Meta health and wellness ad restrictions: how clinics can keep measuring bookings

Since 2025, Meta has been restricting the data that health and wellness advertisers can send to its platforms. The details below come from secondary sources, mainly agencies that run Meta campaigns. We have found no documentation on how these rules apply specifically to accounts in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, so the safest step is to check your own account.

What has been reported

From early 2025. Data sources classified as health and wellness lose lower-funnel events, such as Purchase, or face restrictions on them. For a clinic, the events that tell Meta a patient booked or paid may stop being available for optimisation and reporting.

From around September 2025. Meta began proactively restricting custom audiences and custom conversions that imply sensitive information. Examples cited include a conversion named "appointment booked" and audience lists named after a medical condition.

How to check your account

1. Open Events Manager.
2. Go to Data Sources and select your pixel or dataset.
3. Open Settings and look for any notice about health and wellness classification or restricted events.
4. Review your custom conversions and custom audiences, and note any that show a restriction.

Write down the date and what you found, so you can compare at your next check.

What this means for a clinic

• Campaigns that optimise for a booking event may lose that signal. Delivery may shift towards earlier actions, such as page views or conversations started.
• Reports inside Meta may show fewer bookings than actually took place.
• Audience lists built from patient records, or named after conditions, carry platform risk and privacy risk at the same time.

The privacy side has its own timetable. In Egypt, the one-year compliance period under the executive regulations of the Personal Data Protection Law (Law 151/2020) ends around 1 November 2026, and the regulations cover sensitive data and direct electronic marketing. In Saudi Arabia, the personal data protection law is already enforced: according to Clyde & Co, SDAIA committees issued 48 violation decisions in the year to January 2026.

Count bookings in your own records

The reliable count of bookings sits in your clinic's system. These steps keep measurement working whatever the platform reports:

1. Use a separate WhatsApp link for each campaign, with a slightly different opening message, so the team knows the source from the first line.
2. Ask every new patient how they heard about you, and record the answer in the booking record.
3. Each week, match the bookings from each campaign with that week's spend, and calculate the cost per booking yourself.
4. Send ad platforms only the data they need. Keep patient conditions, treatment names linked to a person, and patient lists out of anything you upload or track.
5. Where it suits the service, use ads that open a WhatsApp conversation. The conversation itself becomes a record your team can count.

How to check it is working

Each month, compare two numbers for every campaign: the bookings Meta reports, and the bookings your own records attribute to the same campaign. Note the gap. If the gap widens after a restriction notice, base budget decisions on your own records and treat the platform figures as a guide to delivery.

Keep this comparison for at least three months. It shows which campaigns bring patients who actually attend, which is the number that matters for your schedule.

In practice

Check your Events Manager settings this week, review the names of your conversions and audiences, and set up per-campaign links if you have not already. If you would like help setting up this kind of measurement, the Naqar team can work through it with you.

Sources

• Haus: Meta announces new health and wellness conversion restrictions (industry publication, no link)
• Accelerated Digital Media: guide to social media health ad restrictions 2026 (industry publication, no link)
• CMS: Egypt's PDPL executive regulations issued, one-year compliance countdown begins (law firm summary, no link)
• Clyde & Co: enforcement of the Saudi PDP Law (law firm summary, no link)