This page is for owners, medical directors and marketing leads at UK private clinics: private GP services, fertility clinics, physiotherapy and musculoskeletal clinics, scan and diagnostic centres, cosmetic surgery practices and consultants with their own rooms. It explains how I build and run Google Ads for a clinic, the rules that shape every ad and landing page, and where I usually find the budget leaking. Dental practices face a different mix of rules, which I cover on the page about Google Ads for dental practices.
How patients look for a private clinic
Health searches are rarely casual. A person typing a symptom, a test or a treatment into Google is usually anxious, comparing options with care, or both. The searches that matter to a clinic tend to fall into four groups.
- Wanting to be seen soon. “Private GP appointment today”, “blood test without a referral”, “sports injury physio near me”. Often on a phone, often after hearing how long the NHS wait is. They book with whichever clinic shows a time and a clear price.
- Researching a treatment. “IVF cost UK”, “private knee replacement price”, “MRI scan self-pay”. These people read several clinic websites, check fees and consultant profiles, and may take weeks or months to decide. One patient can be worth a great deal, so this is usually where the budget earns its keep.
- Looking for a named consultant or clinic. A referral letter or a friend’s recommendation gives a name, and the patient searches for it before calling.
- Reading about a condition. “Why does my lower back ache in the morning”, “signs of low iron”. Mostly people wanting information. These are cheap clicks that seldom book, and they are better answered by SEO for private clinics than by paid search.
Each group needs its own bids, hours, wording and landing page, so I keep them apart in the account from day one.
What changes in Google Ads for a private clinic
The rules come before the keywords
A clinic ad has to satisfy several sets of rules at once, and Google enforces only its own.
- Google’s healthcare and medicines policy. UK ads cannot promote prescription-only medicines to the public, and that applies to keywords and the destination page as well as the ad text. Some categories, online pharmacies among them, need Google certification before a single ad will serve. Google revises the list of restricted services from time to time, so I check the current UK policy at the start of every account rather than relying on what was allowed last year.
- Medicines law. Regulation 284 of the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 prohibits advertising prescription-only medicines to the public. Weight-loss injections, botulinum toxin and many hormone treatments fall under it, and so do ads that avoid the product’s name while making it obvious what is on offer. What a clinic can usually promote is a consultation with a qualified prescriber about the patient’s concern.
- The CAP Code. Section 12 requires documentary evidence for any objective health claim before the ad appears, and stops ads offering advice or treatment for serious conditions outside the supervision of a suitably qualified professional. Words such as “painless”, “guaranteed”, “safe” and “leading” rarely survive a careful read. Ads for cosmetic interventions must not be directed at under-18s, so those campaigns get age exclusions and copy that does not speak to a younger audience.
- Professional regulators. The GMC, HCPC, GPhC and the other councils expect their registrants’ advertising to be factual and not to play on people’s fears. The GMC’s guidance for doctors who offer cosmetic interventions, for example, rules out promotions such as time-limited discounts that push someone towards a hurried decision. Fertility clinics also have HFEA guidance on how success rates should be presented.
So I write ads and landing pages with these rules open beside me, and I ask the responsible clinician to approve every clinical claim before launch. I am not a regulatory lawyer, and for anything borderline I suggest the clinic asks CAP’s Copy Advice team before it runs. A rejected ad costs a day; an ASA ruling that names the clinic is public and stays online.
Keywords and the searches to keep out
Health keywords attract a great deal of traffic a private clinic cannot use: NHS services and waiting lists, jobs and training (“physio jobs”, “phlebotomy course”), home test kits, free advice and treatment abroad. I begin with phrase and exact match on the services that matter, add a negative keyword list before launch, and read the search terms every week for the first few months. Broader matching can come later, once conversion data is reliable enough for Google’s bidding to learn from.
Medicine names need a firm line. Bidding on the brand or generic name of a prescription-only medicine is itself a way of promoting it, however careful the ad text, so those names sit on the negative list rather than the keyword list.
Hours, distance and ad assets
Clinics have fixed consulting hours and a reception team that cannot always answer the phone. Call-led campaigns run only when someone can pick up; booking-form campaigns can run for longer. How far a patient will travel depends on the service. Someone after a blood test wants a clinic near home or work, while a fertility or orthopaedic patient may cross the country for the right consultant, so the radius is set campaign by campaign. Call, location and sitelink assets carry the details patients look for before they click: the address, consultant profiles, fees, and whether a GP referral or insurer authorisation is needed.
Landing pages that answer a patient’s questions
Every campaign sends people to a page about that service, never the home page. A patient comparing clinics wants to know who will see them and what that person is registered and qualified to do, what the first appointment involves, the fee or an honest “from” price, whether insurance is accepted, how soon they can be seen and how to book. Services registered with the CQC must show their latest rating on their website once they have been inspected, and it belongs on these pages too. Where the existing site cannot do this, I build landing pages for paid campaigns and check them against the same rules as the ads.
Tracking without leaking health data
I track calls from the ads and the website, booking requests and online bookings, and test each one before the account spends anything. Many clinics book through a third-party system on another domain, and without the right setup those bookings never reach the reports. Once there is enough volume, I send back which enquiries became consultations and treatments using offline conversion imports, so the bidding learns from patients rather than form fills.
This step needs more care in healthcare than anywhere else. Information about a person’s health is special category data under UK GDPR, and a thank-you page called “/ivf-consultation-booked” passed to an ad platform can reveal it. I keep condition and treatment names out of the URLs and event names that reach Google, send back only what the bidding needs, agree the setup with whoever handles data protection at the clinic, and make sure every tag waits for the visitor’s cookie choice. Remarketing follows the same caution. Google’s personalised advertising policy restricts targeting people on the basis of their health, so I do not build audiences from condition pages and I do not upload patient lists.
A typical account structure
| Campaign | What it covers | How I run it |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Searches for the clinic and its consultants | Small budget; keeps directories and competitors off your name |
| Appointments | Private GP, blood tests, health checks, “seen this week” searches | Local radius, consulting hours only, calls and bookings as conversions |
| Diagnostics | Scans and tests patients can book themselves | Self-pay searches kept apart from referral-led ones, prices on the page |
| Treatments | One campaign per high-value service, such as fertility, orthopaedics or cosmetic surgery | Wider radius, consultant profiles and fees on the page, judged on consultations booked |
| Prescriber consultations | Services where treatment may involve a prescription-only medicine | Promotes the clinician’s assessment of the concern, never the medicine; sometimes better left out of paid search altogether |
A small clinic rarely needs all five at once. I usually start with brand and the one service with the most appointment capacity and the clearest value per patient, then add more once tracking produces numbers I trust. Performance Max waits until there are months of clean conversion data, and even then I use it sparingly in healthcare: it picks its own placements, images and search matches, and every one of them has to clear the same rules as the ads I write myself.
Mistakes I see in clinic accounts
- Selling the medicine, not the consultation. Weight-loss, hair-loss or “anti-wrinkle” ads where the prescription-only product is plainly the offer. The ASA has ruled against clinics and pharmacies for this, including ads that never named the drug.
- Every service in one campaign. Cheap, high-volume searches take the budget and the high-value treatments barely appear.
- Claims nobody can evidence. “The UK’s leading clinic”, “100% safe”, or success rates with no source and no date.
- Health data in the tags. Treatment names in conversion events and page addresses, sent straight to Google and Meta.
- Symptom questions using up the budget. Ads showing for NHS services, jobs and “what does this rash mean” searches.
- Counting the wrong thing. Taps on a phone number or visits to the contact page recorded as conversions, so the bidding learns to find people who tap rather than people who book.
Google Ads within a clinic’s wider marketing
Paid search can bring enquiries in the week it launches, but the cost continues for as long as the ads run. Organic search, Facebook and Instagram, email to existing patients and the Google Business Profile all have a part, and each has health rules of its own. My page on digital marketing for private clinics shows how I fit them together, and the search terms report from Google Ads is one of the most useful inputs to that plan, because it shows exactly how patients describe what they need.
Next step
Tell me which services you most want to fill, roughly what a new patient for each is worth to the clinic, and whether you already run Google Ads. If you do, give me access before we talk and I will look through the account, then tell you where the spend is going, which ads or pages I think carry a regulatory risk, and what I would change first. Ongoing work runs as monthly PPC management, reported on consultations booked rather than clicks. Book a call about your clinic to start.