Meta has recently introduced significant changes to its advertising policies, particularly impacting healthcare marketers who advertise on Facebook or Instagram. These Meta ad policy changes limit how healthcare providers can track user activity, retarget patients, and optimise campaigns for mid and lower funnel conversion actions. If you’re running Facebook or Instagram ads for a healthcare business, these updates could affect your ability to reach and convert your audience effectively.
In this article, we’ll break down what’s happened, how Meta healthcare ad policies worked before, what these changes mean for advertisers, and the solutions to ensure your campaigns continue delivering results.
Don’t want to read?
What Meta Ad policies have changed for healthcare advertisers?
At the start of 2025, Meta updated its policies around healthcare advertising and data tracking, particularly for businesses operating in the European market. These changes restrict the way healthcare advertisers can collect and use data from their website visitors, reducing the effectiveness of conversion tracking, audience segmentation, and retargeting.
Specifically, Meta are now restricting the data that can pass between healthcare related websites and Meta platforms. Which means
-
No custom parameters
-
No URL info after the domain (.co.uk or .com)
-
No custom event tracking
-
No lookalike audience creation
-
No retargeting
-
… No good!
The move follows ongoing regulatory pressure around data privacy, particularly in response to laws like GDPR and the broader push toward a more privacy-centric internet. As a result, Meta now blocks data collection from healthcare domains, meaning advertisers can no longer track website visitors in the same way.
How Did Meta Ads Work Before?
Previously, Meta ad policies allowed healthcare advertisers to use Meta Pixel tracking to collect user data and optimise ad performance. This worked in two key ways:
-
Retargeting Potential Patients: Meta’s tracking allowed advertisers to target people who had been on their website but not converted (e.g., visiting a hip replacement page).
-
Targeting New Audiences: Advertisers could create Lookalike Audiences based on past patient enquiries or website visitors, helping to reach people with similar characteristics.
These are of the utmost importance because the hardest thing to do in healthcare marketing is identify someone that has a particular condition, or is seeking a specific treatment. Once they’ve hit the condition or treatment related content on your website, you can be fairly sure they’re in the market for your services.
Those website visitors are gold dust, and losing the ability to target them through Meta is a real blow.
What the Changes Mean for Healthcare Marketers
Meta’s latest update imposes the following restrictions on healthcare advertisers:
-
No more website event tracking: The Meta Pixel can no longer track website visits, inquiries, or other key user actions from healthcare domains.
-
Limited optimisation capabilities: Advertisers cannot optimise campaigns based on mid- or lower-funnel actions, such as enquiry submissions or appointment bookings.
-
No Lookalike Audiences based on patient data: Healthcare advertisers can no longer create Lookalike Audiences using website visitor data.
-
No retargeting based on website behavior: Patients who visit a provider’s website can no longer be re-engaged with targeted ads across Facebook or Instagram.
The result? Higher ad costs, lower targeting precision, and reduced campaign effectiveness---unless you adapt your strategy.
What’s the Solution? How Healthcare Marketers Can Adapt
Despite these challenges, there are several workarounds that healthcare advertisers can use to continue running effective Facebook and Instagram ads:
1. First-Party Data & Lead Forms
Meta has not restricted on-platform lead generation---meaning advertisers can still use Facebook and Instagram lead forms to collect inquiries directly. This removes the need for website tracking while allowing advertisers to build their own first-party data for future email or SMS marketing.
2. Google Analytics & UTM Tracking
Although Meta can no longer track website conversions, advertisers can use Google Analytics (GA4) with UTM parameters to monitor traffic and inquiry data. This ensures that even though conversion tracking is limited within Meta, campaign performance can still be measured.
3. Provide more value
Due to the cost of creating content that resonates on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it’s no secret that marketers can become price-sensitive and, to some extent, lazy with their campaigns. This often leads to social media advertising that fails to provide value for the end user, ultimately limiting the returns and effectiveness of the channel itself.
If you’re focusing on lead forms and gathering first-party data, you also need to focus on providing value. A social media user is unlikely to share their private information and personal details without some kind of value exchange. As marketers, we need to be thoughtful about what will resonate most with our audience---what will provide them with the kind of value they’d be willing to “pay for” with their private information.
If we can add value, social media advertising can act as a magnet that attracts the needle---in this case, the potential patient---in the broader social media audience haystack.
How Medico Digital Can Help
These Meta ad policy changes present challenges, but they also offer an opportunity for healthcare marketers to rethink their strategy and future-proof their campaigns. At Medico Digital, we specialise in navigating complex Meta healthcare ad policies, ensuring that your advertising remains effective despite industry-wide shifts.
If you’re concerned about how these changes impact your healthcare marketing campaigns, speak to our team today. We’ll help you optimize your strategy, maintain strong ad performance, and explore alternative growth channels.
📩 Contact us at hello@medicodigital.co.uk to find out how we can help.