Adxe reviews the destination as closely as the advertising that leads to it. A compliant creative pointing at a non-compliant destination is non-compliant advertising, and the advertiser is responsible for both.
What the destination has to do
- Deliver what the ad promised, prominently, without needing a scroll or a second click to find it.
- Identify the business behind it — a real name, a way to make contact, and where the market requires it a registered address and company number.
- Publish its own privacy policy, and its terms, refund and delivery terms where it sells anything.
- Load quickly, work on a phone, and work in the language of the market being targeted.
- Serve over HTTPS with a valid certificate.
Cloaking
Cloaking is showing our reviewers, our systems or a publisher something different from what a person clicking the ad is shown. It is the most serious violation in this document, and the only one where the first instance normally ends the account rather than the campaign.
- Serving different content based on IP address, geography, network, user agent, device, referrer or the time of day, in order to hide the real destination.
- Detecting review traffic, automated checks or known reviewer addresses and serving a substitute page.
- A "safe page" shown during review and swapped for the real one afterwards.
- Redirect chains, cookie tests or JavaScript branching whose purpose is to separate reviewers from users.
- Changing the destination of a live creative to something that would not have been approved.
Legitimate personalisation — currency, language, stock availability, a localised phone number — is fine, as long as the offer, the claims and the business behind them do not change.
Redirects and the click path
- Automatic redirects to a domain unrelated to the one that was approved.
- Redirect chains long enough to obscure where a click ends up.
- Landing on a page that immediately triggers a download, a dialler, an SMS or an app-store handoff.
- Breaking or hijacking the browser back button, and trapping a person on the page.
- Opening additional windows, tabs or interstitials the person did not ask for.
The page experience
- Pop-ups or overlays that appear before the content and cannot easily be dismissed.
- Fake system dialogs, virus warnings, battery or storage alerts, and countdowns to nothing.
- Content that is mostly advertising, mostly links out, or has no substance of its own.
- Automatically playing audio.
- A page that requires an extension, a plugin or a download in order to read it.
- Parked domains, placeholder pages, error pages and pages under construction.
Collecting information
If the destination asks for personal details, it has to be honest about why.
- Say who is collecting the information and what it will be used for, before the form is submitted.
- Ask only for what the offer genuinely needs.
- Never collect payment details on a page that presents itself as a quiz, a survey or a giveaway.
- Never imitate the sign-in page of a bank, a platform or a government service.
- Get the consents the market requires — including for cookies and similar technologies — before any tracking runs.
Selling and billing
- A price on the page that differs from the price in the ad.
- Fees, shipping, taxes or handling charges revealed only at the final step.
- A free trial, sample or gift that converts into a recurring charge without the terms being stated before payment details are taken.
- Pre-ticked boxes adding a product, a subscription or a service.
- Cancellation that is harder than sign-up was.
Advertorials and review pages
A page written in editorial style to promote a product is permitted, provided it is honestly labelled and honestly written.
- Label it as advertising or sponsored content, at the top, before the body copy.
- Do not present it as an article by a news organisation, or use a masthead, layout or logo that implies one.
- Do not fabricate reviews, comments, ratings, star counts or reader numbers.
- A comparison or review site must disclose its commercial relationship with the products it ranks.
Keeping the destination compliant
You are responsible for the destination for as long as the campaign runs, including pages you do not operate yourself. If you use an affiliate network, a white-label funnel or a third-party lander, their breach is your breach.
What happens when a destination fails review is described in review and enforcement.