Text Decoration text decoration
Text Decoration text decoration
Penrod Blog

Meta’s Data Restrictions for Healthcare and Wellness Marketers

Do you rely on the Meta Conversions API to track engagement and improve campaign performance? If you're in the healthcare industry, you may notice you can no longer access these crucial details. The change comes down to Meta's increasingly cautious approach to data privacy in sensitive advertising categories, and healthcare is at the top of the list.

Meta Data Restrictions

After all, Meta's data collection practices have been under intense scrutiny over the past decade. In response to public pressure, state regulations, and lawsuits like John Doe v. Meta, they plan to restrict how much conversion data healthcare advertisers can see.

What defines a healthcare advertiser? That depends.

Meta assigns advertising categories based on your websites and apps. For healthcare, "Health and Wellness" is mainly determined by whether a brand is associated with medical conditions, health statuses, or a patient relationship. If these descriptions apply to your company, Meta could completely restrict you from seeing mid- to lower-funnel standard conversions like:

  • Add to Cart
  • Purchase
  • Subscribe
  • Schedule
  • Find Location
  • Contact
  • Lead

To put it bluntly, losing the ability to optimize for conversion events is a nightmare for healthcare brands. However, you can do a few things to lessen the impact when it hits.

Not sure if you’ve been assigned a category yet? It’s easy to find it by following the steps below:

  1. Log in to your Meta Ad Center account at business.facebook.com
  2. In the menu on the left, select Events Manager
  3. In the menu on the left, select Data Sources
  4. In the box on the right, select the Settings tab
  5. Scroll down to the Manage data source categories section
  6. Click the Manage button
  7. A dialog box will appear with any categories that have been assigned by Meta

Manage data source categories on Meta

If you’ve been assigned a sensitive category like “Health and Wellness”, the time to act is now. If you haven’t been assigned a category, there’s no shame in being proactive. We’ve outlined some key steps you can take below.

What Healthcare Marketers Can Do

While the changes are a potential win for patient privacy, they are also a bummer for marketers. We're talking about rising ad costs, worse campaign performance, and harder-to-prove ROI. Marketers must develop new strategies to continue advertising across Meta's massive audience.

How? Here are some things you can do.

1. Appealing Your Categorization

To avoid the restrictions, you can appeal your categorization as a "Health and Wellness" company. However, remember that this categorization is usually out of your hands. Meta relies on objective, market-facing information from your apps and websites to determine your categorization. Unless they misclassified you in error, this is unlikely to work.

2. Focus on Top-of-Funnel Standard Events

You can continue using top-of-funnel standard events like page view or search. However, it's essential to understand the limitations of this strategy. Top-of-funnel events only indicate awareness and interest, so you'll miss out on the data that helps drive more conversions.

3. Using Custom Events

Custom events come with great responsibility; using them means you're taking accountability for the data Meta collects. Meta's goal is to transfer responsibility for compliant ads onto the advertiser, so by creating a custom event, you need to limit data sharing significantly. And, of course, avoid sending PHI.

4. Using Event Codenames

When naming standard events, it's crucial to exercise caution because they can inadvertently contain protected health information (PHI). For example, if you're a clinic running an ad for colonoscopies, labeling an event as "colonoscopy_scheduled" could constitute a PHI violation.

5. Removing the Meta Pixel

Removing the Meta Pixel from your website stops it from sending any potential PHI. However, you may also face catastrophic reporting issues, limiting your ability to optimize ad performance.

6. Blocking PHI

HIPAA-compliant web trackers like Destinations can be intermediaries between your website and Meta properties. It strikes the perfect balance between HIPAA compliance and performance marketing. You can send conversion data to a BAA-protected environment and then redact the PHI before it gets sent to Meta. This means you can optimize ad performance based on conversion events.

Healthcare Compliance is Constantly Shifting

Meta's data restrictions for healthcare and wellness marketers is a challenging problem to overcome. From managing custom events to staying compliant, every step requires forward thinking. While removing the Meta Pixel may seem like a simple solution, it cripples your advertising performance, leaving you at a competitive disadvantage.

That's why having a reliable partner is crucial.

Penrod's HIPAA-compliant Destinations makes your Meta Ads compliant. We also provide tag management and marketing services to keep them that way. With Penrod, healthcare companies have a stable partner in a shifting regulatory landscape.

Solution

Make Meta Ads HIPAA Compliant

Stop worrying about non-compliance fines. Destinations ensures PHI from custom events never reaches non-compliant ad networks.

Learn More →
Meta Data Restrictions

Related Articles