Data-Driven Targeting Hits the Mark
First published in March 2024 and rewritten in October 2026. The client work below took place before the original publication date. The final section is new.
The problem
A health and wellness coach was frustrated with her online advertising. Despite her early efforts, the ads did not seem to reach the right people. Conversion rates were low and few new clients came from them.
What we did
We started with research rather than more ad spend. We looked at online advertising platforms that offered detailed audience targeting and used them to analyse data on her ideal clients: their demographics, their interests and how they behaved online.
With that picture in hand, we worked with the coach to build targeted ad campaigns aimed squarely at the people she wanted to work with. Her knowledge of her clients and our analysis of the data went into every campaign.
What happened
Click-through and conversion rates improved significantly. The leads were better qualified, and the coaching business was on a footing for sustainable growth.
The real lesson
The lesson here is precision: knowing exactly who the ideal client is before spending money trying to reach them. Vague targeting spends the budget on people who were never going to buy, however good the ad.
What has changed for health advertisers
Targeting on Meta has become harder for anyone in health and wellness.
- From 19 January 2022, Meta removed detailed targeting options relating to sensitive topics, including options referencing health causes.
- Meta now assigns advertisers' websites to data source categories, and for some categories it limits or blocks the sharing of mid- and lower-funnel events, the signals advertisers rely on to optimise for conversions.
- Its Business Tools Terms bar businesses from sharing data that includes or is based on health information.
A wellness coach can still advertise. The detailed, data-led targeting that worked here is simply harder to repeat on Meta than it used to be.
What we would do today
I would start with the same question: who exactly is the ideal client? But I would rely less on ad platforms to find them. Having contacted 15,282 decision makers across four client accounts, my view is that targeted outreach to a well-defined ideal client, with an easy way to opt out, is far more reliable than hoping ads or organic content convert.
For a wellness coach who works with professionals or organisations, that means:
- A list built from the ideal client profile. Role, sector, location and company size, found on LinkedIn, instead of interest categories an ad platform guesses at.
- Every message written for the person. Over 16 weeks, with the same audience and sequence, AI-written messages drew replies from 13.6% of people against 7.7% for a client's own templates. A reply means any reply, including "no thanks".
- Warm contacts first. Existing connections replied 2x to 5x more often than cold contacts on every account that ran both.
Health claims still need care. A quality gate checks every draft against the client's rules, rewrites it up to three times and holds it if it still fails, so nothing goes out that the coach would not say herself. You can see how that works in done-for-you outreach.
