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Ep 480: How Meta’s New Ad Rules Impact Health & Wellness Brands with Pilothouse | AKNF
00:31:04
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- [00:00]
Eric Dick
Changes that Meta is making to the way it handles health and wellness ads.
- [00:06]
Taylor
This is a pretty massive change. Meta has stated that its intention is to promote a safer and more transparent experience for the consumers who use the platforms. Brands who operate a health and wellness based product type site on Shopify. Those will likely see a partial event restriction, which means saying goodbye to Pivot.
- [00:28]
Jocelyn
The copy from being more reactive to proactive.
- [00:32]
Unknown
You have to be conscious of what it is that you sell. Some things are very easy to pivot into being a proactive product. If you're kind of in the danger zone, you have an opportunity right now to start doing some testing.
- [00:57]
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- [02:02]
Eric Dick
It's all killer, no filler. This is the DTC podcast and I'm here with Pilothouse's Meta Ads Brain Trust. The topic that we're talking about today is inspired by some changes that Meta is making to the way it handles health and wellness ads. Taylor, maybe you can start by explaining what this change is and maybe what inspired it.
- [02:22]
Taylor
Yeah, so this is a pretty massive change for any brands that operate in that space. Basically there are different levels of event restrictions happening which affect tracking and delivery depending on where a brand sits within that. And there have been a couple of different reasons for this happening that have been thrown out there. So Meta has stated that its intention is to promote a safer and more transparent experience for the consumers who use the platforms. But there's also the side of it too, right where with a lot of shifting privacy regulation and various things like that happening around the world, there's various levels of risk of Having certain data passed back to the platform so there's the potential for that to be a driver as well.
- [03:12]
Eric Dick
So not to be vulgar, but if, if I bought ED pills or something like that, that information is, is considered sensitive or something or if you buy any kind of health and wellness thing, it's considered to be sensitive information that you don't want other advertisers to be able to advertise against. Or, or is, is that kind of it?
- [03:28]
Taylor
Yeah, I think probably from the sense of like the, like how the algorithm predicts what to deliver to and that data going back to meta so that it can do that, that's, that's likely kind of where it is. Right. Like if you see one ad for a topic that might be a sensitive topic, are you now going to be shown 5 to 10 related ads and then that, that creates a pretty bad user experience. Right. So thinking about the end consumer in mind with, with that it makes sense. And it's kind of been a matter of time for something like this to take effect.
- [03:56]
Eric Dick
It makes me remember a story that was going around around five years ago and when we kind of started all this it was about Target and it was about how Target started sending flyers to someone's, to a teenage daughter's home for like new, you know, new baby equipment and things like that. And it was like that Target somehow knew that this teenage person was pregnant before the parents did and what a big, what a big deal that was. So I imagine, yeah, I can see that wanting to very sensitive around this. So what does it mean practically for the health and wellness advertisers in our audience?
- [04:28]
Taylor
Yeah, so it's, it's still developing really quickly and there's a lot of I think unknown information out there still even to this point. Like we're, we're working to navigate it with our clients who are affected in, in real time. The gist of it is that there are a few levels to the restrictions. The two most common ones being brands based on our understanding, brands who operate like you're, you know, a health and wellness based product type site on Shopify, standard kind of selling supplements or anything that might be related to health and wellness topics. Those will likely see a partial event restriction which means saying goodbye to add to cart check and initiated purchase lead and then kind of anything in that bottom of funnel zone. Then there is the full event restriction level which is basically goodbye to like upper funnel events too on top of those ones. And this to my understanding is more aligned to geo based. So places like where GDPR might be impacting and then also any sort of deeper scenario where the risk for having that, that data would be higher. So you could think of a situation where there's like a login portal with like extremely sensitive like HIPAA kind of information and whatnot. This is all just based on my understanding and conversations with contacts in the advertising space so far.
- [05:53]
Eric Dick
And then there's also some restrictions around how you're setting things up with the URL.
- [05:58]
Taylor
Yeah. And Meta. Meta automated this in a lot of like ways. Like if you go into Events Manager you can see it, but there's this core setup restriction level which would have already started affecting brands likely like August, September of last year. It's really just about how URL data passes back to meta. So that might affect like UTM tracking or how they, they truncate the URL to again mitigate the risk and mitigate what, what is shared with them.
- [06:23]
Eric Dick
So with our advertisers that this affects, what impacts are we seeing? Because I assume the delivery of the campaigns isn't really changing, it's just sort of our ability to pivot against various actions.
- [06:35]
Taylor
Yeah. And so like this is what's developing in real time because Meta offered a 30 day delay to a lot of brands earlier this month where you could extend it and see basically have until February 14th to 21st somewhere in there for it to take effect. But brands who have been getting categorized since that the deadline to apply for that ended, we're seeing it take effect already. So we do have some insight on what it looks like. You're spot on there with what we've seen so far. Most notably you go into Events Manager and you see your purchases drop, they basically stop passing back or tracking through and then you don't see attribution in your campaigns. And then we did see a limited delivery flag on those purchase objective campaigns in some scenarios. But it's, it's changing in real time. Like we've even seen it bounce back and forth a bit between looking more or less like normal. We've seen like almost to the point where it looks like it's a systems update, like systems updates are happening at Meta and it's going to be interesting to watch. But generally speaking we're seeing less purchases pass directly in Events Manager where you can see that 28 day chart that shows you your daily purchases that's either dropped off to zero or it's started to drop down. Especially over this last week or 10 days as of recording.
- [07:53]
Eric Dick
Very interesting. And then so what are brands act how Are brands preparing for this, this 30 day grace period?
- [08:00]
Taylor
Yeah. So like with the 30 day grace period, it's, it's crazy, right? Because it's really that key window to, to it's kind of that like final stand to figure out exactly where you want to go and what, what you can obtain to prepare accordingly. So we've been really deep in it. We have some really good insights. I know, but I'll pass it to Jocelyn to speak to. Kind of the first thing that a lot of brands are looking to.
- [08:22]
Jocelyn
Yeah, we do have brands looking to test different upper funnel events. So view content and setting up custom events in other areas that we typically see correlations between the upper funnel events and purchases. So doing a deep dive into accounts and doing a correlation analysis between upper funnel events like View content add to cart, people who have removed from cart because typically that does show intent because they're on the site shopping and seeing how those upper funnel events correlate with purchases and then doing upper funnel testing using those strongest events. And we are seeing some success in some cases with the view content event. And then outside of that, we also are working with brands who have made updates to their site to pivot the copy from being more reactive to proactive, which takes away the disease factor and response to a health condition and positions them more as a proactive way that you can mitigate your risk around a health condition. But one thing that we were just also chatting about is that there could be other implications with adjusting copy. So if you typically rank high on search for disease keywords, by pivoting those for being able to advertise on meta, you're potentially removing some of the ranking that you've earned on Google. So yeah, definitely a bit of a balance there. But overall, looking for ways to adjust copy on site outside of PDPs as well. So scraping your blogs and double checking for copy on some of the pages that meta will be crawling, but they might not necessarily be your core landing pages that you send meta traffic to.
- [10:19]
Eric Dick
And we don't know yet that those efforts will actually spare the categorization of meta. You know that meta is categorizing you as a health or wellness ad or is that, is that just sort of a proactive like we're hoping that might work, but we don't quite know.
- [10:31]
Jocelyn
We have seen a couple of brands have their brands recategorized by meta. So it has worked in some cases. But being really thorough with going through your site and checking all pages, not just the core landing pages to make sure that you're really covering all your bases and Meta does go back through and continue crawling your site on a regular basis. So if you've been rejected now, that could change in the future and you could potentially also be reverted. So yeah, it's really something that we'll kind of see and learn from as we go here.
- [11:09]
Unknown
I think you have to be like very conscious, I was just going to say, of what it is that you sell when we're talking about this too. Like some things are very easy to pivot into being a proactive product that helps you maybe mitigate the symptoms of a number of different like diseases. But if you sell something that is like very prescriptive, especially like in the US like if you're not an actual pharmaceutical company but you are selling something that's so like specific to one type of disease, you can't really do that. You know what I mean? Like there's no above board way to pivot that product into something that is a bit more ambiguous. Sounds like a really bad word when we're talking about health and wellness. But you know, a bit more blanket and umbrella and it can help proactively treat a number of symptoms rather than like not to be crass again. But like if you're Viagra, you're selling something that does one thing, you can't really like spit that. There's no way to make that okay. You're just at some point lying. So I would like definitely caution people to think about their actual product and like not scrub their website and change things in hopes of sort of extending the time and avoiding recategorization. To be really like thoughtful about what you actually sell, I think is the most important thing.
- [12:29]
Eric Dick
Can anyone give me an example of a kind of product that would be marketed in one way and then could maybe effectively be pivoted to be more proactive and more general.
- [12:39]
Unknown
I can't lean on my usual mug, like fake brand. I'm trying to think of like, I guess you could again go back to Viagra. Just one thing where if you sell like a tea, like a Matcha based tea that has some shared ingredients with Viagra, which goes in mugs by the way. It does go in mugs. Yeah. Always bring it back to the mugs, then that is obviously something that you can pivot. You may have previously sold that tea directly addressing Ed and saying like this.
- [13:13]
Eric Dick
Blood pressure or something.
- [13:15]
Unknown
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you can then pivot that to saying like, like it's just a healthy tea that features ginger, lion's Mane whatever the heck you're putting in there. And that's a really good example of like you can change it. I think Jocelyn said this earlier, but proactive versus reactive is really important here. So it's not like I experience something, some kind of like prescriptive disease and then I take something to remedy that. It's more like the products that can help you in advance of like an actual diagnosis.
- [13:47]
Eric Dick
You know, this is a pretty big update like I'm trying to figure out. I was just asking ChatGPT how big of a category health and wellness is on a platform like Meta. I imagine it's a pretty big one.
- [13:57]
Jocelyn
Yeah.
- [13:58]
Taylor
And that's what's been really interesting from working, working through this because a lot of it, like even Jocelyn, your points about understanding the trade off in like updating, languaging on the site versus like how it could affect your search, impacts your SEO rankings, all that kind of stuff, a lot of it comes down to business level decisions. Right. So it's, it's a lot of like risk analysis and understanding what makes the most sense based on your, your marketing mix, how much you're affected and then what you can uncover as this continues to develop in real time with a lot of unknowns out there for, for everybody experiencing it.
- [14:33]
Eric Dick
And so this could be any like what are the lines between things like cosmetics and things like health and wellness. So like for instance, skin cream that helps with redness or something like that. Is that, is that a cosmetic product or is that a health and wellness product?
- [14:48]
Taylor
Like I would say this is where some of the challenge comes into with this is like there hasn't been much clarity at all in terms of like what will and will not be included or picked up in the crawls or affected or what Meta's concerned about like from a brand category perspective. So it could be, and it's, it's kind of one of those scenarios where with our, with our clients we're working to try to make sure that they're prepared for whatever that circumstance could look like.
- [15:13]
Eric Dick
And then I'm just trying to think are there any like is, is tracking like, are there third party tools? Like, because I know we're always checking, you know, on platform metrics against things like GA4. Potentially other third party tracking metrics are. Well, I guess because Meta is no longer sending the events, everyone along the chain will be affected from these conversion events. There's no, no easy solution with another party.
- [15:35]
Taylor
Yeah, like we can it, it definitely kind of depends to my understanding so far I know that like one thing that's been thrown out there quite a bit has been like using custom conversions to just track purchase, which like, from what I've heard, those kinds of efforts where you might circumvent what's happening, there's a good likelihood you'll end up with an account ban and it could cause further problems. Right. So from evaluating all of this, I think it'll be interesting to see where the idea of like anonymized purchase events goes and how that affects third party tracking tools, knowing that that may align to like what's really at the root of this, which is a customer experience and increased thresholds for privacy while still being able to serve people with the products that could be valuable to them for, for whatever reason. Right. Without the advertiser knowing. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see where it goes. I mean there are certain tools. For example, at Pilothouse we have our own tech Stack Warp Drive, which is a third party post click optimization tool and includes third party attribution as part of that. It doesn't store pii. And so these kinds of tools that may be compliant and not passing info back that affects the root of this topic, which is that potential deliverability issue in predicting based on someone's behavior. Those might honestly become more prominent too as we get going. I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes a bigger thing like people referring to those tools to make optimizations and align with, with trying to find that balance.
- [17:07]
Eric Dick
And it's possible that meta itself will be continuing to fire these events for its own purpose because it still wants to drive effective results as best as possible, but it just won't be passing that information everywhere or are they going to be flying blind as well?
- [17:21]
Taylor
Yeah, so I mean like from what I can tell, that's part of the challenge. Right. Like a lot of brands haven't moved out of that 30 day period. But from seeing purchase events drop like down to nothing in some circumstances after like I have to think that that like we did see some cases where brands who were affected and were categorized after that extension period, their frequency increased pretty aggressively, which to me like that's a symptom of like, of a potential deliverability issue or performance issue based on steering it. So it's tough to say at this point. You know, I think Back to like iOS 14.5 where there was the immediate fallout and then now three, four years, five years later, we're in a really, we've been. Meta has been in a really strong attribution position and delivery position relative to where it was in the immediate fallout. But it'll be, it'll be interesting to see, see where that goes. I know like a lot of our brands are looking at those proxies for performance in the upper funnels because that's really the safest way to protect your ad account potentially is leaning into those, those approved upper funnel events and then focusing on details like is there a correlation between time on site and session depth and how, how long those users typically are engaging with your brand before they make a purchase and they're optimizing towards that. And so yeah, it'll be interesting. There's, there's a lot to this for sure.
- [18:39]
Eric Dick
Kind of like fingerprinting it. Yeah, it takes me back to my old like display network or even before then this is like, this will become like old school radio advertising. You talk to a lot of people that want advertisers to kind of think, you know, think about marketing a bit more like investment bankers. I had someone say to me recently where you just want to make sure you put money in and you're getting more money out. You're actually seeing incremental growth. It might make advertisers focus much at a much higher level as to whether this is working or not. So is this something that we could see spreading to other categories? It's like, or like do we see this kind of being an isolated thing in this health and wellness area? It's like meta's always, you know, since iOS 14 there's been this idea that they, that they're going to be holding data closer to their chest. They have to. With a lot of the laws that are coming up, whether it's GDPR are or other things. Do we see this potentially as spreading to other categories?
- [19:33]
Taylor
The first one that comes to mind for me is like financial products and services. Right. Like you think about that and how sensitive that can be. I think it's really interesting to think about what could the advertising world look in the different phases following this and how it potentially shifts into more like predictive advertising to your point and, and kind of a different approach and different methodologies that force us to focus more on that, that high level strategy more and more.
- [20:00]
Eric Dick
What, what is your, what's your darkest dystopian viewpoint of where this could net out for health and wellness advertisers?
- [20:07]
Taylor
Yeah, I mean it's tough to say at this point. Right. Like I know I wouldn't be like to me like a word like a most difficult case from the advertiser perspective could be like that level three type format. Right. Where there's really no event tracking whatsoever. And you're running, you're running like reach and frequency campaigns and looking at your mmm and trying to understand what kind of like incremental lifts you're driving, which is it has its place, but it can be pretty challenging as well, depending on where the brand is at in their journey as well for growth.
- [20:38]
Eric Dick
Especially when it comes to things like creative testing or actually finding out the little nitty gritty aspects of what's working in your funnel.
- [20:44]
Taylor
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. With how a lot of brands have gotten accustomed to operating, moving pretty quick with creative testing and creative iteration, it's a challenge for sure.
- [20:53]
Unknown
Yeah. It definitely like just brings you back to the era of sort of like one of my notes was like selling the sizzle, not the steak. Where we've been really focused on like, how is the steak cooked, what was the temperature? Like, what kind of peppercorns did we use? Where it demands of you to go back to that, like, what is this bringing? Like, what does someone have to gain by using this product? What do they have to lose? And you have to be a lot more emotional and play with storytelling. When you're kind of advertising amongst regulations like this, it makes it interesting. I like the like investment banking analogy where it goes back to, you know, you just put money into a billboard and you're like, hopefully people drive past that billboard and they like it. And we'll look at that at like a longer viewpoint, but that's definitely the dystopian version, like Taylor said.
- [21:47]
Eric Dick
From the advertiser's perspective.
- [21:48]
Unknown
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:49]
Eric Dick
From a customer perspective, they're probably happy. Probably happy that people don't know they have Ed. But in this case it is a little dark from the advertiser's perspective. Interesting. To summarize this, what are the lenses that we're kind of looking at this through for our advertisers who are affected by it?
- [22:06]
Taylor
Yeah. So I think like, to summarize from, from my perspective, we're looking at short term, technical like, and making sure that we're aligned to why Meta is doing this. Because at the end of the day that's what's going to end up being best for the brand and the ad account long term, but trying to look at opportunities to improve there and leverage details like going back to some good old fashioned, like your top audiences in what you're testing, seeing how you can enrich those upper funnel events and exploring those avenues. And then outside of that too, I think the other Two kind of major ones are third party resources like getting comfortable with which ones align to your business objectives and your brand's terms and ultimately what is aligned from that overall business perspective. And then the third one being long term strategy and thinking through messaging strategy to aves point where we focus a little bit further up on selling the sizzle, knowing that some of the tools to craft the perfect steak on the grill itself might not be might not be there as much as they once were.
- [23:14]
Eric Dick
And be careful if you're thinking about circumvention, if you're thinking of doing a server to server call and calling it something else or you know Facebook meta is pretty, pretty intelligent when they can feel people trying to circumvent them and that is account level trauma that can happen. Are there any implications from the creative side of things for this? It's like from you know, how do you. Because I guess, you know creative testing relies on all these, these down funnel metrics that we're able to pull out. What does this make you think from a creative standpoint?
- [23:44]
Unknown
Totally. Yeah. Like from the very top down point of view. I think I mostly talk about being more strategic around the sizzle and stake anyway. But I think from initial phases, if you're immediately calling out blank will cure first of all. Kind of wild to be doing that on meta anyway. But you probably want to start reigning that in a little bit. And I think as someone who's I guess pretty optimistic usually about how things will go for marketers, just thinking like longer term when you're making creative in the next few months I think is really important for brands. So instead of carrying down on that path and feeling like maybe you aren't feeling the effects now either Jocelyn or Taylor said this earlier. This is very much something that's continuing to evolve so you might be re categorized later. So just being mindful if you're kind of in the danger zone, I'm thinking of that Ralph Wiggum meme where he's like I'm in danger. If you're feeling that Ralph back in the bus meme definitely just be more conscious of your creative because you have an opportunity right now to start doing some testing that other people maybe didn't. So I'm trying to think of a good example. If you are looking to pivot a T from this cures migraines brought on by a specific disease. Instead of this is just a tea that's great for your health. You can start testing now. What are those like health benefits? What are the reasons that someone would purchase this tea with ginger and whatever is in it that are not directly correlating it to a medical issue. Yeah.
- [25:24]
Eric Dick
Stress relief or these other. It's funny, this brings me back to my like cannabis advertising days or whatever where you're not selling, you know, that it's gonna cure cancer or anything like that, but that it can relieve stress or these other things where there's not sort of codified medical claims around it.
- [25:39]
Unknown
Yeah. And a lot of things are super easy to like do that around. I think one of my notes was like, what are the like benefits? You know, it's like, it's a great routine. You feel calm at the beginning of your day if you're drinking the tea. So there's like a lot there, but usually we don't dig into it. Right. Because it's really easy to say this tea will cure. Blank. There you go. And that really works. Top of funnel. But being a little bit more intentional is definitely my biggest piece of advice on the creative side. And also I feel like I said this earlier and I'm always joking that I'm a bit of a Debbie Downer, but also just being cautious. Again, if you sell something and it has an explicit purpose, don't try to get too fancy footwork around it because there's just then a lot of risk that we'll have. I can't wipe.
- [26:26]
Eric Dick
I think it's a really good point that you have to be careful with the way you're repositioning your products and your funnel because Google hasn't put this policy into place. They might. And so it might be worth doing some research. But the fact that like a lot of these brands are doing well because they specifically address a specific pain point and how if you change that too much, you could really dilute your product market fit.
- [26:49]
Unknown
Potentially you can, but you could also potentially expand it, which the dichotomy of Debbie Downer versus painfully the utopian perspective. Like, yeah, you can potentially find new people who maybe didn't get migraines because of a specific disease who just want to find that like morning tea. I'm carving out something nice. It has health benefits to my blood pressure, things outside of something specific. So it does present some opportunities. But I would say first figure out how to remarket to your existing core Personas and then start thinking about like, what are the new opportunities that are coming from this.
- [27:26]
Eric Dick
And Taylor, I just want to drill in quick double click on something that you mentioned just about because I haven't had an update about Meta's on Platform attribution in a while. I know that was a topic around iOS 14 we talked about all the time was how bad it was and how far off it was from our other third party trackers. Just to end on a positive note, maybe for other segments, what is your state of the union around meta attribution at this point? Is it a lot more dialed in and how do you account for how they've been able to do that?
- [27:58]
Taylor
Yeah, I've noticed it's a lot better and I'm comparing it to May 2021 when we're right there pretty much I'm doing my own kind of correlation analysis based on historics and looking in GA4 at Signal and just trying to find anything at the time in that circumstance. It's really good compared to that. Now the biggest frustration I have with it at this point is the fact that it's feels like their payloads get delayed and then it's not like accurate first thing when I'm looking in the morning and I have to refer to my third party sources there. So my, my general take and sense I've been able to a lot of it comes from managing the day to day and looking at a combination of short term and long term trends and a variety of sources. Looking at a variety of sources is the only way you're going to be able to establish a confidence degree in the attribution in any regard. But like I've seen more, more alignment between what I notice in a tool like GA or Shopify's UTMs which have also improved, improved quite a bit and, and then like Meta and being able to take a look at my click data and understand what's happening in each and then on top of that what I see in the, the third party tools I use to look at some of that impression type data overlaid on top of that and how I compare it against for like fractional attribution and stuff like that with other, other channels. But yeah, ultimately I feel pretty optimistic about the fact that we've now got really good third party tools available. There's a lot of really cool innovation happening too with more stuff to come I think on the third party side. And that combined with the, the platform attribution improving, it's a, it's a pretty good, pretty good world of attribution right now compared to where we were, knock on wood that, that, that carries forward.
- [29:33]
Eric Dick
And so if you're a health and wellness advertiser out there and you want to, you know, you're a little nervous about how all of this is shaking out. Maybe get in touch with us and we can put you in touch with Taylor. You guys can, you know, Taylor and Jocelyn, you guys can nerd out a little bit on how to mitigate these effects. I really, I like that idea of being able to model real upper funnel metrics as a proxy for this because you will be able to, you'll still be able to do some basic creative testing. You'll still be able to see what's resonating with people. And if you can correlate that to incremental growth that you're seeing from your top line, then it still could be quite effective.
- [30:10]
Taylor
Exactly. Yeah.
- [30:11]
Eric Dick
All right. Well, thanks, meta team. Hopefully we'll, you know, we'll watch this space and we'll, we'll come back with an update soon, hopefully with some, some, some better news about, about this for health and wellness people peeps because it is, it's, it's New Year, new you. It's the tis the time for health and wellness in, you know, this time of the in Q1 here. So hopefully we can overcome this. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer. Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer no fil takeoff to pilothouse co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the D2C podcast. We'll see you next time.