Intimate and sexual health ads on Meta: why it's the most flagged category and what to send

If there's one category that gets flagged more than the rest, it's intimate and sexual health. And there's a reason worth understanding, because it tells you how to approach tracking for it.

It makes sense. The subject matter is highly personal, and the potential for sensitive data to leak is high. A product name, a page link or an event name can each reveal something a person would not want an ad platform to know. In this category, almost anything descriptive is sensitive, so the margin for error is smaller than in most.

The result is that advertisers here often find their events blocked or their accounts restricted, even when the ads themselves are within the rules. And that pattern is the giveaway: when the ads are fine and the events are the problem, it's a data question.

So what should you send? The principle is the same as elsewhere, applied more strictly: measure every sale with nothing sensitive attached. A neutral event name. A link cut to the domain. The value and the hashed identity. Nothing describing what the product is for.

It sounds like you're giving the ad platform very little. But the important parts are still there: who clicked, which ad, and what they spent. That's what optimisation runs on. The rest, the reason for the purchase, was never something the ad platform needed.

A few practical points specific to this category.

Look at your order confirmation and shipping pages. Product names on them travel too, and they're often descriptive.

Look at your discount and referral links. A campaign name in the URL, like /sale/performance-support, can say more than intended.

Think about what your thank-you page says. It's usually the last page before the event fires, and it's often the most explicit.

And remember the repeat customer. For a lot of products in this space, repeat purchase is a big part of the value, and it can be sent without any description of the product.

A made-up illustration of the principle. Two versions of the same order. Version A: page yourshop.com/products/[descriptive-product-name], event named after the product, order details. Version B: page yourshop.com, a neutral event, the value, a hashed email and phone and the ad click. Both count as a sale. Only one tells the platform something about a person's private life.

Here's a list of common leak points for products in sensitive categories, so you can check them.

Page addresses and titles, including the order confirmation page.

Event names, especially custom ones an agency created.

Product names and SKUs in order data.

Shipping and packaging notes if they sync to another tool.

Discount and referral codes in URLs.

Campaign names in UTM parameters.

Customer service tickets or chat transcripts, if the tool sends events.

Email subjects in automations that report events back to an ad platform.

You won't have all of these, and most stores have two or three. The point of the list is to make the audit systematic. Go through it once, tick what applies, and fix them in order of how descriptive they are. Then keep the list, and re-check it after each launch.

If you sell in this space, I'd love to hear how you've dealt with it. What did you have to change first?