Meta Ads Tracking Changes: how to adapt to new health, social, or political issue restrictions

What’s changing about Meta tracking?

Currently, you might use the Meta pixel or conversions API to track user actions after clicking on ads, such as signing petitions, making donations, or taking other actions. This data helps Meta’s algorithm optimise ad performance by identifying the best audiences to target.

Starting January 2025, Meta will restrict the collection of pixel and conversions API event data from certain websites, specifically affecting mid to lower funnel events. These restricted events include ‘complete registration’, ‘lead’, and ‘purchase’ actions – essential to the optimisation process for most organisations!

Meta is making these changes as they don’t want information about people shared around sensitive issues.

The restrictions apply to websites dealing with health, social or political issues, race, sexuality, gender identity, refugee status, nationality, trade unions, or personal hardship, though the full list is not exhaustive.

Data source categories that may have certain data sharing restrictions include, but are not limited to:

• Health and wellness: Is associated with medical conditions, specific health statuses, or provider/patient relationships (for example, a patient portal or wellness tracker for depression)
• Financial service: Provides financial tools, consultation and/or services, consumer credit reports
• Unsuitable content: Contains topics related to unsuitable content, including content that violates Meta’s Community and Advertising Standards (examples include hate speech, violence and illegal activities)
• Politics: Is associated with members of a specific political party, political position or contains topics related to a political issue
• Race: Is associated with individuals of a specific race
• Religion: Is associated with individuals with specific religious or spiritual beliefs and practices
• Sexuality: Contains topics related to sexuality or sexual orientation
• Gender identity: Is associated with individuals of a specific gender identity
• Nationality: Is associated with individuals of a specific citizenship status, immigration status or refugee status
• Trade union: Is associated with members of a trade union
• Personal hardship: Is associated with individuals likely facing personal hardship

Meta has said that this list is not exhaustive and may evolve over time.

How could these Meta tracking changes affect you?

As the screenshots above hints at, if you’re affected by these changes you will face two main limitations:

1. You will be unable to run Meta ad campaigns where the goal is conversions and conversion events involve leads, complete registrations, or purchases.
2. You will also lose the ability to build retargeting or lookalike audiences based on restricted events, which is a shame as we’ve seen these perform well over time. However, higher-funnel objectives like awareness, engagement, and traffic will remain unaffected.

This is a big change and one that will have a large impact on charities relying on Meta’s tracking to optimise their campaigns, as shown in this chart by Dan Papworth-Smyth, who recently ran a group workshop for charities affected by these changes:

You can read Dan’s full write up of his workshop here.

How do you know if Meta tracking is restricted for you?

To determine if your organisation is affected, you should check your Meta business manager account’s Events section, where alerts will list affected domains and their assigned categories.

If you’ve been restricted, you’ll also receive an email from Meta detailing which pixels and domains have been affected.

The email is copied in full at the bottom of this article, but here is a screenshot of what you’ll see in the Meta Business Manager for any affected accounts.

If you believe your domain has been wrongly categorised, you can request a review, though rejected reviews cannot be appealed for 30 days.

If you have an impacted pixel or domain you should have received an email letting you know to request a 30-day extension before this policy kicks in.

What do you need to do to adapt to these Meta tracking changes?

If affected, we recommend you take immediate action by pausing live campaigns and developing a new strategy.

As a next step, you can adapt by modifying your campaign setups to optimise for traffic and landing page views, setting thank you pages as landing pages for sign-ups or donations. You can also test using Meta’s in-platform lead generation forms, which aren’t affected by pixel event restrictions.

Once these have been looked at, you should consider testing separate domains as a workaround, as Meta categorises domains individually. For example, a domain focused solely on donations or sign-ups, without content related to restricted categories, may avoid being flagged. 

Should you stop using Meta, Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads?

As Dan Papworth-Smyht’s writeup shows, many organisations are considering moving their ad spend elsewhere:

But despite these challenges, organisations with strong first-party data collection programmes are well-positioned to weather these changes.

Email lists will become increasingly valuable as privacy policies become more restrictive, making lead generation an essential component of digital programmes.

If you need any support in adapting your paid media strategy based on these changes, the Empower paid media team is here to help. Just email us at hello@empower.agency to get the ball rolling.

Our friends at Torchbox, Forward Action and Platypus Digital have also written about this issue, so it’s worth taking a look at their writeups for more advice.

Meta Ads Tracking Changes: The Full Email

Important: One or more of your websites or apps are in a category with restrictions

Hi Ben Matthews,

To help ensure the data you send to Meta is in compliance with our Meta Business Tool Terms, we’ve categorized data sources such as websites and apps associated with your business tools. Depending on the content of the data source, Meta may assign a category with data restrictions.

We’re writing to inform you that at least one of the data sources sending events to your Meta Business Tool is in a category with data sharing restrictions.

Meta Business Tool: [Your pixel name and ID]

Specifically, some data is now blocked in the European Region and has new data sharing restrictions enabled, such as core setup and/or blocking of some standard events.

The data source is in a category with restrictions because it:

• Is associated with a specific medical condition, health status or relationships between patients and providers

When your data source is in a category with restrictions, performance may be impacted for any ads optimizing on blocked events received from impacted data sources. You will also receive warnings about affected campaigns in the Ads Manager Campaigns table and when you create or edit campaigns.

Review your data sources to make sure they’re in the right category. If you think they aren’t, you can ask us to review them in Events Manager.

Note: We can use the data source’s category to help us determine and restrict certain kinds of information you can share through Meta Business Tools.

Learn more

Review source categories

Thanks,

The Meta Business Team