Tag an ad request for age treatment (TFAT)

The tag for under age of consent (TFUA) and the tag for child-directed treatment (TFCD) are now deprecated. Instead, use the Tag for age treatment (TFAT). You can mark your ad request using the TFAT setting to manage different age treatments for your ad requests. The TFAT “child” value is functionally equivalent to the TFCD or TFUA child treatment tags.

The age treatment setting is a tool to help you manage your compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC), and the Australia Online Safety Act (AU OSA), or other applicable laws or regulations. 

Learn more about how the GDPR and AADC affect publishers.

Please remember that Google's tools do not relieve you of your obligations under the law. Consult your legal counsel to determine the age treatment settings for your users based on your legal and regulatory requirements. 

About age treatment settings

The following settings let you specify how Google handles ad requests for different age treatments:

• CHILD: Indicates that ad requests should receive child age treatment. Child age treatment is specified by the value 1. This results in specific ad request behaviors, such as:
  • Personalized ads and remarketing are disabled.
  • Requests to third-party ad vendors, such as ad measurement pixels and third-party ad servers, are disabled.
  • Ad-serving protections for children are applied.
  • The Android Advertising Identifier (AAID) and the iOS Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) are not transmitted.

• TEEN: Indicates that ad requests should receive teen age treatment. Teen age treatment is specified by the value 2. This results in specific ad request behaviors, such as:
  • Personalized ads and remarketing are disabled.
  • Ad-serving protections for teens are applied.

• UNSPECIFIED: Indicates that no specific age treatment has been set for ad requests. This is the default state and specified by the value 0.

The following guidelines describe how to mark your tags as age restricted and include the following topics.

Tip: If you're using Google's advertising services and would like to implement age treatment at the site or app level, rather than in your ad requests, learn about Tag a site or ad request for age 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 age 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 for age treatment, compliant with COPPA. Omission of this setting defaults to allowing personalized ads.

Reference 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 TFAT=1 to signal child treatment, TFAT=2 to signal teen treatment and TFAT=0 to signal no specified age treatment. The ad request to publisher B will be made using the value from the first ad request. Using the %%TFAT%% 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 for age treatment by adding the tfat 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. 

Example of Tagless Requests

Example of child treatment
https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/adx?tfat=1&iu=/12345/adunit&sz=728x90&c=12345

Example of teen treatment
https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/adx?tfat=2&iu=/12345/adunit&sz=728x90&c=12345

Example of no specific age treatment https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/adx?tfat=0&iu=/12345/adunit&sz=728x90&c=12345

Google Mobile Ads SDK

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

You can set the age treatment setting to indicate whether your content should be treated as age restricted for the purposes of COPPA. Read the developer documentation for Android and iOS for more information.

Age treatment in mediation

Google Ad Manager mediation facilitates compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Set the age treatment setting in the Google Mobile Ads SDK (Android | iOS) to indicate that your content should be treated as child-directed for the purposes of COPPA. Google makes this signal available to third-party ad networks in Mediation to facilitate COPPA compliance. Learn more about tagging an ad request for age treatment.

Google Ad Manager simply serves as a platform. The advertising relationship is between the mobile app developer and the third-party ad network, so it's the developer's responsibility to ensure that each third-party ad network serves ads that treat the developer's content as age restricted for purposes of COPPA.

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.