Making sure that Google and Facebook can scan your page
In order to run ads on any major ad platform you have to make sure that those platforms have access to your destination page. They need this access to scan your page and make sure its content matches with your ad and with their quality standards and policies. Of course those platforms don't send their employees to check out your page manually. Instead they use bots to scan your page. And because these bots are friendly ones, they even tell your page who they are. They do this by sending a header that is specific to them and different from the header of a normal browser.
We have seen cases in which pages specifically disallowed bots to proceed reading their content. In such cases, google would not succeed in scanning and would not allow an ad for that page to run.
So always make sure that bots are never treated any differently than your normal visitors. Also, never redirect your traffic anywhere, that is something that the major platforms would view as a means to deceive visitors and thus disallow.
A normal page will never have an issue with any of this. But you might run into problems if you have very special custom configurations. Luckily, Balloonary scans your pages for these kinds of issues before they become a real problem and gives you a chance to fix them.
Google and Facebook scan each URL that an ad points to. They do that before they launch the ad and also while the ad is running to make sure that users have a good experience.
Make sure that the following User Agent strings, representing different bots (AdsBot Mobile Web Android, AdsBot Mobile Web, AdsBot) are supported by your page:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0; SM-G920A) AppleWebKit (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome Mobile Safari (compatible; AdsBot-Google-Mobile; +http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_1 like Mac OS AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0 Mobile/13B143 Safari/601.1 (compatible; AdsBot-Google-Mobile; +http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html)
AdsBot-Google (+http://www.google.com/adsbot.html)
'facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)',
'facebookexternalhit/1.1',
'facebookcatalog/1.0',
'Facebot/1.1',
'FacebookExternalHit/1.1',
More information on Google bots User Agent strings: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/overview-google-crawlers
We hope the details above will help you straighten things out.
We have seen cases in which pages specifically disallowed bots to proceed reading their content. In such cases, google would not succeed in scanning and would not allow an ad for that page to run.
So always make sure that bots are never treated any differently than your normal visitors. Also, never redirect your traffic anywhere, that is something that the major platforms would view as a means to deceive visitors and thus disallow.
A normal page will never have an issue with any of this. But you might run into problems if you have very special custom configurations. Luckily, Balloonary scans your pages for these kinds of issues before they become a real problem and gives you a chance to fix them.
Here are the technical details on how to fix page scanning issues
Google and Facebook scan each URL that an ad points to. They do that before they launch the ad and also while the ad is running to make sure that users have a good experience.
Make sure that the following User Agent strings, representing different bots (AdsBot Mobile Web Android, AdsBot Mobile Web, AdsBot) are supported by your page:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0; SM-G920A) AppleWebKit (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome Mobile Safari (compatible; AdsBot-Google-Mobile; +http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_1 like Mac OS AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0 Mobile/13B143 Safari/601.1 (compatible; AdsBot-Google-Mobile; +http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html)
AdsBot-Google (+http://www.google.com/adsbot.html)
'facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)',
'facebookexternalhit/1.1',
'facebookcatalog/1.0',
'Facebot/1.1',
'FacebookExternalHit/1.1',
More information on Google bots User Agent strings: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/overview-google-crawlers
We hope the details above will help you straighten things out.
Updated on: 15/03/2023
Thank you!