Meta’s latest update is the biggest shift in healthcare advertising in over ten years. With new restrictions limiting how businesses can track lower-funnel events and optimise for conversions, many healthcare advertisers have been forced to rethink their entire approach. One of our clients—an established healthcare provider—was hit hard by these changes. Here’s how we helped them adapt, maintain lead quality, and continue driving results.
What’s the Change?
In early 2025, Meta rolled out a major policy update affecting healthcare advertisers. The biggest impact? The removal of lower-funnel event tracking and optimisation, meaning advertisers can no longer optimise for actions like “Purchase” or “Add to Cart.” Instead, they are restricted to higher-funnel events like “Landing Page Views” or “Engagement.”
Other key changes include:
- Stricter age targeting – Some health-related ads can only target users aged 18+.
- Tighter data privacy rules – Advertisers can no longer send custom data parameters that may include health-related information.
- Restrictions on sensitive content – Messaging around weight loss, cosmetic procedures, and prescription drugs faces stricter scrutiny.
Why Did Meta Implement These Changes?
Meta’s reasoning behind these updates comes down to three main factors:
- User Privacy & Data Protection – In response to growing scrutiny around sensitive health data, Meta is aligning with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA to prevent personal health information from being exploited for ad targeting.
- Regulatory Compliance – Global governments have been cracking down on digital health advertising, particularly around prescription drugs, weight loss solutions, and medical claims.
- Combatting Misinformation – The spread of misleading health claims has been a long-standing issue. These changes help Meta enforce more responsible marketing practices in the healthcare space.
- They’re being sued – although they won’t say this publicly, they have several active court cases against them with the plaintiffs claiming Meta has stored and misused sensitive medical information. They need to be seen to be doing something about this.
How Our Client Was Impacted
Our client, a leading healthcare provider, relied on conversion-optimised campaigns to drive high-quality patient inquiries. Before the update, they could track leads all the way to bookings and optimise for lower-funnel actions.
Now, with lower-funnel event tracking removed, they lost the ability to:
- optimise campaigns for actual patient bookings, reducing ad efficiency.
- Use Meta’s pixel data to retarget high-intent users based on their actions.
- Reliably measure the success of campaigns beyond top-of-funnel interactions like clicks and landing page visits.
How We Helped Them Adapt
To work around these changes, we implemented a three-step strategy that allowed our client to maintain strong lead quality and adapt to Meta’s evolving ad landscape.
- Testing Higher-Funnel Events to Monitor Traffic Quality
- Since lower-funnel optimisations were no longer an option, we shifted to optimising for higher-funnel events like “Landing Page Views” and “Engagement.”
- To ensure we weren’t just driving low-intent clicks, we ran controlled tests to measure how well these events correlated with actual patient inquiries.
- Diversifying the Media Mix Testing Higher-Funnel Events to Monitor Traffic Quality
- We expanded their advertising efforts beyond Meta, introducing TikTok ads to reach potential patients through a different channel.
- This move helped mitigate the impact of Meta’s changes while taking advantage of TikTok’s lower CPMs and strong engagement rates.
- Implementing a Custom Tracking Solution
- To bridge the tracking gap, we set up a sophisticated conversion logging system that ties upper-funnel events (like form submissions or call clicks) to actual booked appointments using first-party data.
- This allowed us to recreate lower-funnel tracking within Meta’s limitations.
Results
We can’t give all the juicy details away, however there were some really interesting insights that you should be able to learn from and apply to your business.
First – it’s important that you have good clean data linked to your sales CRM or equivalent. You need to be able to evaluate customer data on the backend, you can’t rely on platform metrics only. All of our analysis and key decisions came off the back of mapping customers directly to individual ads and the platforms.
- 99.99% of user who came in from TikTok were first time customers – AMAZING! We have a new audience.
- This audience converts! CPA was 20% under our baseline CPA for our main channels – for the more sophisticated media buyer, you’ll know there are many factors that can influence this metric, including volume and media spend but for the purpose of keeping this simple, that number is fact.
- The bounce rate was much higher than all other channels, however if they did come back for a second visit that were very engaged and more likely to convert.
- Thanks to our analytics whiz, our tracking solution worked, the CPA with this new workaround remained stable.
- The business has continued to thrive and arguably are in a stronger position thanks to further diversification of our media mix.
Final Thoughts
While Meta’s policy update has forced major changes in how healthcare brands advertise, it doesn’t mean performance has to suffer. By adapting our strategy, diversifying our media mix, and implementing smarter tracking solutions, we’ve helped our client maintain ad efficiency in a rapidly shifting landscape.
If your business is struggling with Meta’s new healthcare ad restrictions, we can help you find solutions that work. Get in touch today.
