Meta has announced significant updates starting in January 2025 that will change how they handle data from healthcare advertisers. I don’t know anyone in the industry who isn’t worried about this announcement, so I wanted to shed a little light on what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what you should plan to do about it.
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Most importantly: DON’T PANIC.
Digital advertising for healthcare has always been a dynamic landscape, which is the only thing about healthcare advertising that won’t change. Everything else evolves, and we figure out smart ways to evolve with it so we can continue delivering effective campaigns. After researching (and some input from our resident experts Carolina Costa and Rich Briddock), here’s what you should know:
CONTEXT: PURSUING PRIVACY
In the past few years, we’ve seen a big general push from consumers and regulators alike for more privacy across the board, whether we’re talking about HIPAA compliance with PHI, or California privacy laws against pixels, or Google phasing out third-party cookies. The future of digital healthcare advertising is trending towards more privacy.
That’s a general trend. Of course, sometimes things buck the trend and we see pushback—you may recall the AHA won a verdict this summer regarding the recent HIPAA bulletin on tracking technologies, and Google Chrome has already delayed their third-party cookie deprecation once —but overall, we’ve seen that both healthcare and digital advertising are getting a lot more privacy-protective regulations than they used to have, and the lawsuits to back them up.
For those of us who live at the intersection of healthcare and digital advertising, that’s a reality we must adapt. Heck, we already have adapted to numerous new privacy regulations over the past decade, and so in that context, while Meta’s latest update may come as an unpleasant surprise, it’s nothing outside the bounds of what we’re used to dealing with.
WHAT JUST HAPPENED
As mentioned, Meta announced significant updates starting in January 2025 that will change how they handle data from healthcare advertisers. These updates will impact both audience creation and campaign optimization. Big picture, here’s Meta’s Changes to Data Sharing for Healthcare: All businesses will have their data sources (e.g., pixels, conversion API, or domains) categorized by Meta within healthcare categories. Each category will fall into one of two types:
Fully Restricted Properties: No website conversion campaigns will be allowed (e.g., condition-specific domains like treatmigraines.com).
Mid Restricted Properties: Lower-funnel optimizations (e.g., broader domains like hospital websites) will be restricted.
Here’s what Meta said about it:
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Starting in January 2025, we will begin rolling out additional restrictions on certain categories of websites and apps that are using the Meta Business Tools as part of our ongoing efforts to help prevent advertisers from sharing information that is not allowed under our terms. It is crucial that you review your data source categories in Events Manager to help ensure they are appropriately categorized.
As you may know, Meta’s systems are designed to help detect and remove information shared through our Meta Business Tools that may not be allowed under our Meta Business Tool Terms. We are also working to categorize data sources, such as websites and apps, that send us data through the Meta Business Tools based on the topics related to the data source and the products and/or services provided. This helps us determine how your data source may be categorized, including if your data source may fall under a category that comes with restrictions.
Based on your current data source categorization, your websites or apps may be fully restricted from sharing all event data via our Meta Business Tools in your target regions. This means that all events from your website or app will not be shared with Meta, or will be subsequently removed when received (if it’s sent server-side, for e.g., CAPI), through any of our Business Tools. Please note that this change may impact your campaign performance. The impact you may observe to your campaigns will depend primarily on if and how you are currently using standard events.
Meta will not pause your ongoing campaigns as a result of these restrictions.
You’ll receive a notification in Ads Manager and Events Manager about which ad sets and events are impacted by these changes.
Your delivery and effectiveness may decline over time if the restricted events are required for campaign targeting, optimization, or measurement.
In light of this update, we recommend :
If you think your website or app are appropriately categorized, we recommend adjusting your campaign and events/data source strategy to optimize for certain available actions and/or campaign objectives, such as Awareness (e.g., reach, impressions), Engagement (e.g., likes, comments, shares) and Traffic (e.g., link clicks).
If you think that your website or app is not appropriately categorized, you can request a review in Events Manager.
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HOW DOES THIS IMPACT OUR STRATEGY?
The first thing to know is that this primarily affects bottom of funnel (BOF) campaign optimization purposes and data pass back for audience creation.
- Audience Creation: Pixel and Conversion API (CAPI) audiences built using BOF events may be restricted or phased out, limiting retargeting and Lookalike (LAL) audience creation.
- Bottom-of-Funnel Campaigns: For website conversion campaigns, optimization will need to focus on events triggered by CTA button clicks (e.g., “Fill Form”) rather than form submissions themselves.
What Stays the Same:
- Lead Forms: No mention has been made about restrictions on lead form data sources, so we believe lead form campaigns will remain unaffected for now.
- Top-of-Funnel Campaigns: Top-of-funnel campaign strategies do not rely on restricted conversion actions and will not be impacted.
Note that this isn’t going to affect everyone equally. From conversations with Ray Minna, Freshpaint’s VP of Marketing, it sounds like Health & Wellness will be subcategorized into Providers (websites) and Patient Portals (apps and portals with actual patient info)—and that events sent from within Patient Portals are a lot more likely to be fully restricted. Using a customer data platform (CDP) or healthcare privacy platform like Freshpaint might reduce your impact. These platforms don’t share PHI, avoid the Meta pixel, and use neutrally named events like “Event_A105” instead of “Appointment.”
He thinks this is less a case of Meta trying to squash lower funnel or CAPI in health and wellness entirely, and more about Meta trying to give themselves some cover regarding privacy. After all, Meta lives in that same digital universe we all do, where everyone is pursuing privacy online and in healthcare specifically—which means public sentiment, complex regulations, and lawsuits are all pushing Meta to be more proactive regarding privacy.
WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO NOW?
Audit Your Data Source Categorization
You want to do this ASAP to prepare for the January 2025 rollout. For media managers, go to events manager, select your data source (such as pixel) in your ad account, go to settings, and click on “manage categories.” Review the categories assigned to your data sources in Meta Events Manager to confirm they are appropriately categorized. If you think they have been incorrectly categorized, you can request a review.
Adjust Campaign Objective
If the categories look correct, but you’re getting specific restrictions on sharing certain lower-funnel events, consider shifting focus to upper-funnel events. If you’re getting full restrictions, you’ll likely need to adjust your campaign for a different ad objective in Meta Ads Manager, since you’ll lose access to Meta Business Tool for campaign optimization.
More information can be found here.
Future-Proof Your Marketing
Some basic steps will help make sure you’re in a better position to deal with not just this Meta change, but whatever future privacy-fueled changes are causing people to panic next year:
Take a Privacy-First Approach
The less information you’re sharing out in the wild, the less exposure you have to any new regulation or rule change — and it’s better for patient privacy as well. Use neutral event names, and avoid any tracking that isn’t BAA-signed.
Embrace the Full Funnel
Full-funnel marketing isn’t just more effective, it’s also more resilient. We’ve long advocated for a full-funnel approach primarily for performance reasons, but a side benefit is that you’re in much better shape when a certain platform changes the rules. When you’re not just running Google Ads on Search, but also using Google PMAX, TikTok, Meta, etc., then a temporary blip in one platform is going to hurt your leads a lot less. Diversity is strength, in this case.
Stay Prepared to Adapt
Good general advice for any healthcare marketer, but it applies double to this Meta situation which is very much still evolving, and we are still determining exactly how things will shake out. We’ll keep you updated as we get more information. Meanwhile, if you follow the steps above, you’ll be in a better position for whatever comes next.
As always, if you could use some more personalized advice for your situation, feel free to drop us a line.
