Google Ads for Medical Practices

Advertise the appointments you can fill

Many GP practices are not taking new patients, or only taking them for one or two doctors. If the ad says "GP clinic near you" and the patient finds out on the booking screen that nobody has a free appointment for weeks, you have paid for a click that was never going to book.

So the first question in any medical account is about the diary, not the keywords. Which practitioners have room, and which services have spare sessions? The answers decide what gets a campaign, and what stays switched off until capacity opens up.

When a doctor's list fills, their ads should stop. When a new practitioner starts, theirs should start. A campaign set once and left alone soon drifts out of step with the appointment book.

Services that suit ads in a medical practice

Some medical services are a better fit for search ads than a general clinic listing, because patients search for them by name and the practice can control supply. These are examples. What suits your practice depends on who is free to see patients.

A new practitioner with an open list. When a GP joins and is taking new patients, that is often the clearest thing a busy clinic can say. The ad and the landing page should be about that doctor's availability, not the clinic in general.

Skin checks. People search for this service directly. It deserves its own ad group and a page explaining what the appointment involves, rather than a line on a long services list.

Women's health. These searches are often personal and specific. Each ad should lead to a plainly written page about that service. Wording needs care here, because some searches involve prescription medicines.

After-hours appointments. The ad schedule should match the hours you actually run, and the landing page should show those hours up front.

Specialist rooms. The searcher may already hold a referral, or be a GP looking for somewhere to send a patient. If your rooms need a referral, the page should say so, along with what the patient needs to bring.

Prescription drug terms and telehealth certification

Medical practices face a rule most allied health clinics never meet. Ads targeting Australia cannot use prescription drug terms in the ad or on the destination page. An ad can read cleanly and still breach the rule because the page it links to names a medicine.

A treatment page often names the medicine because that is what patients ask about. Cosmetic injectables and prescription weight management medicines are examples where the wording on both the ad and the page needs checking before anything goes live.

Telehealth adds a second condition. Google allows telemedicine providers to advertise if they are verified through LegitScript's Healthcare Merchant Certification Program. If you want to promote telehealth consultations, confirm which requirements apply before launch, not after a disapproval.

We check each ad and its landing page against these rules before launch, and again whenever the copy changes. Google updates its policies, so check the current version before relying on any of this. Our guide to Google's healthcare ad policy covers the detail and how it sits alongside AHPRA.

Tracking bookings made on a third-party booking platform

Many medical practices take online bookings through a separate booking platform. The patient clicks your ad, lands on your website, presses "Book now" and moves to the platform's own site to choose a time. At that point the ad account often loses the trail.

Then one of two things happens. Either Google Ads records nothing, so a campaign that is filling appointments looks like it is failing. Or it counts the click on the "Book now" button as a conversion, so every patient who opened the booking screen and then gave up is reported as a booking. Neither tells you what a booked appointment cost.

The fix is to set tracking up across both sites, so a visit that starts with an ad can be followed through to a completed booking. Depending on the platform, that may mean cross-domain measurement or a conversion signal sent when a booking is confirmed. We test it with a real booking path before trusting the numbers, and track phone calls separately, because plenty of patients still ring the front desk.

Where Google Ads for medical practices waste money

One ad group for every service. A campaign that tries to cover general practice, skin checks and women's health in one set of ads ends up vague about all of them. Patients also search in plain words, not clinical ones. We cover both problems in what local doctors often overlook with Google Ads.

A landing page that does not match the ad. If someone clicks an ad about skin checks and lands on the home page, they have to find the service themselves. On a phone, many will not bother. Our post on why a medical practice site is not bringing in Google Ads leads goes through the common page problems.

Ads still running for appointments nobody can offer. This one is most specific to general practice. Spend keeps going to a doctor whose list closed last month, or to a service the clinic has paused.

How we work with medical practices

Google Ads sits within our wider medical practice marketing work. It performs better when the pages it sends patients to are built for booking, which is where medical practice web design comes in. For services you want found over the long term without paying per click, there is medical SEO.

Each campaign starts from the practitioners and services with room in the diary, and we adjust it as capacity changes. Groups with several sites, or practices not sure where to start, can begin with a strategy call instead of an audit. For how we run Google Ads across other health professions, see our main Google Ads page.

Frequently Asked Questions