Navigating Meta’s 2025 Update: What Healthcare Marketers Need to Know

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Lauren Leone: Hey everyone, welcome to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m back with Rich Briddock, our chief strategy officer. Today we have an important and timely update for you on our podcast. We want to talk about the changes to the Meta landscape. It’s been years of Meta and other organizations like Google saying things like, “We won’t sign a BAA. It’s up to the organizations to decide what they do and how they use our platforms.”

For the first time ever, Meta is actually going to place some restrictions on how you can use certain components of their tracking. Rich, as we dive in here, can you just contextualize a little bit what you think is driving these changes, and then we’ll talk about what they are and what they mean

Rich Briddock: Yes. This is the first big reaction that we’ve seen from a platform post the HHS bulletin in December 2022, where Meta is essentially trying to limit what information is being sent to them by companies that are in certain categories.

Lauren: In the past, they’ve said like, “Send what you want. It’s not our problem.”

Rich: Correct. Yes, exactly. The liability’s on the advertiser, but now, Meta is starting to restrict. It’s not unheard of for platforms to do that. Google has done that for years within the healthcare space in terms of restricting certain features in its platform that cannot be used, things like customer match, remarketing lists. Google has had those features turned off for healthcare advertisers for years.

Lauren: We’ve seen a little bit of it with legit script and some other third parties coming in as well.

Rich: Yes. This is just the first change that feels like a true reaction to the compliance landscape changing at the end of ’22.

Lauren: Walk us through the actual changes. What is changing? What was it? What is it going to be?

Rich: As you said earlier, it used to be essentially a free-for-all in terms of feature usage on Meta for healthcare companies. They could use all the same features and functionalities that any other company could use. If you’re an e-com platform, remarketing was on the table, conversion campaigns on the table, all this, building lookalike audiences off your first-party data, all of that was available.

Now what they’re going to do is they are going to categorize healthcare companies into two categories. There will be a fully restricted category and a partially or mid-restricted category. The difference, how Meta is going to determine which category you fall into is whether you are treating a single condition essentially or you are a specialist where Meta can easily understand if someone– If you’re sending an appointment event through the Meta, Meta can easily understand what that’s an appointment for.

Lauren: The health context is pretty obvious.

Rich: The health context is pretty obvious versus a more general multi-service line provider, like a hospital health system. Those will only be partially restricted because you can be sending events to Meta and it could be for a whole number of different health conditions so that the PHI piece is less sensitive. For those that are fully restricted, they will not be able to use conversion objective campaigns via the Pixel or via the Conversion API, CAPI.

Lauren: That’s a change in that, up until this point, organizations could choose themselves not to use the Pixel or not to use CAPI. Meta was not participating in deciding that for you.

Rich That’s right. Exactly. Now Meta is saying, “No, even if you decide that you want to use the Pixel, you cannot.” The partially restricted or the mid-restricted, it’s going to be on a case-by-case basis about what– We still don’t fully know yet what Meta is going to allow. There’s been a lot of speculation, as you might imagine.

I think certainly some CDP players in the space are hoping that partially restricted advertisers would still be able to use conversion campaigns in conjunction with a CDP. There’s been some talk about standard events being available for partially restricted advertisers, but not custom conversions. Again, if you’re just using a standard lead event, you may still be able to send data to it.

Lauren: Talk about what you mean by standard lead event versus custom, just so everybody listening, if they’re not quite sure what the terminology means.

Rich: Yes. Facebook has standard events that it allows you to optimize to. It might be like a page view, a lead, and there’s various others, right? A button click, that’s just like a standard event that you can optimize to. Custom conversions are where you set up a conversion yourself and you name it your own thing. That’s far more likely, a custom conversion, to be giving away health context because usually, people label things fairly descriptively. They say things like online appointment booking.

Lauren: New patient booking for whatever service.

Rich: Yes. You’re far more likely to give away health context through a custom conversion, which is why Facebook is limiting that more than just a standard event, which is like a lead or a button click where it doesn’t know what the button click is. It doesn’t know what the lead pertains to, especially if you are multi-discipline, multi-service line. It’s not going to know what that lead is.

Lauren: How would you set up a page view or a lead event without a pixel anyways? How would that even be possible?

Rich: You would essentially have to send an offline conversion via CAPI to the lead event. Got it. You’ll still be able to do it with a CDP. You’d still be able to do it if you had an offline event upload file for those advertisers.

Lauren: You’re just going to have to feed that information via CAPI to one of those standard events.

Rich: One of those standard events, yes.

Lauren: Do a world in which people are working the system and saying, “I’m going to send this event to lead, this event to page view, like I’m going to build my own way of scoring those standard events.”?

Rich: 100%. Meta won’t care about that because all that Meta cares about is that it doesn’t get the information. I think what we are going to see is a lot of standard events being repurposed and advertisers will have a map on the back end that says, “A lead is this, a button click is this, a page view is this.”

Lauren: We’re talking partially restricted right now.

Rich: That’s partially restricted.

Lauren: Fully restricted. What we’re hearing word on the street is they may not be able to do that at all.

Rich: They may not have any access to conversions or conversion events or conversion objectives at all. I think the situation for fully restricted, as far as we know today, and again, there’s certainly no very little until these changes roll out, is that lead forms are potentially still on the table. Those on Facebook lead forms, you may still be able to use.

Lauren: Talk about getting health context. [crosstalk] It’s kind of ironic.

Rich: Yes. We don’t fully know yet. We have no definite information from Meta that’s saying one way or another, whether lead forms will be allowed or not for those fully restricted advertisers. I think for people who are fully restricted, if lead forms are available, it’s about building funnels, top-of-the-funnel video campaigns, middle-of-the-funnel traffic campaigns that will not be going away for either category and then driving them to an on-Facebook lead form.

If the on-Facebook lead forms are going away, the best you’re getting is video engagement campaigns, the traffic campaigns. Then you’re trying to understand by using UTMs and various other query parameters, what that Facebook traffic is actually netting out in terms of conversions on the back end.

Lauren: You’re manually then making adjustments, so there’s no algorithmic adjustments.

Rich: Yes. You’re manually making adjustments. You’re trying to ascertain if running traffic and awareness is having a positive impact on your other channels, organic, direct, paid search, downstream. Essentially a lot of people are going to have to be evaluating whether or not an engagement and traffic campaign combination on Meta will be an effective use of dollars in Q1.

Lauren: The ways, just not to get down a rabbit hole, but if this is where you’re at, if this is your outcome, if you’re listening and this is you are a fully restricted entity, reflecting back on other conversations we’ve had this year or some content that came out of scaling up MMM, how are you going to draw a correlation? It’s really going to be about, “Do I believe those dollars are having a positive impact?” This pressure to tie the dollars back is that gap is actually going to widen, not get smaller.

Rich: I think that’s where there’s really going to be two challenges for these advertisers in Q1, which is can I measure, and then can I optimize effectively without the signal going back? The measurement is almost the easiest piece. It’s crucial for the optimization piece. Anyway, if you can’t measure, you can’t make optimizations because like you said, it’s directional optimizations that you’re going to be doing. The question is, can you get Meta to work just based on a video view or a traffic signal?

The other big thing that this is going to impact is your ability to create audiences. I think a lot of healthcare advertisers on Meta and certainly outside of healthcare have really leveraged first-party audiences, sort of the holy grail, they’re creating lookalikes. That’s going to go away. There will be no audience creation either from the Pixel or from conversion events that you’re passing back via CAPI anymore.

Lauren: Not modeling audiences off of an event that you want someone to see.

Rich: Yes, exactly. If you’ve got an online booking event and you want to build a lookalike audience off of that, no chance anymore.

Lauren: Could you do those off of the standard lead events or is that functionality going away? We don’t know.

Rich: I think if you are partially restricted, you should be able to build off those standard lead events because it wouldn’t make sense for Meta to allow you to continue to use that lead event from a conversion optimization point of view if it wasn’t going to allow you to build audiences off it. Again, it’s still, I think it’s still wait and see at this point.

Lauren: The importance of the third-party data providers is only going to grow the ways that we’re pulling in audiences externally.

Rich: Correct. Essentially what you’re going to have to do, the algorithmic power of Facebook to find the right users is going to be drastically reduced. What you’re trying to do is find the right users and before you push it into Meta. Essentially you’re already giving it the right audience to target.

Lauren: You feel more confident that traffic is worth the money or video view campaigns.

Rich: Exactly. You’re already doing the legwork that it was using its algorithm to do. It’s then just got to serve the inventory to that audience. Yes, third-party audience providers are going to be probably rubbing their hands with glee at this, some of them, because it’s going to make them much more impactful.

Lauren: When is this going to happen?

Rich: January 2025. Just around the corner, my friends, happy new year.

Lauren: Do we think that’s legitimate? We’ve seen announcements like this before and there’s delays and delays. Is this official?

Rich: It’s official and it’ll be interesting to see how rapidly it hits everyone’s accounts. Your campaigns are not going to be paused, you’re just not going to be able to optimize towards that objective anymore. Nothing’s going to change with your video view or your traffic campaigns or your reach and frequency campaigns. Anything that is not conversion-based will stay as is.

Lauren: If you want to avoid going dark, potentially in January, on those conversion campaigns, let’s say you get flagged, those conversion events are literally unavailable now to you. Should you be pausing those traffic or those conversion objective campaigns until you reset? Is there something groups should be doing now to get ahead of this? Or should you ride it out till the very last minute?

Rich: I think you should be monitoring your account and going into your events manager and monitoring your status because that’s where it’s going to appear in the events manager. You should be monitoring that on an almost daily basis at this point. You can appeal the categorization that you receive. If you feel like you’ve been incorrectly categorized, like maybe you have been categorized, maybe you’ve been fully restricted, but you feel like you should only be partially restricted because you have different service lines inside your organization that you’re advertising for, you can appeal that. We have no idea how long the appeal process is going to take, what it looks like.

Lauren: They’re going to get onslaught with appeals, so it’d be a while.

Rich: It’ll be a while. We don’t know what happens during the appeal process, but our presumption would be that those features would remain disabled during the appeal process.

Lauren: Do we know anything about the timing between when you get a classification and is it immediate, then that those changes going to affect, or do you believe there’ll be a period of time to react?

Rich: We believe it’s going to be immediate, which is why regular eyes on your account to make sure to notice when those categorizations happen is going to be crucial. If you believe, you asked what someone could do proactively. If you are confident that you are only going to be partially restricted, something that you can do today is you can move from custom conversions to those standard lead events.

Lauren: Do that matching of what you would normally label custom into the standard, create your backend map, and just get comfortable there so nothing changes.

Rich: Because then, yes, if you then are categorized as partial and you’d still have access to those standard lead events, the disruption should be minimized.

Lauren: Rich, I know we don’t know everything right now, so we’ve gone through what we do know, what we believe it means. Anybody who’s listening, are there any sources you recommend that they stay in touch with? Is it just Meta’s announcements themselves? Are there other places that they can go to to check for updates besides this amazing podcast episode, of course?

Rich: Besides this amazing podcast episode, I’d say definitely be in touch with your Meta rep if you have one and be pushing them for more specific information around your account. As you can imagine, we’re not getting a lot of information outside of the official announcement from Meta from the reps at this point in time, but I think it’s worthwhile, especially if you’re spending a decent amount on Meta, you might get access to more information in a more timely manner.

There are some good articles online, as you can imagine, everybody’s talking about this, Search Engine Journal, Ad Age, all these folks have articles out, but I think the majority of people outside of a very select group of people inside of Meta are just really speculating at this point. Anything that you do consume is going to be 20% official, which is what we’ve already heard from Meta, and then probably 80% speculation on how are we going to adjust, what are we going to do, how are we going to circumnavigate this challenge in 2025?

Lauren: We’re in it daily, as Rich mentioned, with the reps pressing for information, playing what-if scenarios with them. As it breaks, we will try to bring it to you all who are listening. No doubt, we’ll probably have an update on this episode with new information as soon as we start to see how this unfolds. Stay tuned.

Thank you all for listening. Thanks, Rich, for joining us. I actually learned a lot. Usually, I come to these podcasts and I know the backstory, but it’s really cool to hear this unfold in real-time. I learned a lot just chatting with you. Thanks for being here.

Rich: Thanks for learning something new today.

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