Meta has removed the setting that let people disconnect their off-platform activity from their account, so the connection is now on by default. Retargeting pools and custom audiences will grow, but that is the measurement floor moving, not your campaigns improving.
A bigger audience is not the same as a better one. It just means the pool changed under your feet.
Meta has removed the setting that let people disconnect their off-platform activity from their account. The old control, "Your activity off Meta technologies," is gone. In its place sits a single setting called "Activity from other businesses" that governs how the data gets used, not whether the connection gets made. The link is now on by default and cannot be switched off.
For advertisers the effect is immediate. Website Custom Audiences built through the Meta Pixel or the Conversions API will grow. Retargeting pools will swell. People who were previously invisible start reappearing in lookalike seeds and conversion matching. On paper your reach and your match rates improve without you touching a thing.
Why it matters
If your retargeting numbers jump next month, that is not your campaign getting sharper. That is the measurement floor moving. Treat the two the same and you will pour more budget into a change you have misread as performance. Australian businesses running Meta as a core channel need to know the baseline shifted, because the reports will not tell you politely.
The change also flatters attribution. When more users are matched, Meta can claim more conversions it may not have driven. If you are already fighting the platform over how much credit it takes, this makes that fight harder. Your own numbers, measured outside the platform, matter more than ever.
There is a second problem. This is a privacy control being taken away, not added. Australian consumers are already wary of how their data moves around, and the rules here keep tightening. A quiet rollback like this chips at trust, and trust is the thing that keeps people buying from you.
Meta's apps reach around 3.3 billion people a day, and their off-platform activity now stays tied to their accounts by default
What to do about it
Annotate the change date in your analytics so nobody mistakes the audience jump for a win.
Rebuild your lookalikes off the new larger seed and watch the quality, not just the size.
Do not lift retargeting budgets on pool growth alone. Judge on cost per outcome.
Cross-check Meta-reported conversions against your own analytics before you trust the lift.
Keep your first-party data clean. When platform signal gets murky, the data you own is what you can trust.
The pool got bigger overnight. Your job is to make sure you are still measuring what actually works.