January 9, 2025

As you know, Meta has started implementing restrictions on data-sharing for certain categories of websites under sensitive topics. Charities and brands who are in some restricted categories, such as the health & wellness and politics, will not be able to run any lower funnel conversion events at all. For example, purchase or add to cart events.

If you are a charity, log into your Facebook ad account and see if any categories have been assigned to your data source ( website) in Meta Events Manager. Review the categories assigned to you and if you think a category is inaccurate, you can ask Facebook to review it again.

• You will not be able to use conversion events such as add to cart, purchase, website lead, complete registration and more.
• You won’t be able to create custom audiences, lookalikes or retarget audiences s

This includes, CAPI ( Conversion API)

I am a fan of CAPI ( Conversion API and Server Side Tracking) but these will also be affected.

Meta: “This means that all events from your website or app will not be shared with Meta, or will be subsequently removed when received (if it’s sent server-side, for e.g., CAPI), through any of our Business Tools. Please note that this change may impact your campaign performance. The impact you may observe to your campaigns will depend primarily on if and how you are currently using standard events.”

What Action’s therefore can you take?

1. Log into your Facebook ad account and determine if this is going to affect your charities brand. If your charities brand is miscategorised then request a review asap.
2. Review your ad campaign strategy and focus on upper funnel events, for example, the engagement or traffic objectives) .
3. Look at alternative events in order to replace the restricted events. For example, landing page views, donate, phone call and more.
4. Run campaigns on other social media platforms and test how successful they are or not.

Some good news however is if will not effect Facebook Lead generation ads that are use the Meta Instant form as the conversion point. It will however effect fundraising campaigns that are reliant on restricted conversion events.

Overall, if your charity comes under the health and wellness category, its so important to move fast in order to minimise the impact, especially for campaigns reliant on restricted events.

Let me know your thoughts?