Meta restricted my ad account and I never changed anything: what changed?

This is the story I hear most, and it's the hardest one to accept.

"We didn't touch the ads. We didn't touch the site. And suddenly our health conversions stopped counting."

Here's the uncomfortable truth: something usually changed, but not always on your side in a way you'd remember. There are three broad possibilities, and it helps to think about them separately.

Possibility one: the rules or the enforcement changed. Meta restricts data that could reveal a health condition or treatment. Many clinics find their conversions stop counting without any change on their end. You can't control that, and you can't easily see it. What you can do is make sure your data would survive stricter enforcement.

Possibility two: your site changed without anyone telling you. Websites change constantly, and each change can alter what the pixel sends. A few things that quietly shift without anyone noticing: a website update or a new plugin adds a parameter or a page title to the events. A new landing page or thank-you page uses a service name in its address. A form gets a new field about a condition. A new pixel event gets added by an agency, and nobody documents it.

Possibility three: your traffic changed. A new campaign sends visitors to a page that carries more descriptive data than your old ones. The events look the same in the dashboard, but they're now attached to pages that say more.

The point isn't to find someone to blame. It's to accept that what the pixel sends isn't fixed. It changes whenever your site changes. And that's why cleaning at the source matters more than a one-off fix: a fix applied to today's setup doesn't protect against tomorrow's page.

So what do you do? Three things.

Look at what changed on the site in the weeks before it started. Ask your agency or developer for a list of tracking changes, even a rough one. Compare pages that existed before and after.

Read your events as a reviewer would, right now. Test Events, a booking on your own site, the URL, the name, the form.

Then put a cleaning step in the middle, so the next change doesn't recreate the problem. If the data leaves through a layer that cuts links to your domain and neutralises event names, a new landing page with a treatment name in its address can't leak it, because the address never goes out.

And keep a simple changelog of tracking changes. Even a shared note with dates. It turns "we have no idea" into "it started after this update".

Here's a 15-minute method to find what changed, when nothing seems to have. Open Test Events and trigger a booking on a page from before the problem started, if it still exists, and on a page from after. Compare the two events side by side: the URL, the event name, the user data, the custom fields. Then compare the pages themselves: their addresses, titles and forms.

If you can, ask whoever manages the site for the change log around the date the problem began. Even a rough one helps. Look for anything that touched tracking: a plugin update, a new form, a redesigned thank-you page, a new landing page for a campaign.

More often than not, the difference between the two events points straight at the cause. It's a simple diff, and it beats guessing.

Did you ever find the cause of a sudden restriction?