Tag an ad request for child-directed treatment (TFCD)

You can mark your ad requests to be treated as child-directed. The feature is designed to help facilitate compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Note that you may have other legal obligations under COPPA. Please review the FTC’s guidance 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.

When using this feature, a TFCD (Tag for Child Directed Treatment) parameter will be included in your ad request. The parameter functions to either allow or disallow interest-based advertising and remarketing ads for that content. The parameter does not affect your use of Ad Manager key-values. Consequently, you must ensure that any use of key-values is compliant with COPPA. See our COPPA guidance for more information.

Including the TFCD parameter in an ad request will take precedence over any applicable site-level settings.

The guidelines below describe how to mark your tags as child-directed and include the following topics.

If you're using Google's advertising services and would like to implement child-directed treatment at the site or app level, rather than in your ad requests, please see Tag a site or app for child-directed treatment.

As the content owner in control of your site or app, you generally control how your content is treated with respect to COPPA. 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 our tools to specify a particular treatment.

Google Publisher Tags (GPT)

If you're using Google Publisher Tag (GPT), you can mark an ad request with a child-directed status, compliant with COPPA. Omission of this setting defaults to allowing personalized ads.

Please refer to the GPT developer documentation for the latest code samples.

View the GPT developer documentation

GPT passbacks

Google Publisher Tag allows you to generate tags with “passback” functionality. This functionality can be implemented using a standard Google Publisher Tag written into an iframe. This means you can use the same method, setPrivacySettings().

If using a macro, use either TFCD=1, TFCD=0 or neither. When the creative is served into the page, the %%TFCD%% macro will ‘inherit’ the value from the initial ad request. The ad request to publisher B will be made using the value from the first ad request. Using the %%TFCD%% macro will only work where both publisher A and publisher B use Ad Manager ad serving.

View the GPT developer documentation

Tagless Request

If you're using Tagless Requests, you can mark an ad request with a child-directed status by adding the tfcd=[int] parameter directly to the tag request URL.

You must specify the parameter early in the tag. We recommend that you put it in the first 500 characters. Specify tfcd=1 to mark the ad request as child-directed or tfcd=0 for ad requests that are not child-directed.

Google Mobile Ads SDK

As an app developer, you can indicate whether you want Google to treat your content as child-directed when you make an ad request.

You can set tagForChildDirectedTreatment to indicate whether your content should be treated as child-directed for the purposes of COPPA. Read the developer documentation for Android and iOS for more information.

Google Interactive Media Ads SDK (for video)

On video requests, you can indicate that you want Google to treat your video content as child-directed when you append the tfcd=1 parameter to your ad tag. You can do this with a manually constructed master video tag or using any of the platform-specific IMA SDKs (HTML5, iOS, or Android).

If your player uses Dynamic Ad Insertion, it can also include the tfcd=1 parameter with any video on demand (VOD) or live stream request to pass it to ad requests. When a DAI request includes tfcd=1, any values assigned to the rdid, idtype, or is_lat parameters are removed to comply with COPPA.