Transcription
All right, good morning ladies and gents, and Happy New Year!
I wanted to film this quick video for you guys to give you an update. We had a couple of people asking us about the Facebook Financial Special Category restriction, or whatever you want to call it. So, I just wanted to film a brief video to update you on what's happening, how we're preparing, and how you can prepare as well.
I'm going to make this little post inside of our school to give you some context. 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 date it was published, but it's relatively recent.
Basically, on Facebook, there are a couple of different things that are classified as a special category. A special category just means that there are different rules and practices that you have to follow to run ads related to that category.
For example, if you run ads about politics, you have to have a disclaimer that says "paid for by" whoever it's paid for. I'm guessing they do that to avoid foreign countries from spending money on ads without anyone knowing who's actually paying for them.
So, there are different rules based on what you're advertising. If you're advertising housing, for instance, you can't discriminate based on age, sex, gender, or whatever. You can't target based on those things.
Now, previously, financial products were not included in this. It was just politics, housing, credit, and employment. But now, they're adding financial products, and insurance is included in this.
They put out a notification, I think it was maybe a month ago or a couple of weeks ago, saying this was going to happen. I got a bunch of messages from people freaking out, comments on 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 in this video, as well as when it's actually going into effect.
Up until this morning, I thought it was going to be in January, but it's not. They said early 2025, and it's going to start in March 2025.
So, if you're watching this in January, when I'm filming it, you have a few months before this even takes effect. Basically, what's going to happen is, with financial products, you're not going to be able to target based on age.
For example, if you sell final expense, you're not going to be able to select 50 plus. If you sell IULs, you're not going to be able to cap it at 55. It will be shown to any age demographic or age group.
Now, again, we have a few months where this isn't even going to be a problem, so you don't need to worry about it right now. In March, I'm going to tell you what we're basically going to do to solve this issue.
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, you know, 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 specify who this is for.
The other cool thing is, even if you get someone who's 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 30 or 40-year-olds, which realistically, based on the product you're selling, you're not going to get a bunch of 30 or 40-year-olds interested in final expense—you might get some of them.
You can just sell them a term policy. Or if you're trying to sell a term or an IUL and a 65 or 70-year-old comes in, you might be able to find an annuity opportunity or just sell them a whole life policy.
So, either way, it's not like even if you get someone out of the ages you want, you can still sell to them. What we're going to do is basically just have a disclaimer on the lead form that says, "Hey, this is only for people ages blank to blank," which is not against Facebook's policy.
Let me show you an example of what that would look like. This is for our company because we run ads for insurance agents. We generate high-intent leads and appointments for you, and if you don't sell 20K per month using these leads, you don't pay.
Then we have this note right here: "This is only for licensed agents. If you're not licensed, leave this page immediately."
What happens is, if someone who's not licensed or doesn't sell insurance comes to this page, they're going to see this and click off it. At least most of them do. They just click off of it, and then Facebook's going to start optimizing and learning that if somebody's not licensed to sell insurance, they're not going to complete the form.
So, the conversion will be lower for people that are not licensed. The exact same thing is going to happen on your ads. If we're managing your ads, I'm going to send this into our group. Once the restriction takes place, if there's any issue in your account, Facebook will optimize for the ages that we specify.
So, if it's 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.
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. You can even say, "Ages 50 to blank." We've done that on a couple of different accounts and haven't had any problems with it.
So, that's it. That's what's happening. It's 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.
Hopefully, this was helpful. See you guys soon!