Healthcare PPC has more rules than most categories, and most of the waste I see in clinic accounts comes from ignoring them or working around them. A med spa, a dental office, a physical therapy clinic and a multi-specialty practice look very different from the inside. On Google Ads, they share the same problems: health policies that limit what you can say and who you can target, privacy limits on tracking, phone calls that need to be sorted into new patients and everyone else, and searches that are almost always local.
Google Ads by type of practice
Each specialty has its own search patterns and its own page here:
- Google Ads for med spas: treatment-specific campaigns and the rules around injectables and cosmetic procedures.
- Google Ads for dentists: new-patient, emergency and high-value treatment campaigns, with offline conversion tracking.
- Google Ads for physical therapists: condition-based campaigns and booking tracking for PT clinics.
- Google Ads for chiropractors: problem-first searches, local reach and separating new patients from rescheduling calls.
If you run a private or multi-specialty clinic, the rest of this page covers what applies to all of them.
Google’s healthcare and medicines policies
Google’s Healthcare and medicines policy restricts the use of prescription drug terms in ads, landing pages and keywords. That matters more than many clinics expect. Leading with the brand name of a prescription product, for example, can get ads disapproved or limited. The same policy generally doesn’t allow ads for speculative or experimental medical treatments. It also requires certification for specific services, such as online pharmacies, telemedicine that involves prescribing, addiction services and health insurance, so if you offer any of those, it’s worth checking before you build campaigns.
My practice is to write ads around the problem you solve and the first visit, not around drug names or promised outcomes. It keeps ads approved and tends to read better to cautious patients anyway.
Remarketing and audience limits
This is the one that surprises clinic owners most. Google’s personalized advertising policy says advertisers promoting products or services in sensitive interest categories can’t use advertiser-curated audiences: Customer Match, your data segments (remarketing), audience expansion and lookalike segments. Health is one of those categories. Google’s definition covers physical and mental health conditions, treatments for chronic conditions, invasive procedures including cosmetic surgery and injections, and disabilities.
Two practical consequences:
- Plan the account without remarketing. Whether it applies to you depends on what your ads and pages promote, so I check it per campaign. The core search campaigns have to work on their own either way.
- Be careful with Demand Gen. The same policy page notes that Demand Gen campaigns use advertiser-curated audiences by default and may be restricted from serving when promoting sensitive categories.
Predefined Google audiences, such as in-market and affinity segments, demographics and location targeting, remain available to health advertisers.
Tracking and patient privacy in the US
If your practice is a HIPAA-regulated entity, tracking needs more care than in other industries. Google’s own HIPAA and Google Analytics page says Google makes no representations that Google Analytics satisfies HIPAA requirements and doesn’t offer a Business Associate Agreement for it. It also says Analytics tags shouldn’t be placed on authenticated pages, such as patient portals, and that unauthenticated pages related to the provision of health care services are more likely to be HIPAA-covered. Google’s advice is to work with your legal team to decide which pages can be tagged.
I’m not a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice. What I do is build the tracking plan around your legal team’s decision. As my own practice, I apply the same caution to Google Ads tags: no tracking on patient portals or intake forms that collect health details, and conversions that record that a booking or call happened, not what it was about.
Calls and appointments as conversions
Most clinics get a large share of new patients by phone. Google’s call conversion tracking counts calls above a minimum length you set, which is a start. A call tracking tool goes further and lets us count only calls that become appointments.
That’s what made the difference for Radiance MedSpa. Every phone call had been counted as a conversion. We routed Google Ads calls through Call Tracking Metrics so only calls that resulted in bookings counted, and built a new landing page with Zenoti booking. Cost per lead dropped from $142 to $89 within six months. For Everett Physio, a physical therapy clinic, lead tracking linked to revenue was part of the work, and patient appointments increased 35% while cost per appointment fell 22%. Details are in the Radiance MedSpa and Everett Physio case studies, and my analytics and tracking setup covers this in depth.
Local intent
Patients rarely travel far for routine care. I set targeting to the area your patients actually come from and check Google’s location options, because the default can also show ads to people who have only shown interest in your area. Multi-location practices usually get separate targeting and budgets per location.
Insurance vs. cash-pay services
In my experience this is one of the most useful splits in a clinic account. Patients searching for an in-network provider behave differently from people researching a cash-pay service. I keep them in separate campaigns, with separate landing pages and budgets, and set the bidding around what each patient is worth to the practice. If insurance acceptance is a selling point, it belongs in the ad and on the page so you don’t pay for clicks from people you can’t see.
How I work with healthcare practices
I start with your goals, capacity and current account. My Google Ads audit gives you a recorded video review and a PDF if you want a second opinion first. Then I restructure campaigns, fix tracking and manage the account. Every two weeks you get a Loom video, plus a live dashboard. No contracts, and you work directly with me. See my Google Ads management or browse all case studies.
