Update on Meta’s Health & Wellness Data Restrictions Rollout ⚠️

TL;DR

Meta is now automatically applying Health & Wellness categorization or enabling Core Setup for domains — both of which restrict your ability to optimize and measure performance properly. These changes are happening silently, without any notification, and they are crushing ad efficiency, and thus throttling ad spend, for many brands.

We were alerted back in Q4 2024 that this would be coming into effect in early Q1, but that we’d be notified and given some form of heads up on how to address it for impacted brands. We actually hadn’t seen any fallout in Q1, but H&W nightmares have started ramping up this month…silently.

The Background: A Surge in Performance Volatility

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed strange volatility across some major Meta ad accounts we manage - particularly in the wellness and supplement space.

After digging deep across multiple client accounts, and escalating to Meta reps, I uncovered something deeply frustrating:

Meta has started silently categorizing brands as “Health & Wellness” or enabling Core Setup — triggering strict data restrictions that undermine the backbone of performance marketing.

Neither brand-side reps nor agency reps were notified.

These are brands with seven-figure monthly budgets — and suddenly, their best-performing channel was underperforming with no obvious reason why.

What Are These Restrictions?

Let’s break down both:

🏷️ Health & Wellness Categorization

Once Meta classifies your domain as Health & Wellness, it imposes restrictions including:

• Inability to optimize for bottom-of-funnel (BOF) events

• Stripping of URL parameters

• Campaign optimization blind spots

• Limited targeting precision

This label can be seen in Events Manager — but you likely won’t be notified when it happens.

🛑 Core Setup: ON

If your Core Setup is turned ON (also done silently), Meta will:

• Strip custom parameters from URLs

• Impose black box restrictions on your data

• Block BOF event optimization in some cases

• Limit your ability to measure and attribute properly

And again — no alert, no notification. Just damage to your results.

Here’s What We Know (and Don’t Know)

After conversations with actual Meta reps and internal digging, here’s what we’ve uncovered so far:

• Meta is silently rolling out Health & Wellness categorization and Core Setup activation.

• There’s no visible timestamp to know when your domain was affected.

• Most Meta reps have no insight into when or why this happens.

• The impact varies — from full removal of BOF events to partial campaign degradation.

• Brands with both rep coverage and large spend have been hit without warning.

• The appeals process is weak, long (7–14 days), and likely won’t result in reversal.

• You can’t even include a narrative in the appeal — it’s a one-click "request review" button.

• It’s unknown if any assets can be changed to get unflagged.

• Reps themselves are escalating internally with no clear or timely answers.

How to Check if You’re Affected

✅ Check Health & Wellness Categorization

1. Go to Events Manager

2. Click Settings

3. Scroll to “Manage data source categories”

4. Click “Manage”

5. If you see your domain listed with a category like “Health & wellness – other,” you’ve been flagged.

✅ Check Core Setup Activation

1. Go to Events Manager

2. Click Settings

3. Scroll to “Data Restrictions”

4. If it says “Core Setup: ON” — you're impacted.

If you’re impacted and go to ViewContent or Purchase events in Events Manager, check Sampled events and you’ll notice that all of your URLs are truncated down to site URL only (aka no URL parameters!)

Why This Is So Concerning

This is arguably the most opaque and destructive change I’ve ever seen Meta roll out for health-related brands.

• No communication to brands or reps

• Minimal documentation or proactive education

• Massive media inefficiency without warning

• Budget cuts happening across multiple brands

• Eroded trust between Meta and advertisers

Worst of all, many impacted brands have slashed spend — which ironically hurts $META ( ▼ 0.6% ) ’s own bottom line. This could materially affect their quarterly earnings.

What You Can Do

1. Check your domains today using the instructions above.

2. Escalate internally to your Meta rep (if you have one).

3. File an appeal if impacted - even though success is rare.

4. Advocate for better tools to monitor categorization and data restrictions.

5. Document everything - date of changes, rep conversations, screenshots.

6. Get in touch with a server-sided tracking solution - I recommend Blotout

If you run an agency: build daily workflows to check client Event Managers for status changes until an actual Meta-native solution rolls out.

Final Thoughts

There’s something strange brewing at Meta regarding ‘Health & Wellness’ brands. While I’m grateful our reps are going to war for clarity, the lack of transparency from Meta as a company is unacceptable.

This can’t go unaddressed. Meta must fix the communication gap, improve appeals, and provide transparency - especially for high-spend advertisers fueling their ad platform.

If your performance has tanked recently, this might be the hidden reason.

Resources & References

• Meta Business Tools: Core Setup FAQ

• Meta Data Source Categorization

• My Tweet Thread on This Topic

I welcome all feedback. Good, bad, everything in between.

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