An addiction treatment center's ads reported no applications. The first week after setup reported 37.

Northridge Addiction Treatment Center runs a residential program in Los Angeles. Its agency sent Meta ads to an application page, but no applications were reaching Meta, and addiction treatment is a category Meta restricts.

No applications were reaching Meta

Northridge is a private residential addiction treatment center in Los Angeles. Its agency ran Meta ads to a landing page where people apply for treatment through a long multi-step form.

Meta restricts sites that serve people dealing with addiction. In its own later emails, Meta said northridgeaddiction.com was on its block list because it serves "an audience likely to be suffering from addiction or are self-harm survivors."

There was a second gap. An audit on 12 June 2025 found that the application form sent no event to Meta, Google Analytics or Google Ads. A test submission fired nothing.

What was done

The agency's co-founder asked for the audit on the morning of 12 June and hired Shahzada, now Crisper's founder, the same day.

Tracking moved to Northridge's own subdomain. When someone finished the application, a standard Submit Application event went to Meta from the server through the Conversions API, with hashed contact details and the ad click ID. It went live on 13 June.

Over the next few days he narrowed when the event fired, after the agency asked whether it was firing too often.

The first week

In the week of 14 to 20 June, the campaign's ad sets reported 37 applications in Ads Manager. The top ad set had 21, at $95.37 each.

Events Manager showed event activity arriving on the same dataset that had been waiting for it two weeks earlier.

Two caveats. Spend that week was higher than in the before screen. And before the work the form sent no conversion at all, so the zero was not all the restriction's doing.

Facts come from the project emails, the project Slack channel and Meta's block-list emails. Figures are read off Ads Manager and Events Manager screenshots; the before Ads Manager screen is undated. Recovered in 2025 by Shahzada Ali Hassan, Crisper's founder, with a custom server-side setup, before the Crisper app existed.