Meta’s recent announcement of new content moderation policies was rightfully front-page news, but not their only critical announcement. Meta is also rolling out new advertising policies that will change charities’ campaigning abilities in the UK and EU. The following is based on information available as of the 9th of January 2025. We will host a Live Q&A on Monday, 20th of January at 5 pm GMT. Sign up here.
Q: What’s happening?
If you, like many others, are trying to understand the true impact of Meta’s Core Setup rollout this January, let’s start with the basics.
In a move to edge further away from collecting sensitive data, Meta has created a list of restricted categories that will no longer pass data back from external websites. The categories that will affect non-profits most are likely to be Healthcare, Nationality, and Personal Hardship, however, the list spans quite extensively beyond that.
The full list of data that will have sharing restrictions include:
- 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 our Community and Advertising Standards (examples include hate speech, violence, and illegal activities).
- Politics: Is associated with members of a specific political party, or 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.
Q: How do I know if my organisation falls into one of these categories?
Advertisers already flagged by Meta as falling into one of the above categories will have received an email alerting them to the coming changes. This will give you 7 days warning of this change coming into effect in the platform.
If you have not received an email, but think you fall into one of these categories, you can check your categorisation in Business Manager. Under the ‘Data Sources’ tab in the Events Manager, you will now see the option to ‘Manage Categories’, where — should your organisation be bucketed into a restricted category — this will be evident.
Advertisers can ‘request a review’ of the categorisation of their event source, as well as appealing for a 30-day extension, in order to prepare for the changes. From what we understand, if your categorisation is clear and your site does fall into one of those listed as restricted, the appeal is unlikely to be successful. Regardless, we encourage clients to take action to cover all bases.
It’s important to note that enforcement of this is at Meta’s discretion. They decide whether your site falls into a restricted category or not, and some advertisers may be informed later than others. So if your digital programme relies heavily on Meta, and you think your organisation falls into the above categories, it’s wise to spend some time understanding the changes and take precautionary actions.
Q: What does this mean in practice?
Organisations falling into the above categories may lose audience and conversion data currently passed back from your website to Meta. This means:
- Any audiences made up of collected website data, e.g. retargeting, will no longer be available.
- Some events that fire on website actions are no longer going to be recorded in Meta. Restricted advertisers will still be able to use the PageView, ViewContent, App Install, Search, and Donate standard events, as well as create custom events as long as they do not send any restricted data back to Meta.
Several lower-funnel standard events will be disabled, including the Purchase event. Fundraising conversion campaigns running can configure the Donate event to track when someone makes a contribution, but will no longer be able to pass donation value data back to Meta.
- This is significant, as it not only affects your reporting in Meta but also the Meta algorithm. The machine learning models used for learning and optimisation will only be able to optimise based on whether a donation occurred, and not based on value. Any optimisation for high-value donation and lead generation campaigns will need to happen manually.
Awareness and engagement campaigns, or in-platform lead-generation and donation campaigns, remain unaffected.
Q: When does this come into effect?
Given the potential ramifications of these changes – and open questions as to whether and how individual advertisers will be impacted – Meta is offering the option to request a 30-day grace period to adjust live campaigns to abide by the new restrictions.
By January 13th 2025, Business Manager admins will receive an email and in-platform notification that restrictions will take effect in seven days, with an option to request a 30-day extension. Be on the lookout for these notifications to ensure you request the extension.
Q: I’m affected, what can I do?
Minimising the impact is possible. To ensure your fundraising programmes don’t take a hit, here are some steps:
- Expect some uncertainty. Any time Meta has rolled out a major policy change like this one, it’s come with changes, rollbacks, and inconsistencies. While this is the best information we have and comes directly from the source, it’s always best to prepare for things to change as the new policy fully comes into effect.
- First-party data remains as important as ever. Ensure that any website-based audiences are (where applicable) replaced with audiences based on first-party data. This may also require charities to create new data capture strategies on their site to capture interested audiences who don’t convert.
- Create “Donate” and custom conversion events. For campaigns that are set up to use Lead or Purchase events, make sure those are reconfigured to use the Donate event or a relevant custom conversion event. Ensure that those events are implemented correctly in both ad campaigns and on website pages – which can be reviewed in the Meta Events Manager.
- Note: it remains to be seen whether this method of reconfiguring conversion tracking will remain available in the long term, and whether or not in the long term there will be a way to pass donation values through. At the time of writing, Meta has confirmed to us that ‘Donation’ events are a compliant way to pass donation conversion data into the platform for fundraising campaigns.
- Note: it remains to be seen whether this method of reconfiguring conversion tracking will remain available in the long term, and whether or not in the long term there will be a way to pass donation values through. At the time of writing, Meta has confirmed to us that ‘Donation’ events are a compliant way to pass donation conversion data into the platform for fundraising campaigns.
- Manual Optimisation of conversion campaigns. For Meta campaigns optimising towards website conversion (e.g. donation), think about how you can utilise upper-funnel objectives to create warm audiences and begin to test conversion asks manually, monitoring campaign efficiency and performance.
- Ensure your UTM tracking is rock solid. As we lose sight of platform attribution and conversion data, GA4 and CRM data become our source of truth for how Meta continues to perform.
- As before, diversify your media plans and reduce reliance on Meta. This has been the conversation on everyone’s lips for a few years now, and this additional data limitation highlights why.
Conclusion:
This move by Meta will likely improve user privacy, and help protect vulnerable individuals; this in essence should be encouraged across online advertising. For fundraisers, Meta has dealt another blow to the efficiency of raising valuable income through this channel. It’s still too early to assess the full impact on financial returns driven by the channel, but the change reinforces best practices that have always been a priority to advertisers — understanding user behaviour, testing content on your landing page, and diversifying your channel mix to safeguard the future of your programme.
Over the past 12 months we’ve seen lower funnel channels match or exceed Meta’s ability to drive strong performance in terms of donations volume and ROI; should this move continue to impact performance to the extent that investment is questioned more seriously, there are plenty of options to keep your channel mix broad. This ultimately incentivises and accelerates the channel diversification that should be happening anyway to safeguard fundraising programmes for the long term. For more discussion on what this all means (until the next Zuckerberg update), join us for a live Q&A on Monday the 20th of January 2024, at 5 pm GMT / 12 pm EST — sign up here or contact us to discuss how we can help.