Meta is playing Scrooge, not Santa, with us this year.
From January 2025, Political and Social Issues advertiser will no longer have access to “mid funnel and lower funnel” Meta Pixel Conversion Events and Campaign Optimisation Goals.
What this means is:
The changes apply if you’re a Political & Social Issues Advertiser – i.e. if you have to check the box to add a “Paid for by” disclaimer to your ads, then this change impacts you. There are other categories affected too (including Health) but most of our affected clients are in the political & issues ad category. If you’re not in these categories, no changes, you can stop reading 🙂
For those to whom this does apply:
- You’ll no longer be able to use Meta Pixel Conversion Events, such as Add to Cart, Purchase, Website Lead, Completed Registration, etc.
- This means you will not be able to track and report in Ads Manager on your ads’ website visitors through their purchase, donation or lead journeys on your website *using these conversion events*
- You won’t be able to create Custom Audiences of people who have fired these events, so you won’t be able to retarget those at the bottom of the funnel, and you won’t be able to create Lookalikes of purchasers or leads from the pixel event (though you will still be able to create CAs and LALs from your own proprietary lists and data on the purchasers / leads).
- You won’t be able to run paid campaigns optimised towards any of these goals, e.g. any campaign objectives currently categorised under “Sales”, and some under “Leads” and “Traffic”.
- You will also no longer be able to use CAPI, for any advertisers who have implemented this (to date we had been reluctant to on-board any political & issues advertisers to CAPI for many privacy and technical reasons, and now feel a tad smug in having advised this.)
Political & Social Advertisers will still be able to:
- Have the pixel implemented throughout your site firing Landing Page Views only.
- Our understanding so far is that this will mean you will still be able to create audiences of those people who have fired the Landing Page View event on certain pages, such as a ‘thank you’ page after the person makes a purchase or submits their email address.
This may provide a useful workaround for Audience creation, since we can create Audiences derived from specific URLs, even if the Event is only Landing Page Views. These will *not* however be value-based, meaning we won’t be able to see Purchase or Donation value. So ROAS will need to be calculated client-side. - Optimise your Campaigns for Traffic > Landing Page Views
- Use Meta Lead Gen forms and Optimise your Campaigns for Leads and Completed Registrations from Meta’s own forms (though our current advice to date has been against using these, rather than website-based lead forms – we’ll have to see whether this advice changes post-roll-out)
- Optimise your Upper to Mid-Funnel Campaigns for On-Meta optimisation goals events such as Reach, Video Views, Engagement and Clicks.
- Report on Campaign metrics in Ads Manager as far as Landing Page Views, and potentially other “upper to mid funnel” events.
Next steps:
On this last point, there is still a lack of clarity from Meta on exactly which Events will or will not be included in this ban. Current speculation is that the following Standard Events *will* still be available:
*ViewContent *Donate *App Install *Search
This would provide some options to pivot tracking and optimisation strategies to use these events as proxies or replacements for other events which have been removed.
You’ll notice that Donate is included in this “potentially still usable” list. This of course will have major significance for fundraising organisations if indeed this is still accessible. We’ll update you as soon as we have more clarity on whether this is available to us or not.
Finally, please be prepared that when these changes roll-out there will undoubtedly be some clunkiness, both in terms of Ads Manager functionality and in reporting accuracy.
We anticipate some challenging times in terms of ad builds (you can bet your life there’ll be a zillion bugs) and performance metrics no longer adding up, decreased attribution, etc. So we’ll be grateful for your patience and pragmatism during these tricky early weeks.