bypass restrictions on health and wellness category restriction on meta/facebook
Facebook has started placing advertisers into categories like health and wellness, financial service, personal hardship, nationality, politics, race, and others.
Advertisers in these categories may face data restrictions, such as being unable to send lower funnel events to Facebook. So no ability to send purchases, initiate checkouts, leads, or scheduled calls. The health and wellness category seems to be the one hit the most and hit the hardest so far.
So there are a solutions that I've seen passed around and have advised people to try.
The most common solution - and the one I've seen work the best - is to use custom events.
Remember, we are restricted from sending STANDARD purchase events to Facebook.
But you can still fire a custom event when someone purchases.
Just give your custom event a generic name that doesn't indicate any health info (like “lead_success” and not “BoughtDiabetesBook”).
If Facebook is receiving this custom event, they can go to the FTC or FDA or HHS and perhaps have a plausible case that it is not health-related sensitive information.
And that's all they care about. They don't care that someone purchases on your site - they just want to protect themselves legally.
I do have media buyer colleagues who have been advised that custom events are considered circumventing policies, but I have heard from others that it is not.
(Like I said earlier - it's chaotic and I don't believe anything I hear from anyone.)
I personally believe custom events won't be an issue based on the little documentation I've seen from Facebook - and based on the common sense that Facebook just wants to protect themselves legally.
Making sure custom events work:
There's a big problem with a custom event though.
When you use a standard purchase event, Facebook can easily optimize for it - because it understands what a purchase means.
Even if you had a brand new account with a brand new purchase-optimized campaign, Facebook would still understand to go after buyers.
It knew what that standard event meant.
But with a custom event, Facebook has to get enough data to understand who is triggering that custom event.
If you just fire up a campaign optimizing for a custom event right off the bat, Facebook may be really confused about who to show the ad to.
It may take a good deal of spend to get a good deal of data before Facebook can properly optimize.
so, If you're not restricted now, set up custom events immediately and begin getting data on those custom events while you still run your standard purchase-optimized campaigns.
Feel free to ask if you have any questions.
Kind Regards
