Meta Business Tools Restricting Data
The latest notification from Meta Ads Manager is ‘To better serve businesses like yours, Meta Business Tools may restrict data, such as custom parameters and parts of URLs after the domain. This helps reduce the potential for information prohibited by our Business Tools Terms being shared. Your custom audiences may now take longer to populate, and in some cases, you may not be able to create them.’
Meta also go on to talk about core setups and if you’re using a Meta Business Tool that is within a core setup, then you may be seeing the limitations quoted above.
WTF does this mean?
From my understanding, the there are three things to look at here:
What are custom parameters and parts of the URL after the domain?
What do they have to do with Custom Audiences?
What is a core setup and how does it relate?
What are custom parameters and parts of the URL after the domain?
There is a list of Standard Parameters Meta shares, and if your parameter is not included in this, then it’s considered a custom parameter - a parameter is a string of information attached to the URL, which doesn’t necessarily impact the destination, and is typically designed to transfer information. Anything in the URL which follows the ? is a parameter. For example, ?product=xyz
I’m sure parts of the URL after the domain is the same thing.
What do they have to do with Custom Audiences?
When building custom audiences based on how users interact with your website, you might create a group of users who have visited the URL ending in ?product=xyz in order to retarget a more specific ad to those users. Meta explains ‘Custom audiences that rely on custom parameters or URLs in their rules can't be prefilled and may take longer to populate or not be available.’
What is a core setup and how does it relate?
A core setup in Meta is a setup which prevents wrongful data being shared which goes against Meta’s terms and conditions. Business tools within Meta are placed into the core setup in order to turn restrictions on for those tools. Meta itself can put your business tool into a core setup for a multitude of reasons (what industry you’ve declared, or because you’re breaking the rules, etc.), or you as the advertiser can put your own business tool into a core setup. One of these Business Tools is the Meta Pixel. So there’s a sort of inception thing going on:
The core setup has to be toggled on and contain the Meta Pixel, AND
The advertiser has to be using Custom Audiences, AND
Custom Audiences has to use parameters, AND
Parameters have to be custom parameters
What happens if my audiences have been restricted?
Ads might automatically pause if they are suddenly not large enough to target or the audience doesn’t exist anymore/can’t be updated.
Your lookalike audiences won’t work anymore as they won’t have any data to go off.
Adding items to your catalogue might not work - not sure why though.