What’s going on with health and wellness??
People are freaking out about restrictions coming for advertisers in the health and wellness industry. It does sound potentially bad.
Let’s attempt to sort fact from fiction (or at least speculation)…
The Sources
There’s a ton of speculation and not a lot of confirmed facts from official Meta sources. So I wanted to put together the main points of what I think we know at this point.
Here’s a quote that was shared in my private community from an ads rep:
Of course, reps have been known to be misinformed before (often, actually). We should take their word seriously, but not as gospel.
Plenty of agencies are hearing similar stories from their reps. This LinkedIn post from Haus shares a similar timeline.
And finally, there are a few official help pages that give us a glimpse of all of this (just not the detail that others are sharing).
Making Sense Of It
Now let’s summarize what I think we know at this point…
Enforcement of new restrictions for certain health and wellness brands begins in January. This is for data sources associated with the following:
- Medical conditions
- Health statuses
- Provider and patient relationships
If you pass these types of data via the pixel or API, this applies to you.
I’ve seen a lot of speculation that restrictions are for a much broader group of companies, but I haven’t seen that verified officially. It makes far more sense to apply restrictions for data sources when dealing with sensitive health data.
The scope of Meta’s restrictions will be variable depending on the situation, including:
Some health and wellness brands may face significant limitations on data sharing. They may even be prevented from tracking lower funnel conversion events.
How to Prepare
This all sounds scary, but it’s still unclear. Prepare the best that you can, but I suspect that this isn’t going to be applied as broadly as many expect.
So stay on top of those alerts that come from Meta and check to see if you’ve been assigned a data source category in Events Manager (found under the Settings tab).
If you see anything here, it will be the first sign that you may face restrictions.
