It’s been a busy 2025 in the digital marketing and media buying world when it comes to Meta changes, and it’s only February.
They started the year by removing third-party fact-checking and relying primarily on community feedback to monitor content.
That announcement was quickly followed up by Meta updating tracking and targeting policies that impact Healthcare and Financial Service brands, which began in January.
Here are the changes and any next steps or clarification for how brands in those industries should proceed if they manage social media advertising on Meta’s channels.
Tracking and Targeting
Conversion Tracking (Healthcare and Financial Services)
- Most custom conversion events will no longer be available to advertisers within a restricted category. You will be unable to track form fills, applications, and other key website activity from those exposed to Meta Paid Social ads.
- Some button clicks or page view events may still be trackable (TBD) and will require testing after this takes effect.
- Next Steps: Use Traffic campaigns that bid and optimize for maximum Landing Page Views. If testing uncovers relevant events/pages that can still be tracked, update campaign objectives accordingly.
Audience Targeting (Financial Services)
- Meta is limiting the use of customer list custom audiences built from consumer/credit reporting data for all advertisers classified under a special ad category, including financial services.
- Next Steps: This won’t impact the use of first-party data segments if you don’t use TransUnion, Equifax, Experian, or other consumer credit reporting data.
Ad Formats
On the creative side of social advertising, Meta increased the height allowance for image ads to a 4:5 aspect ratio (portrait format).
While the square format (1:1 ratio) is not going away, they are recommending (and will likely favor) the portrait format moving forward. Furthermore, Meta also increased their recommended image resolutions to include more pixels.
Here are the new recommended sizes/resolutions:
Feed Placements:
1440 x 1800 (4:5 ratio)
1440 x 1440 (1:1 ratio)
Stories/Reels Placements:
1440 x 2560 (9:16 ratio)
If you are working with an internal media team or media buying agency, you'll need to ask your creative team to provide these new sizes for Paid Social assets moving forward.
Inventory Filters
And for now, as of today (2/24/2025), Meta is updating the default setting for inventory filters to “Expanded,” which will allow ads to appear alongside a broader range of content.
This decision raises concerns amid ongoing discussions about Meta's new content moderation policies, opening up brands to potential PR issues.
This change impacts ads that serve on the Audience Network or in/around video content on Facebook (In-Stream Videos & Reels).
While our current Vision Media clients do not run many ads in these placements, we still believe it is important to change this inventory filter back to “Moderate” ASAP.
For brands in sensitive categories (e.g., Healthcare), we recommend selecting “Limited.” We are auditing all our client accounts to ensure the appropriate setting is applied to prevent ads from appearing alongside potentially harmful content.
Please reach out if you have any questions about these changes. We are happy to assist you in any way.
