Meta, implied health data and advertising impact

What we know about the news from Meta which has led to the fewest recent headlines, but will have a huge impact

Just before Christmas Meta “announced” (and I use the word incredibly loosely here) sweeping changes when it comes to advertising and what data signals it receives.

In what has been a fortnight of huge announcements from the social media giant (ending fact checking in favour of X’s community notes model, cancelling their EDI programme) this one seems to have largely slid under the radar of many despite its impact on both non-profits and for-profits alike.

From this week (13 January 2025) Meta’s pixels and CAPI integrations will stop communicating with Meta if your domain and data fits into any of the 10 categorisations which are deemed to contain implied special category data. If you have an impacted pixel or domain you should have received an email between 9–13 January, letting you know to request a 30-day extension before this policy kicks in.

What do we know so far

1. Reasons for the timing and lack of notice are unclear, other than increasing regulatory pressures particularly in the UK and EU.
2. Impact is at a domain/sub-domain level, not ad account and will include keywords across your website and even in your URL. It will also factor in things like “connection to cause” fields in forms.
3. Restrictions vary by category you’re in, with health being the most restricted and financial services seeing fewer restrictions comparatively
4. UK and EU are harder hit than the US and rest of the world, so may be interesting for those organisations who work internationally.
5. CAPI is impacted in the same way as Pixels despite Meta’s efforts to nudge everyone towards setting it up.
6. Instant forms (lead gen) are not impacted and you can continue to use those as you do currently as it’s an on-platform event.

What can you do about it?

1. Move signals up the funnel (landing page views become clicks, conversions become leads etc) so that Meta can continue to optimise your campaigns based on data it can see within its own walls.
2. Create “clean” subdomains or microsites that don’t contain any words or phrasing which may lead to your categorisation. For a health charity, this may mean omitting the word cancer, or not including case studies for example. This would then also need to be paired with a new pixel too which hadn’t been associated with any restricted domains. So it may mean having multiple clean pixels limited to certain domains rather than one pixels covering multiple to minimise risk.
3. Request Meta review your categorisation — if you believe they’ve got it wrong, you can ask to be reviewed and then a human will take a look. This can be helpful if the only potential triggering copy is in your brand name for example as a human can understand that nuance more than the automated checks.
4. Lean more into custom and lookalike audiences, using first party data and on-platform engagement to build audience groups to either retarget or create lookalike groups of.
5. Meta is an advertising business and needs advertisers’ budgets. If these changes impact your advertising effectiveness on the platform, it’s worth looking to see which other ad platforms could perform for you instead.

How is the charity sector responding?

• I hosted a cross-charity forum on Friday 10 January, bringing together 24 health charities including the likes of Cancer Research UK, Macmillan, Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital Charity, Prostate Cancer UK and more, to share how everyone is approaching the change.
• 12.5% of the organisations on the call only heard about the changes this week, almost a month after the announcement was supposed to have been made to everyone, and a week before the impact is due to hit for many.

• 50% of the charities on the call were appealing their domain categories, asking Meta to reconsider the section they’ve been placed — however, many that have also received rejections shortly after. The next most popular action is to move the aforementioned signals further up the funnel, and to move spend away from Meta.

• In terms of where that budget might move to, the most popular route was to Google — something we are also working towards given our headroom there. With TikTok and YouTube coming in 2nd and 3rd respectively.

• In terms of how it is impacting other organisations, the charities on the call said that on a scale of 1–5, the impact would be 3.8 for where they spend their budgets, 3.9 for how they can effectively report and optimise activity, 3.6 for impact on supporter acquisition performance, 2.9 on their ability to deliver services and educate people, and 3.7 on targeting or excluding the right audiences.

What a start to 2025 in the world of social…