Big changes to how Meta tracks paid ads by charities are here: what you need to know and do

Do I need to care about this?

If you are a charity or campaigning organisation that works on health, social or political issues, and you run paid ads on Meta platforms, then yes!

Your ads are probably set up to use the Meta pixel or conversions API to track what people who click on your ads then go on to do on your website. Whether that’s signing a petition, donating, or taking another kind of action. This data is fed back to Meta which helps power the algorithm and find the best people to show your ads to, improving their performance.

But Meta is now restricting the use of that tracking for some customers, across some tracking events. That’s not good news for some of your paid campaigns – but don’t panic!

This short guide explains what has changed and what you need to do next.

What’s changed?

From January 2025, Meta is rolling out restrictions on pixel and conversions API event data that can be collected from some customer websites within the mid to lower end of the funnel. These events include ones like ‘complete registration’, ‘lead’ and ‘purchase’.

The categories of customer websites it’s restricting include health, topics related to social or political issues, race, sexuality, gender identity, refugee status or nationality, trade unions or personal hardship. The full list is here and it says it’s not exhaustive.

So far it seems to be mostly organisations in the health sector that are actively affected. But we expect this will gradually roll out more widely in the coming days and weeks.

Upper-funnel events can still be used. These likely include ‘PageView’, ‘ViewContent’, ‘App Install’, ‘Search’.

What does that mean?

  • If affected, you won’t be able to run Meta ad campaigns where the goal is conversions and conversion events are leads, complete registrations or purchases. Higher-funnel objectives like awareness, engagement, and traffic will not be affected.
  • You also won’t be able to build retargeting or lookalike audiences based on restricted events.

How do I know if our campaigns are affected?

You will get an alert in your Meta business manager account in the Events section.

Message alert reads 'Restrictions on data sharing starts January 2025. One or more websites or apps are in categories with restrictions that may start in January 2025.'

It will list out all the domains affected, with the categories Meta has assigned to those domains.

What should we do in the short term?

  1. Check your Meta business manager account to see if your Events have been categorised as restricted.
    •  If they haven’t – good news for now! But keep an eye on them.
    •  If they have, pause any live campaign while you make a plan.
  2. If you think your domain has been wrongly categorised you can ask for a review.
    • If it’s rejected you can’t ask for another review for 30 days.
  3. Edit your ad campaigns – here’s our current suggestions of what to try:
    • Change the setup of your campaign to optimise for traffic > landing page views, and set the landing page to be the thank you page for sign-ups or donations
    • For lead gen campaigns, consider testing ads optimised for traffic against meta in-platform lead gen forms, which aren’t affected by pixel event restrictions.
    • Where new leads is your primary goal this could work well, but the downside is you would lose out on daisy chain conversions built into your website journeys, such as donations or shares.

What should we do in the medium term?

  1. Test setting up separate domains as a workaround
    • Meta categorises domains separately, so in theory a domain that doesn’t contain much content on the restricted categories e.g. a donate or sign up domain may not get flagged. We don’t know yet how likely this is to work in practice.
  2. Monitor campaign performance
    • Keep a close eye on impacted campaigns to see how it affects your key performance indicators like cost per lead, cost per donor and the volumes you achieve.
    • Use data from CRM as your point of truth rather than Meta data which is likely to be even more inaccurate than before.

Silver linings

Good news – if you are running a digital mobilisation programme that’s geared towards building your first party supporter data (such as email address or phone numbers) you are already on the right tracks to ride out these changes.

  • First party data (i.e. email and SMS lists) will only become more valuable as privacy policies like these are scaled up, so lead generation should still be a critical part of your digital programme. We’ll all just need to adapt how we do it!
  • You can still use this first party data to create lookalike audiences for targeting on Meta

We’re in this together

The digital landscape is ever changing and we’ve coped with big shifts before – anyone remember the days before GDPR and when you could reach social audiences organically?

At Forward Action we exist to help our partners do world-changing digital, and we’ll share updates and ways to overcome this latest challenge as soon as we start getting results and insights in.

Sign up to our emails to get the latest news, or if you’d like advice or support we are always happy to chat.
hello@forwardaction.uk