Creative and AI 10 min read
Meta Partnership Ads: Setup, Ad Codes and Permissions
How Meta partnership ads work: creator permissions, partnership ad codes, header identities, placements, and launching them across many ads at once.
Contents
- What are Meta partnership ads?
- How are partnership ads different from regular ads and branded content?
- What permissions do you need from the creator?
- How does a creator create a partnership ad code?
- How do you create a partnership ad in Ads Manager?
- Which placements and objectives support partnership ads?
- Who sees which insights?
- What does Meta say about partnership ad performance?
- What breaks partnership ad setup most often?
- How do you launch partnership ads across many ads without redoing the setup?
- What partnership ads do not fix
Meta partnership ads are ads that run from a creator’s handle, with or without the brand’s account next to it in the header. Meta’s Help Center puts the history in one line: branded content ads are now called partnership ads. Media buyers often call part of this whitelisting, a word Meta does not use.
Every fact about Meta below comes from Meta’s Business Help Center, Instagram Help, Meta’s developer documentation and Meta’s newsroom, checked on 28 October 2026.
What are Meta partnership ads?
Meta’s page About partnership ads defines them as ads that advertisers run with partners: creators, brands and other businesses. The partner’s and/or advertiser’s accounts are featured in the header, and the ad uses signals from both accounts for ranking.
The advertiser needs a Facebook Page or an Instagram professional account. Since September 2026, partnership ads can also run in the WhatsApp Status placement. The ad does not show on the creator’s profile as an ad, but it is listed in the Ad Library.
How are partnership ads different from regular ads and branded content?
The difference is identity and permission.
| Ad from the brand’s Page | Partnership ad | Organic branded content | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account shown | the brand | the partner, the brand, or both | the creator, with the paid partnership label |
| Paid | yes | yes | no |
| Creator approval needed | no | yes | yes, but a separate one |
On the last row, Meta is explicit. Partnership ads are not the same as organic branded content, and allowing a creator to tag you with the paid partnership label requires a permission separate from partnership ad permissions.
“Whitelisting” does not appear on any of the Meta pages checked for this article. Media buyers use it for running ads from a creator’s handle; the closest thing in Meta’s vocabulary is the account-level permission.
What permissions do you need from the creator?
Meta’s page on partnership ad permissions lists two levels, and says creators and partners can revoke them at any time.
| Content-level | Account-level | |
|---|---|---|
| Covers | one specific post, story or reel | the partner’s handle, no existing content needed |
| Granted by | a partnership ad code, or the Allow brand partner to boost toggle on branded content that tags you | a request from the advertiser, accepted by the partner |
| Meta’s suggested use | one-time or short-term promotions | ongoing partnerships |
An account-level permission also lets the advertiser boost the partner’s posts that tag the brand, archived ones included, and include or exclude the partner’s custom audience. On Facebook, the tag has to be the paid partnership label; Instagram also accepts an @mention, a people or product tag, or a Collab.
You send the request from Meta Business Suite: Creator Marketing, then Manage permissions under the Creators tab, then Add partnership. The partner accepts it in Instagram, in Facebook or in the hub itself. Meta’s help pages give that hub two names: Partnership Ads Hub or Creator Marketing Hub.
Two exceptions. If both accounts belong to the same business and an employee has ads access to both, no partnership ad permission is needed. And if an agency runs your ads, Meta says you need to grant it permissions across your Instagram account, Facebook Page and ad account.
A partnership ad permission is technical access only. Meta says it does not set compensation or transfer content ownership: scope, duration, exclusivity and pay belong in a separate agreement with the creator.
How does a creator create a partnership ad code?
On Instagram, the creator opens the post, story or reel, taps the three dots, then Partnership label & ads, and turns on Get partnership ad code. They copy the code or share it by direct message. Facebook offers the same option from the content’s menu.
According to Instagram Help:
- one code can be used by up to 2 advertisers at a time;
- archiving Instagram content does not remove the advertiser’s access through the code;
- archived Facebook content cannot be boosted into a partnership ad;
- turning the code off stops new ads, but active ads using it keep running.
How do you create a partnership ad in Ads Manager?
Meta’s page on how to create a partnership ad describes two paths, both at ad level after you turn on the Partnership ad toggle.
With a code. Paste the ad code, post ID or post URL. That sets the first identity and pulls in the content’s media. Then pick the second identity.
Without a code, under an account-level permission. Open Identities, choose which accounts to show, then boost an existing post or upload new creative.
Either way, the header has three options: both identities, first identity only (single identity), or dynamic identity. Dynamic identity is on by default and picks the option predicted to perform best. Meta then reviews the ad before it goes live.
Who shows up first? Meta’s page on displaying accounts in the partnership ad header is explicit: the first identity has to be the Instagram account that authored the post, even when the brand is the one boosting it. A maximum of 2 identities can show, so on a three-account Collab one of them drops out of the header.
Which placements and objectives support partnership ads?
According to Meta’s page on supported objectives and placements:
| Platform | Placements | Single or dynamic identity |
|---|---|---|
| Feed and Reels | yes | |
| Stories and Marketplace | no, both accounts show | |
| Status | no, both accounts show | |
| Feed, Web Feed, Explore Feed, Explore Grid, Stories, Reels | not mentioned by Meta |
The page reserves single and dynamic identity for Facebook Feed and Reels, and the setup page adds that unsupported placements show both identities. Read strictly, that promises nothing for Instagram: build creative that works with both names in the header.
Almost every conversion location is supported. Meta lists two exceptions. Calls are not supported under any objective that offers them. Under the Leads objective, three conversion locations are excluded: Messenger, Instagram, and instant forms combined with Messenger. Instagram Stories is not supported for partnership ads built with Advantage+ catalog ads.
Formats are filtered too when you start from existing content: no link stickers in stories, 60 seconds maximum for a story, 15 minutes for a reel, and no copyrighted music unless the advertiser holds the rights. Margins follow the usual Meta ads safe zones, and a partnership carousel takes up to 10 cards, like any Meta carousel ad.
Who sees which insights?
According to Meta’s page on measuring partnership ad performance, creators see the same insights they get for organic posts, and businesses see the ad’s performance in Ads Manager, without details only available to the creator.
Meta’s page on content-level permissions says something broader: that advertisers can see all insights on partnered content. The two pages disagree. The safe reading is to count only on the ad’s metrics, and to put any further sharing in your agreement with the creator.
What does Meta say about partnership ad performance?
The number everyone quotes comes from Meta. In a post on its Latin America newsroom, published on 26 March 2026, Meta says that adding partnership ads to business as usual campaigns delivers, on average, a 19% lower CPA, a 13% higher CTR and a 71% higher median brand lift. The footnote gives the method: an experiment run from 14 to 21 June 2025 with about 2,400 advertisers, across all placements, on campaigns that combined regular creative with partnership ad creative. Meta adds that performance is not guaranteed.
Its Advantage+ catalog ads page repeats the 19% for the combination with catalog ads, with no visible method. These are averages Meta published from a one-week test, not a forecast for your account: the measure that matters is your partnership ads against your regular ads, in the same ad sets.
None of the Meta pages checked says how much of a budget should go to the format. In a talk given at Meta, published on 11 May 2026, Nilsen Irmouli, CEO of the creative agency Kreads, said some of his clients put up to 40% of their spend into ads that run from someone else’s account: partnership ads, whitelisting and publishing from media or creator accounts. That is one agency’s figure for some of its clients, not a Meta benchmark.
Mathieu Malige, Apogee’s founder and a media buyer, uses it in his own accounts. In two months, he activated 50 media pages with his best ads. The ads published from those pages took 20% of the ad account’s spend, and he measured a 40% ROAS uplift on them.
What breaks partnership ad setup most often?
Besides mixing up branded content permission with partnership ad permission, and the ineligible formats above, Meta’s pages point to three more:
- Forgetting the agency: it needs permissions on your Instagram account, Facebook Page and ad account.
- A code shared with too many advertisers: it works for up to 2 at a time.
- Publishing before approval: Meta’s developer documentation says a partnership ad created through the API without permission is published in a pending delivery state until the creator approves.
Meta ties error #2446986 to its page on how to create a partnership ad, so that is the page to reread if you hit it.
Meta recommends confirming the permission is still active before you create or publish a new ad. A partnership accepted three months ago may have been revoked since, and the ad you planned no longer has permission behind it.
How do you launch partnership ads across many ads without redoing the setup?
Ads Manager already handles part of it. Meta’s page on adding partnership ads to your regular (business as usual) campaigns explains how to put them in the same ad set or campaign as your regular ads, and lets you edit the first and/or second identity of several selected partnership ads at once. What Ads Manager can and cannot change in one pass is covered in Ads Manager bulk edit limits.
Creating them is still one ad at a time. That is where Apogee, the tool we build, comes in. In its bulk configuration, partnership ads are configured at ad level, with a creator code or a pick from approved partnerships, the identity mode, brand first or creator first, and the header display. For an existing post, Meta’s rule still applies: the first identity is the account that published it, and the Ads Manager preview lets you check. These settings propagate across the batch like the rest of the identity: Facebook Page, linked Instagram account and Threads profile. An ad template saves identity along with destination, copy and tracking, so the setup carries over from one launch to the next.
One cost no tool removes: Meta lists adding a new ad to an ad set as a significant edit, so a partnership ad added to a running ad set sends it back into the learning phase.
What partnership ads do not fix
Everything rests on the creator’s approval. None of the Meta pages checked gives permissions an expiry date, but creators can revoke them at any time: removing an account-level permission pauses running ads, and a creator can stop an active ad from their app. A campaign built on a single creator depends on a decision that is not yours.
The header does not pick the creator for you. A creator whose audience does not match your offer is still the wrong creator with their name on the ad. And technical permission replaces neither the contract nor the rights to the music and footage.
Apogee does not fix that either. It starts from a creator code or a partnership that is already approved: the permission is agreed beforehand, with the creator. And a wrong partner picked for a batch shows up on every ad in that batch.