HONEST CUSTOMER STORY

What did Meta do this time? Haha…

Meta has been tightening rules for health and wellness brands, but this update was massive — the new privacy update hit the entire category.

Health is a sensitive space, so ads can’t exploit insecurities or use private details like “Lose 5kg in 7 days” or targeting medical conditions. Meta is also stricter on PII and PHI, forcing brands to balance ad performance with privacy laws like HIPAA, CCPA, and GDPR.

Here is the story of India’s leading personal wellness brand, trusted by a loyal community – known for its bold, modern approach. Got their nightmare to reality – overnight, their ads and tracking systems were silenced by Meta’s new rules.

The Impact – What Changed Overnight for this Leading Personal Wellness Brand?

In simple words, they couldn’t run the ad at all. Here you go the ways the brand got hit;

1. I woke up and the purchase event got blocked. WHATT? 

As per the policy, the bottom funnels events are restricted. Technically, for the leading high-volume brand, we can imagine how much that must have been in terms of a revenue hit.

2. No longer can run custom audience targeting and lookalikes.

This was not part of the plan. The audiences are blocked too. They can no longer retarget the high intent website visitors or even run lookalike campaigns.

3. Scaling the campaigns? More like Stuck. 

So yeah, scaling wasn’t really “scaling” anymore. Retargeting? Gone. Lookalikes? Gone.

The moment Meta blocked bottom-funnel events and audiences, everything just got froze. It felt less like running ads and more like staring at a paused screen. The only thing moving was the ad spend dripping away.

So, we went about find the why’s and how’s moving forward with the brand, which brings us to the next section.

Can Shopify CAPI Help Personal Wellness Brands? 

People who know us know we love Shopify… but when it comes to health & wellness, Shopify’s CAPI just can’t handle it.

Not because it’s bad – it’s simply not built for this use case. Shopify is a website builder, not a performance marketer’s toolkit.

Meta has specific guidelines on how data must be sent for health/wellness brands, and Shopify alone can’t do it.

How did We Resolve and Revive the Account Back in Less than 24 hours? 

As per the guidelines by Meta to remove the flag, these are the following steps that need to be done. To read more – 

1. Audit your tracking setup → Check what your Pixel, Events, and URLs are sending to Meta. Remove anything with health conditions, treatments, or personal info.
   
2. Enable Meta’s core data restrictions → Turn it on in Events Manager to automatically limit sensitive data.
   
3. Shift to server-side tracking (Conversions API) → Gives you more control and lets you scrub/clean data before it goes to Meta.
   
4. Scrub URLs & query parameters → Remove disease names, symptoms, or medical terms from page links. Use neutral identifiers instead.
   
5. Rename event names → Replace health-specific event labels with generic ones (e.g. “conversion_event1” instead of “book_diabetes_consult”).
   
6. Avoid sensitive custom parameters → Only pass neutral fields like purchase value, category ID, or general actions.
   
7. Request review/appeal if flagged → After cleaning data, contact Meta support to show compliance and request account reinstatement.

Sounds Very Technical? But we just turned a couple of toggles on.

Here you go .. turn on the couple toggles to send the data to Meta real time with dynamic event name changes , scrapping the URL and hashing the user information.

Back on the track – Meta events manager shines ✨

Renamed all the events and hid all the sensitive information and sent all the top funnel and bottom funnel events with the high event match quality of 9.3. 

And we are back to the business on how it needs to be done. 

But the problem did not just stop here, right? This brand handles multiple categories and also needs custom events/bottom funnel events for optimizing the campaigns and not just the purchase event. I mean, Signal engineering. Signaling the right event to Meta based on the campaign objective.

The brand sells for men and women, and how do I focus on both the audience to sell and scale? Then, we need to be saying to Meta, that I need more men purchases and not just purchases. 

Given the Meta’s violations, the bottom funnel events are blocked as well. Because, the users’ sensitive information passed along. 

Who said we cannot optimize for Bottom Funnel Events? 

We have already adopted 1PD OPs – First-Party Data Ops. And with first-party data in place, there is a lot of control in operating the data. 

We have created multiple custom events based on the product, category, gender etc.. and follow the guides of hashing the user info and sent to Meta to scale their campaign performance deeper. 

Here you go a sample of how they have structured the campaign. They have campaigns focussed on all categories and ofcourse Men categories. 

Conclusion

1PD Rocked. You are shocked, right? 

Don’t let Meta’s data restrictions limit your ability to track and optimize campaigns, specifically for your health and wellness brands. With 1PD Ops like CustomerLabs, you can capture and send both top and lower-funnel events of both known and anonymous users while staying fully compliant with privacy laws. 

We are now super safe to, 

1. Send any custom events for optimization and reporting 
2. Using the audiences for retargeting 
3. Using the high intent audiences for lookalikes. 
4. Finally, to run ads based on all the strategies you have in mind. 

Get in touch with 1PD Ops experts for more information. Book a consultation today. Let’s talk soon.