Meta Introduces New Data Sharing Restrictions For Health and Wellness (Dental) Websites

Meta Introduces New Data Sharing Restrictions For Health and Wellness (Dental) Websites

How dental paid ads on Facebook and Instagram are likely to be affected.

In January 2025, Meta started the roll-out of data sharing restrictions to certain categories of websites. We already know that this includes dental websites and so will have some impact on dentists who rely on the Facebook website pixel to gather data for optimising Facebook ads for example.

These new restrictions are primarily around the prevention of unauthorized data sharing, an area where Meta already has somewhat of a chequered history and been subject to lawsuits and fines. So it certainly looks like Meta is now implementing quite stringent actions to try to stay compliant with the legislation and keep out of trouble.

What do we know so far?

To begin with, Meta is placing organisations into specific categories e.g. Health and Wellness and further into sub-categories like “provider” or “patient portal”. This determination is made based on the type of information you’re already sharing with Meta e.g. from your website or perhaps an app.

Meta is then looking to restrict certain “events”, for example those recorded via its data pixel. How your dental website is categorised will dictate which events will be restricted and subsequently not be shared back to Meta. This will then be unavailable to help optimise ad campaigns.

We already know that dental websites have been placed in the Health and Wellness category and we’re also seeing indications of inclusion in the “patient portal” category.

What does this mean for dental advertisers?

Historically the data recorded by Meta has been used to help target ad campaigns to specific audiences, so bringing the best chance of success for the advertiser. Their Conversions API and App Events API will be affected similarly. However, if the ‘events’ e.g. the logging of a contact form submission, are no longer available for recording and sharing, they clearly cannot be used to help target the campaigns to those people most likely to click and enquire in future.

So we can see the possibility that some of the very useful data which used to be available to Facebook to help target ads to certain demographics and users, will no longer be available to use. One possible result is that ad targeting could suffer by becoming more general.

The more “sensitive” your website is perceived to be by Meta, the more data sharing restrictions you are likely to receive.

Is this the death knell for dental social media advertising?

It’s certainly way too early to think this, particularly as Meta hasn’t confirmed exactly what it’s doing yet, so what we are advising is largely based around observations to date. It’s also pertinent to note that Meta makes millions of pounds from dental advertisers using the Facebook and Instagram platforms and consequently they likely don’t want to lose this by forcing advertisers away. So while we think that optimising and targeting campaigns will become trickier, it won’t reach the point where it’s no longer worthwhile.

We also know that Meta isn’t going to restrict some of the more general data collection events such as ‘page view’ and ‘search’ so there will be information which can still be used for optimisation.

What comes next?

We are still in the data collection phase and so it’s very much a watching brief to see what actually happens. We also need to see what Facebook eventually confirms in terms of the data it will restrict.

We strongly suspect that Meta will continue to tighten the data sharing parameters around their various tools and that this *could* result in ad campaigns for dentists becoming harder to target and optimise. However, we think that this will just present additional challenges for advertisers rather than make the use of ads untenable.

Rest assured we are looking at this very closely on behalf of all of our marketing clients and we’ll share more information in a future blog.

If you’re interested in paid ads for dentists, either as a new initiative or to evaluate where an existing campaign might be failing, please get in touch with the Dental Media ads team on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation discussion.