The Landing Page Compliance Checklist: Why the Destination Fails Review More Often Than the Ad

The most common shape of an ad problem is an advertiser rewriting a headline for the fourth time while the actual issue sits on a page they have not opened in six months. Reviewers assess the destination as seriously as the creative, and on Google the single most common disapproval reason is the destination not working at all.

This is the checklist we run on every landing page before a campaign goes live, and the first thing we run when an established campaign starts getting rejected for no apparent reason. It applies to Meta, Google, TikTok and Snap, and to any market.

Start here: load it as a stranger

Before the checklist, do this once. Open the page in a fresh browser with no cookies, on a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi, from the country you are targeting. Then click the thing the ad told people to click.

A surprising share of rejections resolve at this step, because the page the team remembers is not the page a stranger gets. Cookie walls, geo-redirects, an interstitial, a consent banner covering the offer, a form that fails on mobile, a certificate warning. None of it shows up when you visit your own site logged in from the office.

1. It has to work

• The URL resolves, with no error page and no timeout.
• Valid SSL, with no browser warning on any device.
• No redirect chain. Every hop is a chance for one of them to resolve differently for a reviewer than for a user, which is how well-meaning setups get read as cloaking.
• Loads acceptably on mobile data. A page that times out for a reviewer is a broken destination.
• No malware, injected scripts or third-party tags rewriting the page. Compromised sites get flagged as advertiser problems.
• Back button works and does not trap the visitor.

2. It has to match the ad

Message match is a policy requirement, not just a conversion tactic. The reviewer is checking whether the page delivers what the ad promised.

• The offer in the ad is the offer on the page, at the same price and the same terms.
• The product in the creative is the product being sold, not a category page it lives in somewhere.
• If the ad names a discount, a free trial or a specific outcome, the page states it plainly.
• No bait pricing where the advertised number is the floor of a range that starts higher in practice.

3. It has to say who you are

This is the most frequently missing item on otherwise good pages, and it drives a large share of misrepresentation rejections.

• Legal business name, visible without hunting.
• A real contact route: address, phone or email. Not a chat widget alone.
• Terms and conditions, privacy policy, and where relevant a refund or cancellation policy, all reachable from the landing page rather than only from the homepage.
• Company registration or tax identifier where your market expects it. GST details in India, company number in the UK, VAT identifier across the EU.
• The business identity on the page matches the entity on the ad account. A mismatch here feeds both ad rejections and account-level verification problems.

4. Claims have to be defensible on the page

Reviewers assess claims on the destination as well as in the ad, and a page is where most of the unsupportable ones live.

• Health, income, results and timeline claims are evidenced, qualified, or removed.
• Testimonials are real, attributed, and not implying typical results if they are not typical.
• Before-and-after imagery is used carefully or not at all. It is a standing risk on every platform.
• Statistics cite a source the reader can check.
• Superlatives like best, number one, guaranteed and fastest are substantiated or cut.
• Countdown timers reflect a real deadline. Fake scarcity that resets on refresh is a deceptive practice.

More on where the line sits in the claims and copy guide.

5. Data collection has to be honest

• The form asks for what the offer needs and no more. Asking for a national ID number to download a PDF reads as a privacy violation.
• Consent is not pre-ticked, and consent for marketing is separate from consent to deliver the thing being requested.
• A cookie and tracking consent mechanism that actually gates the tags it claims to gate. In the EU this is both a legal requirement and, increasingly, a conversion data quality issue.
• The privacy policy describes what you genuinely do with the data.
• No dark patterns in the unsubscribe or cancellation path.

6. Category requirements have to be present

If your product sits in a gated category, the page carries obligations the creative does not. Missing these is a rejection even when everything else is perfect.

• Age gate where the category and market require one, set to the local legal age rather than a single global floor.
• Risk or responsible-use disclosures, in the format the market specifies. Some markets mandate a size, not just a presence.
• Licence or registration details displayed where the regulator requires it.
• Mandatory wording rendered legibly on mobile, not shrunk into a footer.
• The domain is directly owned and controlled by the business. Free platforms, host-owned second-level domains and third-party subdomains are increasingly ineligible in gated categories.

Which categories are gated, and where, is covered in the restricted products guide and the country matrix.

7. The page has to be the same page for everyone

This is the one with the worst consequences if you get it wrong, so it is worth being explicit.

• No content that changes based on referrer.
• No serving a different page to crawlers than to users.
• No geographic or device-based switching that hides something from review.
• No JavaScript that rewrites the offer after the page has been assessed.

Some of this gets built with entirely innocent intent, usually to keep a page compliant in one market while running a different offer in another. The platform does not read intent. On Google it sits under circumventing systems, which suspends on detection with no warning sequence. If you need different content per market, use different URLs.

A note on established campaigns that suddenly fail

When a campaign that has run for months starts getting rejected with no creative change, the cause is almost always one of four things, in this order: the site changed, a third-party script changed, a policy changed, or the account got reclassified into a category with stricter destination requirements.

Check them in that order. Teams tend to assume the policy changed, because that is the explanation that requires nothing of them, and it is the least common of the four.

Related

Start with why ads get rejected across every platform for the wider diagnostic. If the account rather than the ad is the problem: advertiser verification and account structure and risk containment.

We run this checklist as part of a paid ads audit, and rebuild pages to it inside landing page design.