue delivering to audiences 18 or over.

If and when your ads have been paused, you'll need to increase the age or remove affected locations. There's nothing that you'll need to do for audiences under 18 in unaffected locations or for audiences 18 or over in affected locations.

These changes may affect the results of conversion lift or A/B tests.

In addition, the pause on teen ads limits under 18 users' ability to run ads and participate in partnership ads, as well as their ability to earn money through our products. For under 18 users, the following may no longer be available because they would require using their information for ads:

• Running ads and boosting posts for an Instagram account
• Running ads and boosting posts for their Facebook profile (for example, boosting their own Marketplace listings)
• Running ads for a Facebook Page, if the Page is linked to an Instagram account that is under 18
• Participating in partnership ads on Instagram or Facebook

At this time, under 18 users can still run the following types of ads:

• Boosting posts or running ads for a Page, if the Facebook Page isn't linked to an Instagram account that is under 18

These options are not available to target ads to teens:

• Targeting by gender
• Targeting by postcode or locations smaller than cities (custom location radius or "pin drop")
• Detailed targeting (interests, behaviours and demographics)
• Language targeting
• Website custom audiences
• Mobile app custom audiences
• Customer list custom audiences
• Engagement custom audiences (event, Facebook Page, Instagram, Instant Experience, lead form, shopping, video)
• Offline activity custom audiences
• Lookalike Audiences

These campaign options are not available to target ads to teens:

• Advantage+ catalogue ads

• Certain optimisation goals for ad delivery, including app installs, app events, video views, post engagement, value, ad recall lift, landing page views, leads, conversations and event responses

  Note: The following optimisation goals for ad delivery are still available to reach teens: impressions, reach, daily unique reach, link clicks and off-site conversions

• Cost per result goal or ROAS goal as a campaign bid strategy, link clicks (CPC), Page likes, ThruPlay or 2-second continuous video views as a selection for when you are charged

• Certain ad placements (both manual and automatic placements), including Facebook Groups Feed, Facebook Business Explore, Facebook in-stream video (desktop), Facebook search results, Messenger sponsored messages, Audience Network native, banner and interstitial, Audience Network rewarded video and Audience Network in-stream video

  Note: The following ad placements are still available to reach teens: Facebook Feed, Facebook right column, Facebook Stories, Facebook in-stream video (mobile), Instagram feed, Instagram Explore, Instagram Stories, Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels

• Lift tests for ad sets targeting teens

  Note: We automatically adjust the minimum age of the audience for all Advantage+ app campaigns. Advantage+ app campaigns can't be used to reach teens.