As 2020 was winding down and news broke about Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 changes as it related to Facebook, its pixel tracking capabilities, and what that meant for advertisers, Facebook began encouraging Business Page admins to verify their website domain(s) inside their Business Managers. Facebook said that domain verification was important if A. You want to have authority over which conversion events are eligible for your domain, B. Your email domain doesn’t match your website domain, and C. You want to manage editing permissions for your ads (You can read more about this here). In this post, we’ll cover the steps needed to verify your domain with Facebook as well as how to grant link editing access to other Facebook Business Pages.
How to Verify your Domain with Facebook
The one requirement that must be in place before you can begin the process to verify your domain with Facebook is to setup a Business Manager for your business. At the time of this writing, Facebook Help links still refer to it as “Business Manager”, but a new, updated interface and a new name – Business Suite – is starting to roll out. Assuming you already have a Business Manager setup, you can continue with the steps below.
From the Business Settings view inside Business Manager, click to expand the Brand Safety tab on the left-hand sidebar. Then choose Domains. Alternately, the direct link is: https://business.facebook.com/settings/owned-domains. Click the blue Add button to add your website domain.
Next, type your domain into the field in the pop-up that appears. You don’t need the https:// nor the www. Then click the Add Domain button to continue.
I needed to refresh my tab after clicking to add my domain. When I did, my screen refreshed to this, and gave me 3 ways to prove I own EliRose.com.
Steps to Prove Domain Ownership
You have 3 options for proving ownership of your domain – DNS verification, HTML file upload, and Meta tag verification. The easiest option is likely to choose Meta tag verification especially if you’ve previously added code snippets like your Facebook pixel code or Google Analytics tracking code to your site.
I chose to add a meta tag to my WordPress theme.
After adding the meta tag to my website’s <head> section, I clicked the green Verify button. After a brief pause, a pop-up saying my domain was verified, showed up.
I refreshed my tab again, and now the red light shows as green, and there are 3 new tabs – Partners, Connected Assets, and Domain Access. The Domain Access tab is an important one to be sure to click over to as it explains further about why you want to control which advertisers can edit your website links for their ads.
Granting Link Editing Domain Access to other Facebook Business Pages
Facebook explains domain verification as “a way for you to claim ownership of your domain in Business Manager. This ownership allows you to control editing privileges of your links and other content to prevent misuse of your domain and to keep bad actors from spreading misinformation.” In its Domain Verification Help link, Facebook lists two of the reasons for domain verification as: A. a way to “edit Link Page Posts that link to content you own—ownership will eventually serve as a means to determine who has access to link editing”, and B. a way “to control who can edit link descriptions on ads pointing to your domain”. As you see when you step through the Domain Access tab options after verifying your domain, Facebook is focused on making sure only the people who own the content or are approved to edit the link content, can edit the meta data that accompanies that link.
You’ll be shown a list of Facebook Pages that have used a link on your website, in an ad. You can choose to leave it at the default setting – that anyone can edit link ads.
You can choose to deny specific advertisers from editing links by clicking on the second radio button, and then choosing which Pages aren’t allowed to from the list provided.
And if you click on the third radio button, you’ll choose to allow only specific advertisers the ability to edit links. Click on the Facebook Pages you will allow from the column on the left. Then click the Add Page button to move that allowed Page to the column on the right.
Once done, click the blue Apply button. Then you’ll be asked to confirm your updates via a pop-up.
At this point, you’ve verified your domain with Facebook and determined which Facebook Business Pages are allowed to edit links from your website when posted to Facebook.
For more information on the Apple iOS 14 update, how it may impact Facebook advertisers, and how best to prepare, I recommend checking out Andrea Vahl’s blog post.
How to Associate a Facebook Business Page with your Domain
From the Domains tab view, click on Add Assets. Then choose your Facebook Page from the list that pops up.
Then your Facebook Business Page will show as a Connected Assets.
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