Using Facebook Ads Audiences for Global Lifestyle Disease Surveillance: Promises and Limitations

TL;DR

This study investigates the potential of using Facebook Ads audience data to monitor global lifestyle diseases, revealing limited effectiveness across countries but useful insights within countries and highlighting API limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to disease surveillance using Facebook audience estimates and evaluates its strengths and limitations across multiple countries.

Findings

Weak correlation between Facebook interests and disease prevalence across countries.

Insights into health awareness trends within countries.

Identification of potential pitfalls in using Facebook's Marketing API.

Abstract

Every day, millions of users reveal their interests on Facebook, which are then monetized via targeted advertisement marketing campaigns. In this paper, we explore the use of demographically rich Facebook Ads audience estimates for tracking non-communicable diseases around the world. Across 47 countries, we compute the audiences of marker interests, and evaluate their potential in tracking health conditions associated with tobacco use, obesity, and diabetes, compared to the performance of placebo interests. Despite its huge potential, we find that, for modeling prevalence of health conditions across countries, differences in these interest audiences are only weakly indicative of the corresponding prevalence rates. Within the countries, however, our approach provides interesting insights on trends of health awareness across demographic groups. Finally, we provide a temporal error analysis to expose the potential pitfalls of using Facebook's Marketing API as a black box.