Ads in Kids Apps: COPPA, Families and Kids Rules

Putting ads in an app for children is allowed, but the rules are stricter than anywhere else in mobile advertising. Laws limit what data you can collect from young users, and the app stores add their own policies on top. Getting it wrong can mean anything from a rejected update to a removed app or a regulator's attention.

This guide covers the pieces you need to understand: COPPA, Google Play's Families policy, Apple's Kids category, how to tag ad requests in AdMob and what all of it does to your eCPM. It is a practical overview, not legal advice. Laws differ by country and change over time, so speak to a qualified adviser about your own app, and confirm the current store rules in their official documentation.

COPPA in plain English

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is a US law enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. It applies to apps and websites directed at children under 13, and to general services that know they are collecting personal information from under-13s.

The core rule is that you need verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from a child. Personal information includes persistent identifiers, such as advertising IDs, when they are used for purposes like building a profile or serving interest-based ads. In practice, a child-directed app should not serve personalised or behavioural ads to children. Contextual ads, chosen on the content of the screen rather than the user's history, are the usual route.

Other places have their own rules. The EU and UK set ages of digital consent under data protection law, and the UK also has a code on age-appropriate design. If you have users outside the US, check what applies there.

Google Play's Families policy

If children are any part of your target audience on Google Play, the Families policy applies. You declare your target age groups in the target audience and content section of Play Console, and that declaration decides which rules you must follow.

The points that matter most for ads, as they stood at the time of writing:

• Use only certified ad SDKs. Ads shown to children must come from ad SDKs that have self-certified under Google's Families program. Check the current list before you add a network, because not every network in a typical mediation stack is on it.
• No interest-based ads to children. Ads served to children must not be personalised, and remarketing is off the table.
• Ads must suit the audience. Ad content has to be appropriate for children, and ads must be clearly recognisable as ads.
• No deceptive or disruptive placements. Ads must not trick children into tapping, full-screen ads must be closable, and ads must not get in the way of normal use.

Apple's Kids category

Apple runs the Kids category as a curated section of the App Store, governed by its App Review Guidelines. The well-established position is that apps in the Kids category should not include third-party advertising or third-party analytics, with only narrow exceptions for services that meet strict conditions, such as not collecting identifiers. Purchases and links out of the app must also sit behind a parental gate.

For many developers, that means a Kids category app on iOS earns little or nothing from third-party ads and relies on paid downloads or subscriptions instead. If ad revenue is central to your plan, read the current guidelines closely before you choose the category. Apps outside the Kids category that still reach children remain bound by COPPA and by Apple's general privacy rules. Our guide to ATT and iOS ad earnings covers the tracking side.

Tagging requests in AdMob

AdMob lets you tell Google that a request concerns a child, so the ad that comes back follows the rules.

• Child-directed treatment. This tag marks requests as coming from a user who should be treated as a child under COPPA. Google then disables interest-based ads and remarketing for those requests.
• Under the age of consent. A separate tag marks users in the EEA who are below the age of consent, which turns off personalised advertising for them.
• Maximum ad content rating. You can cap the rating of the ads you receive, for example to content suitable for general audiences.

You set these through the SDK's request configuration in your code, and some settings also exist in your AdMob account. Apply them before the first ad request, not after. The AdMob help centre has the current details for each platform. If you mediate other networks, check how each one receives the child-directed signal, because it needs to reach every network that serves. Our guide to mediation explains how a stack passes requests along.

Mixed-audience apps and age screens

Many apps appeal to children and adults alike: a puzzle game, a drawing tool, a family quiz. If children are one of your audiences but not the main one, you can treat users differently by age, as long as you do it properly.

The usual approach is a neutral age screen at first launch. Ask for a date of birth or a year of birth without hinting at the "right" answer. Do not show a message such as "you must be 13 to play", and do not default the picker to an adult age. Then:

• For users under 13, tag requests as child-directed and serve only non-personalised ads from certified SDKs.
• For older users, run your normal consent flow, which our guide to consent messages covers.

Store the answer so that a child cannot simply restart the app and try a different age. Google Play has specific requirements for apps aimed at both children and older users, so check the Families policy for the current wording.

What happens to eCPM

Non-personalised ads usually earn less, because advertisers cannot target on behaviour and fewer of them bid. Our benchmark tables do not carry a separate figure for child-directed traffic, so treat any number here as a starting point rather than a forecast.

A sensible way in is to begin from the education category, which our tables set at 0.85x of the baseline, and expect your child-directed traffic to land lower still, by an amount only your own reports can tell you.

Take a hypothetical app with 5,000 daily users in Tier 1, each seeing one interstitial a day. At $6.80, that is 5 x $6.80, or $34 a day, before any further drop for child-directed treatment. If the real figure lands 30% lower, a placeholder you should replace with your own data, the same traffic earns about $23.80. Model your own figures in the AdMob revenue calculator and compare them with our mobile eCPM benchmarks.

Fill can fall as well, because fewer networks and advertisers are eligible. Our tables assume 88% fill for AdMob in a normal stack, and a kids app with a short list of certified networks may not reach it.

Placement needs extra care too. Children tap quickly and often, so ads near buttons produce accidental clicks, which networks treat as invalid traffic. Our guide to rewarded and interstitial ads covers pacing. In a kids app, lean towards fewer, well-timed placements.

A checklist before you ship

• Declare your target audience honestly in Play Console and App Store Connect.
• Check every ad SDK in the app, including mediation adapters, against the current Families certified list.
• Set child-directed treatment, and the under-age-of-consent tag where relevant, before the first ad request.
• Cap the maximum ad content rating to suit your youngest users.
• Use a neutral age screen if your audience is mixed, and store the result.
• Remove interest-based targeting, remarketing and any data collection you do not need for children.
• Keep ads clear of game controls and navigation.
• Publish a privacy policy that explains what you collect and why.
• Publish an app-ads.txt file so buyers can verify your inventory, as our app-ads.txt guide for Google Play explains.

Once you are live, judge the result on revenue per user rather than eCPM alone. Our guide to ARPDAU and LTV shows how, and our disclaimer explains how to use the estimates on this site.