Facebook ads poor performance: advice from an ex-Facebook engineer

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Happy weekend in advance Shopify Superstar, 

If you sell anything that remotely relates to health or wellness and you advertise on Facebook, you may have seen your ads tank since the beginning of FEB. If so, this update is for you.

Facebook/Meta recently implemented rules for advertising health and wellness products, and it’s been a bloodbath for lots of stores advertising on Facebook. 

Ex-Facebook engineer (Yiqi Wu) has been helping stores fix their ROAS and has actually been helping businesses solve these problems. She’s been able to explain what’s actually working and what’s getting accounts flagged.

First of all, if your account relates to any of these areas, you’re likely to be affected and your account has probably faced some level of restriction. 

• Skincare brands (even if you don't make medical claims)

• Dental practices

• Supplement companies

• Maternity/baby products

• Sleep aids, stress supplements

• Basically anything health-related that Meta decides to flag

What's Working

1. You need to understand exactly how Meta has restricted your account. 

• Which website addresses are being blocked?

• Is Core Setup On?

• Can you still turn on automatic advanced matching in Pixel Settings?

Answering these questions tells you what data Meta is and isn't allowing you to collect (for example, if lower funnel events like “Add to Cart”, “Purchase” etc are blocked from restricted domains, or if the URL parameters after your domain got stripped)

2. Implement custom events (without getting banned)

Once you know where the problem is, you need to track customer actions on your website (like adding a product to their cart or making a purchase) using "custom events" that you create.

Here’s what’s Yiqi has tested and found to be working: 

javascript
Copy
// DON'T use these names (will get flagged):
health_purchase
medical_checkout
wellness_conversion

// DO use neutral names:
Aimerce_Target// For Purchase
Aimerce_API// For Add Payment
Aimerce_CKO// For Checkout
Aimerce_ATC// For Add to Cart
Aimerce_SUB// For Lead

3. Server-Side Stuff You Need

Server-side implementation is no longer optional if you want to keep advertising profitably on Meta. It’s now non-negotiable. You need to be tracking your data on your server (the computer that hosts your website) instead of just on your customer's web browser.

P.S If you need server-side tracking broken down for you, check out this post which explains everything you need to know about how server-side tracking works.

What's Getting Accounts Banned

• ANY Health terms

• Missing required data

• Not using server-side tracking

• Inconsistent parameter formatting

Things are unlikely to change, so if you want to keep showing your products to 3 billion monthly active users, here’s what you need to do:

• Check how your events are categorized in Events Manager.

• Create custom events using the naming convention above.

• Start sending these custom events NOW as a backup.

• Set up server-side tracking with correct data formatting.

• Test everything before using it live.

• If your Purchase event is blocked, use a lower-funnel custom conversion event instead.

At the end of the day…

Meta isn't trying to ruin your business, they're trying to follow the law. By using custom events correctly, you're helping them do that.

P.P.S

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Till Monday,

Ada.