A YouTube video (Jan 1, 2025 upload) by Timothy Schucker explaining Facebook’s 2025 ad policy change that adds financial products (including insurance) to its "special category" restrictions. The speaker summarizes what special categories mean, notes the policy will prohibit age-based targeting for financial-product ads beginning March 2025, and recommends practical workarounds (explicit age-disclaimer text on lead forms and ads, and optimizing via conversions). The tone is reassuring and instructional, aimed at insurance agents and advertisers.
Questions this video answers
March 2025.
Financial products (including insurance).
Age-based targeting (you will not be able to select specific age ranges).
Politics, housing, credit, and employment.
Chapters
All right, good morning, ladies and gents, and happy New Year's. I wanted to film this quick video for you guys to give you guys an update. We had a couple people that were asking us about the Facebook financial special category restriction kind of thing, whatever you want to call it. So I just wanted to film a brief video to kind of update you guys on what's happening and then also how we're preparing and how you can prepare as well. So I'm going to make this little post inside of our school to give you guys some. Some context. So this is a document directly from Facebook. Let me see when it was published. I don't even know if we can see the exact data was published, but it's relatively recent. And so basically on Facebook, there's a couple different things that are classified as a special category. So a special category just means that there's kind of like different rules and different rules and practices that you have to follow to run ads that are related to that category. So for example, if you run ads about politics, you have to have this little, like, disclaimer that says, paid for by whoever it's paid for. I'm guessing they just do that to like, avoid foreign countries from spending money on ads and nobody knowing who's actually paying for the ad. So they have different rules based off of what you're actually advertising. So, like, if you're advertising housing, right, like if you're trying to get people to rent out an apartment, you can't discriminate based off of age, sex, gender, whatever. So. So you can't, like, you can't target based off of those things. So there's different restrictions based off of what you are advertising for. There's different restrictions and rules that kind of come with it right now. Previously, like financial products was not included in this. It was like politics, housing, credit, and employment. But now they're adding financial products and insurance is included in this, right? So they put out this notification, I think it was maybe a month ago or a couple weeks ago, saying that this was going to happen. And then I got a bunch of messages from people just freaking out, comments on our YouTube, like, oh, my God, is this going to ruin insurance ads? No, but it will change it a little bit. And that's kind of what I wanted to show you guys in this video as well as show you when it's actually going into effect, because up until this morning, I thought it was going to be in January, but it's not. So they said early 2025 it's going to start March 2025. Okay. So if you're watching this in January when I'm filming it, you have a few months before this even takes, takes effect. And basically what is going to happen is with financial products, you're not going to be able to target based off of age. So like if you sell final expense, you're not going to be able to select 50 plus, right? If you sell Iuls, you're not going to go to cap it at 55, right? So anyone, it's going to be able to be shown to any, any age demographic or any age group. Right now, again, we have a few months where this isn't even going to be a problem. So you don't even need to worry about it right now.
You don't even need to worry about it right now.
And in March, I'm going to tell you guys what we're basically going to do to kind of solve this issue. So on the instant form, whenever someone goes to fill out your form and become a lead, we're just going to add text that says this is only for.
Blank ages, only for 50 plus. So on the instant form.
Instead of in the targeting, just on the form and maybe even in the ad, we'll just specify who this is for. Right. The other cool thing is even if you get someone that's like out of your age range that you're trying to target, like let's say you're trying to sell final expense, but you start getting like 30 or 40 year olds, which realistically, just based off of the product that you're selling, you're not going to get a bunch of 30, 40 year olds that are really even interested in final expense. But you might get some of them, you can just sell them a term policy or if you're trying to sell like term or an IUL or something and you know like a 70 or 65 year old comes in, well, you might be able to find an annuity opportunity or you might be able to just sell them a whole life policy, right? So either way it's not like even if you get someone out of the ages you want, you can still sell them. But what we're going to do is basically just have like a disclaimer on the lead form that says like, hey.
This is only for people ages blank to blank, which is not against Facebook's policy. So let me kind of show you just like an example of what that would even look like. So, so here's an example. Like this is for our company because we run ads for Insurance agents, we'll generate high intent leads and appointments for you. And if you don't sell 20k per month using these leads, you don't pay. And then we have this note right here. This is only for licensed agents. If you're not licensed, leave this page immediately. So what happens is if someone that's not licensed or doesn't even sell insurance comes to this page, they're going to see this click off of it, right? At least most of them do. They just click off of it. And then Facebook's going to start optimizing and learning, hey, if somebody is not licensed to sell insurance, they're not going to complete. So the conversion is going to be lower for people that are not licensed. And so the exact same thing is going to happen on your ads, right? If we're managing your ads, because I'm going to send this into our group. If we're managing your ads, we're just going to do this for you. Once the restriction takes place, if there's even any issue in your account.
And then basically what will happen is Facebook will just optimize for the ages that we specify. So if it's like only for people 50 plus, then if someone who's 40 clicks on it, they're going to click out and not fill the form and it's going to optimize itself. So we can't actually set the targeting on the age coming into March, but you can still just say that on the form or in the ad, even say like, you know, age is 50 to blank. And we've done that on a couple of different accounts and haven't had any problem with it. So that's it. That's what's happening. Not something to freak out about. If you know what you're doing, you'll be totally fine. And if we're running your ads for you, you will 100% be totally fine. So hopefully this is helpful. See you guys soon.
