Meta Pixel Restrictions: What They Mean for Charities & What’s Changing in September 2025

Back in January 2025, Meta introduced new restrictions for Pixels associated with health and wellness content, and many charities suddenly found their tracking capabilities disrupted.

From September 2nd, further policies are being rolled out. They bring the threat that even charities not formally categorised as Health and Wellness could face restrictions on certain custom audiences and conversions.

In this blog, we’ll explain:

• What the original restrictions were.
• How the Health & Wellness category is determined.
• What impact the changes in September could have.
• The answers to common questions and misunderstandings that have been raised (having extensively spoken directly with Meta).

 

 

What happened in January 2025?

Meta began enforcing a policy that limits what data the Pixel can collect if it’s associated with medical conditions or health statuses.

If your Pixel was flagged as being in the Health & Wellness category, you may have noticed:

• You couldn’t utilise custom audiences based on Pixel events, e.g. remarketing to website visitors.
  
• Custom or standard events couldn’t be used for both conversion optimisation and reporting of ad campaigns.
  

It’s important to note, however, that restrictions are applied per domain/subdomain. So, while a single Pixel might be applied across multiple sites, if Meta only deems one (e.g. charity.org.uk) to be associated with medical conditions, you might still have full Pixel functionality for another, e.g. donation.charity.org.uk.

You can identify which domains have been restricted through Events Manager: https://business.facebook.com/events_manager2

 

What was the impact?

In some cases, the impact was substantial – not only affecting campaign performance but also creating stress, confusion and anxiety about the future within the charity community.

When a website was flagged, charities lost the ability to let Meta optimise towards key on-site actions like sign-ups and donations; forcing ads to use less effective strategies like ‘click optimisation’.

The difference in performance can be stark.

Charities have seen costs per acquisition (CPA) increase by 2-3x when forced to optimise for clicks. This is even higher for colder audiences.

There are some other potential solutions available, discussed later.

 

 

What counts as Health & Wellness?

According to Meta, this category applies to products, services, or content related to medical conditions or sensitive health topics, such as:

• Cancer, dementia, arthritis.
• Anxiety or depression.
• Substance use disorders.
• Self-harm or suicide.

How is Meta determining categorisation?

Meta uses AI to scan a page’s content as well as considers the URL naming, using key phrases as context clues. Naturally, these automated checks can often lead to inconsistencies. The exact criteria for how Meta are determining these categorises is not known, and unlikely to ever be made available.

This can lead to some ambiguity as to what actually constitutes Health & Wellness content.

While a page offering advice on breast cancer symptoms and treatments is a more obvious case, pages specific to donation activity might still include health-related terms, but are not promoting health related information per se.

As noted though, restrictions are domain-specific. For this reason, many advertisers have opted to place a new Pixel on a ‘clean’ domain that has more limited content, e.g. a donation-specific page. Whilst this can be successful, this is not always the case and has been a point of frustration.

 

 

Why are some similar sites categorised differently to others?

In recent months, we’ve seen a new category emerge, Health & Wellness – Other. A Meta contact within the nonprofits team confirmed this came into effect some time between March and June 2025.

Importantly, this category does not come with full Pixel restrictions, but rather a lighter set referred to as ‘Core Set-up’.

This new category is not actually discussed in any of Meta’s help articles, but a definition can be found within Events Manager, if you happen to be categorised this way:

The last point is particularly pertinent. This specifies that domains for health-related charities that are fundraising should be categorised as Other and thus not face such severe restrictions.

This subtle distinction could mean your Pixel has been incorrectly categorised. While you can send your Pixel for a manual review, we’ve found that often the decision isn’t overturned – with no further explanation and no option for another review for 30 days.

This is a source of continued frustration, but one we’ve been working closely with Meta on recently. If you feel you have been incorrectly categorised and unfairly restricted, please contact us.

 

So, what’s changing on September 2nd?

Meta will begin flagging individual custom audiences and conversions that “suggest specific health conditions,” even if your Pixel wasn’t already restricted.

This means:

• Custom audiences built from sensitive health-related content may be rejected.
  • This will also prevent lookalikes audiences built from custom audiences from working.
    
• Custom conversions could be denied or removed from campaigns.
  
• You could be flagged before your Pixel is fully restricted.
  

You might have received an email notification from Meta about specific audiences or conversions that will be restricted, but you can also view this in your account within Events Manager:

You may also see a small yellow triangle with an exclamation point within Meta Ads Manager, if your campaigns are utilising either the flagged audiences or conversions.

Meta will not pause your existing campaigns after restrictions begin on September 2nd, 2025. However, unless resolved, any existing campaigns using flagged audiences or conversions will see reduced delivery and performance over time, as those conversions and audiences stop collecting data and thus become unable to guide optimisation.

You can also request a review if you think audiences or conversions have been unfairly flagged. Before doing this, we recommended reviewing both the naming of conversions or audiences (and the URLs used in building audiences or conversions) and removing words or phrases related to health conditions.

 

 

What does this mean for charities?

We’ve seen some confusion around what these restrictions will actually mean. Two questions keep cropping up, which we’ve clarified with Meta:

 

Q: If we’re already categorised as Health & Wellness, with full restrictions, will these new changes affect us further?

A: No, these changes won’t affect you. All custom audiences and conversions will already be limited.

It’s worth noting, if certain custom audiences or conversions do get subsequently flagged, these changes might give a clearer indication of what’s causing the categorisation in the first place.

 

Q: If a custom audience or conversion gets flagged as ‘suggesting specific health conditions’, will the Pixel be subsequently categorised as Health & Wellness and be susceptible to full restrictions?

A: Not necessarily. If some conversion or audiences get flagged, it will just mean the Pixel is placed under ‘Core Set-up’, which does not carry full restrictions.

However, it could still trigger further flags from Meta’s AI and result in the category changing in the future. Unfortunately, it’s not clear how often or under what criteria domains are checked.

 

 

Further changes coming for EU advertisers in October 2025: Politics & Social‑Issues ad ban.

Meta announced that, starting October 2025, it will no longer allow political, electoral, or social‑issue ads in the EU, due to complications from the EU’s Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation.

Key takeaways:

• Meta says TTPA introduces “significant operational challenges and legal uncertainties,” making alternative compliance solutions untenable.
• The decision affects ads that advocate or inform about public policy, elections, or societal issues, which can include charity causes such as homelessness, environment/sustainability, and animal welfare. See more details about Social Issue ads here.
• Meta maintains that these policies only apply within the EU; other regions are not affected by this ban, including the UK.
• EU users and organisations can still post organically, but paid advertising is what’s banned.

 

But there’s still plenty of questions outstanding. Keep your eyes peeled for a part 2 to this blog in the coming days, where we’ll answer all the FAQs that clients have been asking around these updates…