Changes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) went into effect on July 1, 2013. These changes may affect your use of Google products. COPPA applies to websites and services directed to children in the United States who are under the age of 13 and general audience sites or services with users known to be under the age of 13 in the United States. Other countries may define the age of a child differently in their laws or have different rules applicable to underage users. If you use Google products to serve ads in other countries, please be aware of those requirements.
When sending Ad Exchange requests, use GPT to mark an ad request with a child-directed status.
Tag a site or an iOS app
If you use Google's advertising services and you'd like us to treat your site, portions of your site, or your iOS app as directed to children, you can use the following methods to notify us:
- Websites: Search Console
- iOS apps: Tag an iOS app for child-directed treatment
If you tag your site or app for treatment as child-directed, we will take steps to deactivate interest-based advertising and remarketing ads for that content. It may take some time for this designation to take effect.
Tag a bid request for a site or app
To give you finer control over how your inventory is treated, you can set a tag for whether an impression should be given child-directed treatment. If you tag your ad request for child-directed treatment, we will deactivate interest-based advertising and remarketing ads for that ad request. Note that including the tag in an ad request will take precedence over any applicable site-level settings.
For example, let’s say you run a TV review site and you know that the instant user on the site is a child. Rather than tagging your entire site as child-directed, you can just set the tag for child-directed treatment for ad requests shown to this child user to prevent interest-based advertising and remarketing ads from showing in those impressions.
The guidelines below describe how to tag your ad requests on sites for child-directed treatment:
Typical ad codeSee below for how to add the Tag for Child Directed Treatment to your ad code:
<script async
src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<ins class="adsbygoogle"
style="display:inline-block;width:728px;height:90px"
data-ad-client="ignored0123456789abcdef"
data-ad-slot="0123456789"
data-tag-for-child-directed-treatment="1"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script>
The child-directed designation will take effect as soon as you’ve copied and pasted the updated ad code into the HTML source code of your pages.
If you're using legacy ad code, see below for how to add the Tag for Child Directed Treatment to your ad code:
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "ignored0123456789abcdef";
google_ad_slot = "0123456789";
google_ad_width = 125;
google_ad_height = 125;
google_tag_for_child_directed_treatment = 1;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
The child-directed designation will take effect as soon as you’ve copied and pasted the updated ad code into the HTML source code of your pages.
For Ad Exchange VAST tags, add the parameter tfcd=1 to the end of the request to tag an ad for child-directed treatment.
For example:
https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/ads?client=ca-video-pub-1234567890&ad_type=video&description_url=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com
&max_ad_duration=30000&videoad_start_delay=0&tfcd=1"
For guidance about tagging an ad request from an app, see the "child-directed setting" section of the Google Mobile Ads SDK Developers site for Android and iOS.
As the content owner in control of your site or app, you generally control how your content is treated. Even without notice from you, in some cases Google may begin to treat your site or app as child-directed pursuant to our own obligations under COPPA. In these cases, we will attempt to notify you, and you may use Search Console, the ad request tagging feature for sites, or the ad request tagging feature for apps to specify a particular treatment.
Note that you may have other legal obligations under COPPA or the laws of other countries. Please review the guidance of the US FTC and regulators in the countries where you advertise, and consult with your own legal counsel. Please remember that Google's tools are designed to facilitate compliance and do not relieve any particular publisher of its obligations under the law.
