Core Setup & Blocked Events

As an online business owner, keeping up with the latest changes and updates is essential to staying ahead. For certified ad managers and those working toward certification, maintaining sharp skills and up-to-date knowledge is crucial. Recently, the ad management landscape has evolved, particularly within Meta. In this post, we’ll break down the latest updates—focusing on core setup and blocked events—and offer actionable insights for ad managers working with clients in health, religion, and finance.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

1. Meta's ad management has rapidly evolved in the past two months, specifically affecting health, religion, and finance accounts.
2. Core setup issues occur at a domain level, impacting URL tracking and potentially blocking domain data from being sent.
3. If your domain or client's domain is affected, core setups may restrict tracking parameters beyond standard URLs.
4. New rules have made standard events blocked, hindering the tracking of conversions like leads and purchases, but custom events may serve as a workaround.
5. Ad managers should observe new policies' developments, stay informed, and adjust their strategies accordingly.
6. It's essential not to overreact to changes, as past experience with iOS 14 taught that workarounds always emerge.

Find the full show notes at:  https://brandimowles.com/247

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Transcript

EP247 - Core Setup & Blocked Events

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Brandi: , [00:00:00] y'all this episode's gonna get a little techie, but we need to talk about the new Things that are happening in meta. I feel like over the last two months things have been moving really quick in meta Especially in ad management. I also know that like organic There's been a lot of change to Instagram and things like that and I don't deal with organic So that's not what this is about.

I am NOT your go to girl for that, but I am your go to girl For ads, and one thing that we know has come into play, it happened about the end of January, and so there's still a lot of wrinkles, and inside of Certified, it's an add on to conversions for clients, where you can get certified, and then on our directory, We have something called hot off the press, and I gave them the most up to date news on what was going on with core set up and blocked events.

And I always like for things to die down a little bit before I share everything. Now it hasn't died down since then, but our students [00:01:00] inside certified are always the first to know about updates. Now that we have a little bit more information, still, it's not clear. Not everyone at Facebook knows what's going on.

But I do feel like we can come out and talk about this more. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to share with you the recording that I shared with them. And then I'm going to add some new updates that have come about. But this, this is something that's going to affect you if you work with clients in the health space, in the religious space.

So that even includes spirituality. So the So health, religion, and finance. So if you plan to work on clients in those spectrums, I would definitely stay tuned and listen to this episode. So let's jump on into this week's episode of the Serve Scales Soar Podcast.

I want to get you the right.

I want to make sure that you're staying up to date in the know. Now what I'm about to talk about, I'm [00:02:00] not releasing in conversions for clients yet because there's a lot of unknown and uncertainty about what's happening. All of this https: otter. ai So I think whenever there's things that come down from Facebook and they come down fast, we always need to take like a minute just to let everything settle.

So what am I talking about? I'm talking about core setup and some of the restrictions that are being put on specifically health. It's called fitness and religion accounts. And so even if you have clients that are in the woo space or the spiritual space or maybe like personal training space, like they may be hit with these core set up and restrictions.

So I want to make sure that you are in the know, but at the end of the day, this is so new, it's kind of like when iOS happened, iOS 14, it was like a bomb dropped, and no one knew what was going to go on, everyone's freaking out, and I really just like played it [00:03:00] cool, I told people, I don't know, we're going to have to wait and see, and whenever things like happen really fast and it's usually because there was an outside force that made it occur.

So they didn't have time to set anything up for it, but now they have to take action and it's usually really, really messy. So when iOS 14 happened, if you weren't around when that happened, it was. And it was 2020, 2021, I think. And all of a sudden Apple just decided to do this thing. And Google and Facebook, Meta, Youtube, all of them were given very little notice.

Like no notice at all. It just happened. They knew it was in the works, but they were kind of under the impression they had a year or two to get everything in place. And then Apple drops it. And it was like a grenade. And we all freaked out. And now we look back, it's 2025, and it's not really a big deal anymore.

Like, we've set up conversion API, we have other ways to track. Like, it's not that big a deal. And so, with [00:04:00] this happening so quickly, it feels like a ball was dropped on them that they weren't aware of. Now, it's also happening, when this happened, it was a, like, right win between presidencies. And, they're The Biden administration isn't happy with META because of all the things that they released about what happened during 2020, 2021, 2022 under the Biden administration.

So this is not political. This is just breaking down kind of like the lay of the land. So there's animosity that's going on between the administration that was in place and META, okay? And it's not just META. This also affected Google. But there's like this ill will. Then you have the new President coming in, who looks like they're pretty chummy.

Zuckerberg and Google and TikTok and all these media people are looking pretty chummy with Trump. That's what we see. And so, [00:05:00] all these things happened before the passing of the power. A president. So, Whenever, so everything, and you know, like, I'm not behind the scenes, but talking with other media buyers who spend millions of dollars, their intel, I have a friend that actually works at Meta in the advertising department.

So like, as we know all this, we can start to be like, okay, we're just pawns in the game that's being played. And I think that's good to just be aware, like, This is out of our control, but what we can control is how we respond to it. So that's why i'm also not freaking out based on What we've seen so far with zuckerberg loosening like fact checking we've seen some like trump is extending the tiktok ban things like that It looks like there may be like a little bit of a friendship happening with the trump administration And the social media platform Now, who knows how they'll play out.

So maybe these restrictions start [00:06:00] to get a little bit leaner and this goes away in the matter of months. Who knows? But what we can do now is just be like, okay, I'm going to be an observer. I'm going to listen to the podcast. I'm going to seek out information and just stay on top of this. And also let clients know if it happens to their account.

We don't need to let clients know unless it actually happens. Like this is what's happening. And it doesn't mean the end all be all. And remind them, this is very similar to iOS 14, so there will always become something that we can do about it, but we may not know how to fix it at this exact moment. So, what I want to talk about is Core Setup first, and then we'll talk about what that means with blocked events.

So, Core Setup is a setting, and you can actually see if your clients are blocked. If you go into your Events Manager, and then you click the data source, and then you go into Settings, You're going to scroll down and you'll see manage domain. When you click manage domain, it's going to [00:07:00] show if that domain is blocked.

So core setup happens at a domain level. So let's say that your client has a domain like diabetes. com. It's probably going to get blocked because that's in the health and wellness. Maybe it's like fixyourcreditreport. com. Like that's probably going to get blocked for finance. So whenever we look at that.

It is also what's on the domain as well, but like those are going to be easy ones because we can clearly see that's in the health or the financial and religion. So if it was like bible. com, that's probably going to get blocked. But we also have to remember spirituality is also inside of that realm of religion.

So just because your client is Woo, they probably don't recognize that as a religion. It still will fall under that category. Now, here's the thing. All this is happening fast. No one at Meta knows what's going on. Chat support, you can get on with three different ones, so I'll tell you something different.

So, here's what we know that we can [00:08:00] do. One, we want to check our client's accounts just to see if we do see any blocked domains. Now, if they are blocked, it's, there's a few different ways that they can be blocked. The domain can be blocked from And so, we're going to talk about sending data, so like, sharing standard events.

Or, they can just have core setup turn on, which means that they can't send the parameters after the URL back. So that means the core setup, I'm trying to make this super easy. So first, let's talk about our first task that we have to do is we have to go in and see, are our client's domains blocked? Are the pixels attached to them?

are they blocked and is your core setup turned on? If core setups turned on and they're blocked, that's like worst case. And I'm not saying it's worst case, there's always workarounds, but that's worst case. Or your client may [00:09:00] just have course set up turned on and that's not a big deal. So core setup is what it's saying is It's the after the URL.

So if it's bible. com slash, whatever happens after the slash, it's going to block that. But UTM parameters, it looks like are not included in this. So if it's passing it to Google analytics, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about if you have. Custom conversions are custom audience set up.

So let's say that you set up a custom audience for like you has, your client has an SLO funnel and let's say that SLO funnel is bible. com slash SLO. Let's just say that. Okay. So that means, and then you want to create a custom audience. Based on anyone who has went to bios. com slash SLO, you want to retarget those people.

You wouldn't be able to retarget those because it's blocking the SLO. So [00:10:00] hopefully that makes sense. So, if you're not using custom audiences based on URL or custom conversions, it's not going to be a big deal. Core setup will not be a big deal because it's still going to pass through standard events.

So you're still going to have those, but you're not going to have custom conversions or custom audience based on URL. So if you're like, Brandy, I don't use either one of those, then you're fine. Like no biggie. Okay. That's why I don't think core setup is going to be a big deal now. How? Cause most people don't use those now.

However, if you have core setup plus standard events blocked, what that means is right now it looks like you'd still have access to page views and view content. Like that looks like it's fine, but the more down you go in the funnel, you're not going to have those standards events pass back through. It doesn't matter if you have conversion API.

It doesn't matter if you have high roast third party tracking, it's all going to be blocked. So that [00:11:00] means you wouldn't be able to track leads, purchases, add to carts, things like that. Okay. This becomes a big deal and there's no getting around it. So if those are blocked, the standard events blocked, there's a few things we can do.

One is we can set up custom events. So whenever we do tracking and we think about the pixel, we add the pixel to a page, then we set up standard event. You add a piece of code, usually it's purchase, and then you put 27. Or what, 37. Or the lead, you put that standard event in there. Standard events are not going to come through, but you can set up custom events.

And so with custom events, you just write whatever you want in there. We've always actually said, don't do this, but this may be the workaround we need for it. So what would that mean? That would mean you would probably want to keep like a Google sheet of each of these. And so with that bibles. com slash [00:12:00] SLO slash maybe it's thank you after they purchase on that thank you page, you would want to put.

You can do it the same way you would do standard events, but you actually write in whatever you want. You can Google meta custom events and it'll show you how to do it. But you go in and you would do something like bought. So don't put purchase, put like bought. Product 1. Or Product 127. Like if it's 27, you could do that.

Product 127. You don't really want to put anything that would give it away. Like you wouldn't want to put Bible 1. Because we don't want to pass any religions. So we could do Product 127. And that would pass back through. So then you could optimize if we're getting enough for that. So for a webinar, maybe you call it Training 1.

And that's it. So then you would know training one means they registered for training one and you would put that on the thank you page after registration and then you would just [00:13:00] have a sheet that says what each of these is with the link and all that kind of stuff to keep yourself organized but those are going to pass back through and then you can optimize for the custom event.

You can also do top of funnel things where we do a video view. This is more so if you're doing a purchase campaign because you wouldn't be able to track those. You do a video view engagement campaign and then we retarget people who have engaged or watched it with something like traffic. When ultimately we would want to optimize for purchase, but we wouldn't be able to optimize it because they're not passing the purchase data.

So we'd have something that's really good, that talks about our product, and then we send it back to people who watched an X amount. So you would be able to do something like that. The other thing is you can do instant forms. And you can use those because those are on platform. You can ask for like name, email, that kind of stuff, but you don't want to ask personal information if you're [00:14:00] marked like do you have diabetes?

Yes or no. You don't want that. Or are you spiritual? Yes or no. We wouldn't want that. So there are ways to work around this and it's going to be with custom events, instant form, or like doing top of funnel retargeting that way, because you're not going to see The lower, the more down the funnel standard events, they're going to be blocked, like lead purchase, those type of things.

So, what can you do now? One, you can go and check to see if your clients are marked. And if you are worried, because I know several of you work with health coaches in the spiritual realm, you're going to want to go and check it maybe once a week. There is a way to As for a review, 

But the first thing is we're going to check. Is the domain blocked? Is it just in core setup or is it standard events blocked? If it's just in core setup, not a big deal. We're not going to use custom conversions or custom audience based on URL.

If [00:15:00] the standard event is blocked, then we're going to need to use one of those. I'm going to be talking about three strategies I talked about custom events, instant forms, or top of funnel with retargeting. So that's kind of the game plan right now. We don't know much. I will make sure we're updating you as we know more.

Okay, so I'm going to pop in here with a little bit more information that we know since I recorded this episode. One is now they are going to give you, if you notice that your client has this blocked or they receive an email, there's going to be a seven day window where you can ask for a review. If you are an extension, I'm sorry, an extension.

So if you ask for the seven day extension or a 30 day extension, it has to be asked within seven days of being blocked. If you ask for it within the seven days you get approved, you have a 30 day extension. To like figure out what to do from here. Maybe that's getting the custom conversions optimized, things like that.

Maybe it's changing the domain, whatever. So you can ask for that. And that's separate than asking for a review. Then you [00:16:00] could also ask for a review if you think you were marked by mistake. So there's two levels. One, we need to get the 30 day extension. We want to do that. Then we also want to ask for a review if we believe we should get a review now.

If you're like, diabetes, that's clearly not gonna get passed through. We also have doulas. That's not gonna get passed through. There are some that are just like, this isn't happening. But you could always ask for a review if you want. This is happening at a pixel and domain level. which technically means you may be able to change the domain up create a new pixel.

There's going to be some workarounds with this. It's just also new. Another thing is working with certain people having conversations. I know that dietitians and nutritionists haven't really been marked as this. I have people who I know in their account that they work with children. D dieticians for children and dieticians for binge eating and things.

And they're not affected by this. [00:17:00] They haven't been marked. And so it may be where like we just have to see this play out. Now, doulas, I do know doulas are being marked, certain religions are being marked, and so it just depends on are they only being forced to put core setup or are the event.

It's not something to stress about and it's not something to really take action on until it happens with a client. I don't think we need to like, if they're not marked out, we don't need to be stressing about it. We just need to be checking. And knowing like we have a game plan if they end up getting marked.

Also, there has been some that are popping up that says like You're European. This, you may have not have tracking for certain European countries unless your. If our client's primary source of revenue is in Europe, then it may not be a big deal. If ours popped up with that, it's fine. That's it's a portion, but the majority [00:18:00] of ours still comes from US and Canada.

Where we do have a good size portion coming from the UK. But those events may not be blocked. So it just depends on what you're seeing in the ad manager and where we go from that. But the one thing that we can't do is stress. We just got to roll with it, have a plan and move forward. There will always be a way to still successfully run ads.

Just like everyone thought the world was ending with iOS. It didn't end. We're back to it. There will always be a workaround, but right now we're in the messy middle. of what does this mean. Meta has all different suggestions. No one's really on the same page. So we just have to roll with what we have. It will not be the end of the world.

. So big changes, not a big deal. It'll all work out my friends, but your job is to stay cool, stay collected and share the information as needed with clients.

So one thing we do in conversions for clients and in certified is we always keep our students in the know with the most up to date information [00:19:00] as it's always changing. It is my full time job to know what is going on with meta so it doesn't have to be your full time job. And if you want more information about joining us in conversions for clients Go to conversionsforclients.

com. We would love to welcome you inside. And then as always go out, serve your clients, scale your business and soar into the success you deserve.