Clearing the air on Meta's health & wellness restriction conspiracies

I’m seeing a lot of conspiracies on this Meta ads data restrictions saga for health and wellness brands. I’ve been helping over 50 brands turn on a solutions-setting I built for this restrictions update, so I want to break down what’s real and what’s not here. Because I’m seeing a lot of misinformation being shared.

Yes, this is a big deal.

Yes, Meta’s been pretty vague about how these restrictions work.

And yes, it’s been a long few weeks for myself and our engineering team 😅 

Let’s level-set on why Meta’s doing this.

This is not officially announced. I can only speculate with a little more context than the average person, from working there for almost a decade plus my experience now building tools for Meta’s products.

My hypothesis is they are trying to protect themselves from any legal liabilities with the new HIPAA privacy laws. They are not trying to get anyone or intentionally make life harder. They just want to protect themselves.

Now let’s talk about the different solutions on the internet – what’s real and what’s myth.

🧪Proposed Solution #1: Changing domains

Will this work?
My take — maybeeee?

Why I’m not a fan
The restrictions are happening at the domain level. If you switch to a completely new domain, you might get unblocked for the time being. But it does not mean that they won't flag you again and block you again.

What you can do
Make sure you clean up all the health claims on your site's copy to reduce the risk of your current, or new domain from being blocked.

What you definitely should not do, if you insist on this solution
Do not try any cross-domain jumping. Meaning creating a new website domain, and redirecting all your traffic from your old page to a new page, etc. and so forth. This is bad practice, because you’ll lose the Click ID when users jump across domains — especially if their purchase journey and checkout event are split across 2 domains.

Without the Click ID, you are not passing the conversion attribution back to Meta Ads correctly, thus not training your ads algorithm correctly. So this solution is truly all for nothing.

🧪Proposed Solution #2: Removing words like ‘doctor’ ‘patient’ from your site

Will this work?
My take — also maybeeee?

Why I’m not a fan
We have zero information on how the Meta algorithm works, in terms of deciding which website to restrict and at what level. This means we literally do not know what the algorithm looks for to flag accordingly.

As an engineer, I wouldn’t count on this until we have more information on how this algorithm works at a technical level.

What you can do
You could clean up your website’s copy to avoid any medical claims. This probably doesn’t hurt. But I wouldn’t count on it as an end-all-be-all solution — at all.

🧪Proposed Solution #3: Restricting PII in unblocked events

Will this work?
My take — yet another maybeeee?

Why I’m not a fan
There’s no evidence that Meta is restricting PII sent in unblocked events. I understand that core setup refers to certain custom parameters/URLs in the domain that will be restricted, but there's no evidence or announcement from Meta that they're restricting emails/numbers etc from being sent to unblocked events.

So my reasoning here is the same as above — until we know for sure how they are flagging for this information, this solution might not have any impact.

What you can do

1. Go to your Meta Events Manager Settings

2. Check your Automatic Advance Matching setting

3. You should see whether or not this is blocked

I’ve noticed a few Aimerce brands got this setting blocked. This is what tells me that even if you send PII info (email, phone number, addresses) to unblocked events, they are not used in algorithm training — thus, this might be irrelevant.

🧪Proposed Solution #4: Custom events

Will this work?
In my experience so far, yes!

Why I am a fan
Meta has officially announced that properly registered and compliant custom events are still accepted and operational in their targeting algorithm. This is one way to get your lower level conversion events back.

Things to look out for during implementation

1. Make sure that you don’t rename your customer events the exact same as your standard events

2. Make sure you verify them by manually going through the flow in Meta Events Manager

3. Once you’ve done this, the custom events will be unblocked by Meta

What this means for you, if you’re an Aimerce customer

1. Toggle on custom events setting on Aimerce

2. Switch to using Aimerce_Target as optimization goal in Ads Manager, when you set up the ads campaign

3. Create custom metrics in Ads Manager to evaluate Purchase, CAC, and ROAS.

Will this fix my performance 100%?

Short answer is no.

This is because Meta has only used your standard events to train their algorithm to date. Right now, the only events brands have is page view, view content, and Aimerce_target (or whatever custom event you configured).

Meaning you’re missing out on lower level signals like Add to Cart, Checkout Started, Add Payment Info, Initial Checkout, etc.

There’s no way to get around this because all standard events have been blocked. So you only have Aimerce_Target (or your own custom event) as the optimization goal.

What you can do is build a custom audience based on the customer events, and manually retarget them. While this is not the most ideal, it’s really the only way to get all the lower funnel signals back.

Another thing to take note of — custom audiences only work if you’re dataset is large enough. You could consider Lookalikes if you are not at a meaningful size. Honestly, I think it’s worth trying and testing this.

✌️Here to help you win,

Yiqi