Facebook has made their publisher list available for download for advertisers to view and potentially block unwanted URLs from displaying their ads. The publisher list will be rolling out gradually, so if you don’t see all the options yet it should be available soon.

What Is The Publisher List?

Facebook’s publisher list contains thousands of URLs where your ad might be placed. This list includes all possible placements and is not personalized to your ad’s targeting and settings. The list covers Facebook in-stream videos, Audience Network in-stream videos, instant articles, Audience Network native, banner and interstitial ads and Audience Network rewarded videos.

URLs are being added and removed constantly, so you should check the list on a regular basis. I recommend once a month. When you download the list, you’ll see whether the URL is new to the list by looking at the New to List in Last 30 Days column.

If you see any URLs that you don’t want to display your ads, you can exclude them by adding them to your block list.

How To Download the Publisher List

Method 1:

1. Go to your Ads Manager account
2. Click  in the top left and choose Business Settings from the drop-down menu.
3. Click Block lists on the menu on the left.
4. Click  Manage.
5. Click See Where Ads Could Appear.

Method 2:

1. Go to Business Manager
2. Click  in the top left to open the dropdown menu. Choose Block Lists under Assets.
3. Click Publisher list at the top.
4. Click the blue Download Publisher List button. You’ll see when the list updated below.

How to Read the Publisher List

At the top of the list, there are column headers corresponding to different placements and information. The remaining lines list the URLs and their details.

If you don’t recognize a list entry by URL the Organization/Brand/Content Creator column lists the names of the parent organizations.

The New to List in Last 30 Days column denotes if a URL was recently added to the list. You can filter to view recent additions and update your block list.

Creating Block Lists

A block list lets you prevent your ads from running on specific websites and apps within the Audience Network, eligible videos of Pages included in the Facebook in-stream placement and specific publishers for the Instant Articles placement.

To create a block list, navigate to Block Lists under Assets and click the button to create a new list. Upload a file with the URLs from the Publisher List you want to block.

After you create your block list, it needs to be applied to your ad accounts to start working.

You can choose to apply the block list to all ad accounts (for your whole business) or selected ad accounts. You can also remove the block list from any accounts you applied it to by choosing “Don’t apply to ad accounts now”.

When you create a campaign in Ads Manager, you’ll see your block list automatically applied to your ad accounts at the ad set level, ready to work on your ad.

If you want to see how to setup block lists for other channels, check out this guide!

Have you created block lists for your Facebook ads account? Let us know in the comments below!