Facebook’s recent announcement about removing health targeting options for advertising has generated many questions. Two of the most popular articles on the subject are from Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/02/facebook-ad-ban-medical-research-recruitment-526275
and Social Media Today:
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-announces-the-removal-of-thousands-of-ad-targeting-categories-rela/609841/
83bar would like to share our perspective on this issue.
The headline from the Politico article is very misleading and implies that healthcare marketing might “go away” on social media. It isn’t. In fact, we have looked closely at this issue and don’t anticipate there being much of an issue with 83bar campaigns. The Social Media Today article puts it well: Facebook is removing healthcare targeting options, but not healthcare advertising.
Facebook advertisers currently have the ability to target users by interests such as “The American Heart Association,” “Susan G. Komen,” or other health organizations, which is a shortcut for advertisers to reach users that may have associated health conditions. Targeting like this will go away; however, 83bar doesn’t rely on such targeting very much so the effects will be minimal.
With good creative materials, a clear call to action, and the proper setup of Facebook’s tracking pixel so that the Facebook algorithm can be “trained” to find more people like your target users, you will still likely generate more leads at a better cost on this platform than any other for most campaigns. In general, this change may slightly increase the cost to find leads, but there is no major impact.
To summarize, 83bar relies on training Facebook’s algorithm far more than on the simple targeting options that are being removed from Facebook.
