Facebook Ads for Healthcare Marketing
Facebook has long been an ideal medium to connect with friends, customers, and consumers. It can be said that Facebook has been a leader in getting in front of a desired audience. Facebook is a highly effective venue to reach a wide range of eyeballs, and this appeal is enticing to healthcare marketers.
As it sometimes happens, the big playing field can get messy. Facebook as one of the top players in advertising has been involved in recent privacy scandals and congressional hearings. As a way to combat this backlash, Facebook has increased transparency in its ad targeting, which means users can now opt out of advertising indicators. Understand what you can do to ensure privacy when running Facebook ads.
Healthcare Marketing and HIPAA
For healthcare marketing specifically, the issue revolves around identifiable information collected on a hospital website and information protected under HIPAA.
That means in order to send that data to a third party for reasons other than treatment, payment, or healthcare operations, consent to do so would need to be obtained from patients.
Meta Pixel, a snippet of JavaScript code offered by Meta for use on websites, records data of users of those websites and tracks what they did on the sites.
According to Compliance Junction, “At the time of filing the lawsuit, attorneys for the plaintiff alleged that at least 664 hospitals have been found to be using Meta Pixel on their websites and were sending data to Meta without obtaining consent from patients.”
This can be a huge liability and an important investigation is underway.
Facebook Ads Moving Forward
Facebook Ads are getting a makeover, but that does not mean they will be going away anytime soon.
It is important to stay on top of these changes and move forward, despite the messy playing field.
Still many users have not decreased their Facebook use due to privacy concerns. This helps to confirm the staying power of Facebook ads, and its ability to help healthcare marketers reach new patients.
What Practis Does To Ensure Privacy
Practis goes the extra mile to ensure privacy when running Facebook advertising campaigns for our clients.
For Facebook advertising campaigns managed by Practis, we track only pageviews through Meta Pixel and do not capture and share any user-specific data.
