Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines
Upswell supported many of the 174 public health organizations that ran the experiments analyzed in this paper. Upswell’s team also helped the team at Meta set up and analyze many of the brand lift studies used to measure each campaign’s initial impact.
The paper estimates how cost-effective social media advertising was at changing attitudes and beliefs about COVID-19 vaccines and at raising vaccination rates. Its authors pooled data from 819 randomized experiments in a meta-analysis to get a more precise estimate of the overall average effect. They put the average cost at $3.41 per additional person influenced and $5.68 per additional vaccination.
According to the authors, public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns to reach public health goals. The experiments tested about $40 million of Facebook and Instagram ads aimed at raising COVID-19 vaccination rates during the first year of the vaccine roll-out. Together they reached 2.1 billion people in 15 languages.
The study found that the campaigns shifted self-reported opinions by nearly 1% at baseline, and that they were especially effective at increasing people’s knowledge of how to get vaccinated. The authors describe the study as the largest set of online public health interventions analyzed to date.
