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How Block protects Meta ads

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Tapper Block protects Meta ads with an audience, not with IP addresses.

How it works

  1. Someone clicks one of your Meta ads and lands on your website.
  2. The monitoring script checks the visit against your entity's detection rules: click thresholds, detection features and country rules.
  3. If the visit is invalid, Tapper signals it through your Meta pixel, and Meta adds the person to the custom audience Tapper - Invalid Traffic Audience. Tapper creates this audience in each Meta ad account when you connect it.
  4. Every ad set you protect excludes that audience, so Meta stops showing those ad sets to the people in it.

Connecting a Meta account protects no ad set. You switch ad sets on yourself: see Protect Meta ad sets: Protect all or one at a time. People join the audience as Tapper flags them and stay 90 days by default. Your ad sets keep the same exclusion, so new detections do not edit them again.

What your ad account needs

  • A workspace with Block.
  • A Facebook profile with Advertiser or Admin access to the ad account, and ads management allowed when Meta asks during sign-in.
  • A Meta pixel on the ad account. Without one, Tapper cannot create the audience and the account does not connect.
  • Meta's Custom Audience terms accepted for each ad account. When you tick an account while connecting, Tapper shows Accept the terms on Meta.
  • The monitoring script on your landing pages.
  • The ad_id URL parameter on your ads. See Add the ad_id parameter to your Meta ads.

Details and error messages are in Before you connect Meta: permissions, the pixel and the Custom Audience terms.

Which ads Block can cover

Tapper judges visitors on your website, so it needs ads that send people there. Ads that keep people inside Meta, such as video view campaigns, lead form ads and awareness or impression campaigns, give Tapper no visit to check. An ad account that runs only these cannot be protected. In a mixed account, Tapper learns from the ads that reach your site, and you can switch protection on for any ad set, including ones whose ads stay on Meta.

What changes in your Meta ad account

A protected ad set lists Tapper - Invalid Traffic Audience under Audience controls in Ads Manager. Switching the ad set off removes it. Tapper uses its Meta access to list your ad accounts, read spend, create the audience and attach or remove it per ad set.

The first exclusion changes the ad set's targeting, so Meta may review its ads and the ad set may re-enter learning. See Meta ads and the learning phase after you turn protection on.

What it changes for your results

Meta usually charges per 1,000 impressions, so invalid traffic costs you through the people your ads keep reaching. Protected ad sets stop spending impressions on bots, click farms and other invalid sources, and repeat bots stop draining your daily budget. To measure it, pick Meta on the dashboard's platform toggle and read ROAS (revenue divided by spend).

Block tracking pixels for invalid traffic, a switch on the rule set's Detection features tab, keeps invalid sessions out of the signals ad platforms optimize on. It starts off, marked Recommended: On. See Pixel Guard: keep invalid sessions out of your ad platform signals.

What you see in Tapper

The Meta Ads page (Setup > Ad accounts) has three tabs: Ad accounts, one row per account; Ad sets, with the Protection switches; and Invalid traffic audience, one row per account audience, where Keep each visitor for sets how long people stay, from 1 to 540 days.

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