You are weighing whether to put money behind Google Ads, and everyone who sells the service will tell you it works. It does, for certain searches, for certain practices, at certain moments in their growth. It also burns budget quietly for practices whose situation doesn't suit it, and the difference has almost nothing to do with how polished the ads look. This is the honest version: where the spend genuinely earns a return, the Australia-specific rules that narrow what you're even allowed to write, and how to decide before a dollar goes out the door.
Where the spend actually earns a return
Search ads are matched to intent that already exists the moment someone types it in. That is their whole advantage over most other marketing, and also the edge of it. The searches worth paying for are the ones where a bookable slot, shown fast, genuinely beats waiting for organic rankings to do the work.
| Intent type | What the searcher is doing | What it means for ads |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent, symptom-driven | Searching an emergency term at short notice, wanting an appointment today | Ads work well here. Whoever answers fastest with a bookable slot tends to win, and organic movement is too slow to help on the day |
| High-value considered research | Comparing providers over days or weeks for a costed, infrequent procedure | Can work, but only if the landing page actually answers the comparison questions rather than pitching |
| New-practice awareness | A recently opened practice with no review history and thin organic rankings yet | Ads can buy visibility while local SEO has time to build. Treat it as a bridge, not a permanent substitute |
| Generic, high-volume head terms | Broad searches such as a profession name alone, run city-wide | This is where budget disappears fastest: heavy competition, broad intent, and a suburb practice bidding against an entire metro area |
| A named local competitor | Someone already searching a specific competitor's name | Rarely worth it for a small practice. You're paying to interrupt a decision that is often already made |
There is also a question worth asking before any of the above: is this practice actually short on enquiries, or short on capacity? If your appointment book is already full weeks out, more enquiries do not solve the problem you have. They just lengthen a queue nobody has warned about, and the ad spend would do more good sitting in a term deposit until you've added capacity to handle the demand you already get.
The Australia-specific policies that change what you can write
Google's advertising policies apply differently by the country an ad targets, and Australia sits in a stricter bracket than some practices assume.
- No prescription drug terms. Google's healthcare policy exempts only Canada, New Zealand and the United States from its general ban on using prescription drug terms for promotional purposes. Australia is not on that list: ads targeting Australia cannot use prescription drug terms in the ad copy or on the page it points to.
- Certification regimes for pharmacy and telehealth. Online pharmacies and telemedicine providers face their own certification requirements before these ad types are available at all, on top of state-based pharmacy registration where relevant. If either is part of your practice, certification is a prerequisite, not a detail to sort out after the campaign is built.
- No personalising or remarketing on health interests. Google's own advertising policies separately restrict building audiences or personalising ads around a person's health conditions or other health-related interests. A retargeting list built from 'visited our knee pain page' isn't available to you the way it would be for a retail store, regardless of what AHPRA says on top.
AHPRA's rules do not stop at your website
Section 133 of the National Law applies to a Google Ad the same way it applies to your homepage. An advertisement is an advertisement, headline to landing page. Practically, that means any offer or discount needs its terms stated in the ad itself, not just on the page it lands on. It means a testimonial has no more place in ad copy or a review asset than it does on your site. And it means an outcome claim in a headline has to clear the same unreasonable-expectation bar as one in your body copy. We walk through all five prohibitions in AHPRA's advertising rules in plain English; it is worth reading before you write a single headline.
The cosmetic-clinic squeeze
If your practice offers cosmetic injectable consultations, the current rules squeeze from two directions at once. TGA guidance now treats generic phrases such as wrinkle reduction injections or weight-loss injections as prohibited indirect references to a prescription medicine, so the industry's long-standing workaround wording is not actually a workaround. Google then layers its own prescription-drug-term restriction on Australia-targeted ads on top of that. What's left to advertise honestly is the consultation and the service itself: who you are, the area of practice, and an invitation to discuss options individually, not the injectable class or its effects.
Deciding what an enquiry is worth
A new-patient exam is worth one thing to your practice; a specific high-value procedure enquiry is worth a great deal more; a same-day emergency slot might be worth filling at almost any acquisition cost because an empty chair earns nothing at all. Work out, roughly, what each enquiry type is genuinely worth before you set a budget. Without that number, every figure in the Google Ads dashboard looks either impressive or alarming with no way to tell which it actually is.
Kill criteria, decided before you need them
Decide in advance what would tell you a campaign isn't working, because once the money is spent, almost any result can be explained a dozen ways that all sound reasonable. Worth setting before launch: a cost-per-enquiry ceiling that triggers a pause rather than a shrug, a minimum test period so a slow month doesn't get blamed on the campaign, and one named person who actually checks the account weekly. Most accounts that quietly burn budget are the ones nobody is watching.
- Questions to answer before you launch a single ad
- What is a booked appointment worth to us, including likely repeat visits?Without this number, every cost figure in the dashboard is a guess
- Is call tracking and form tracking actually wired up?If you can't see which clicks became bookings, you're paying for clicks, not patients
- Does the landing page answer the specific question behind the search?A generic homepage receiving traffic from a specific search wastes most of the click
- Has every headline, description and offer been checked against AHPRA's five prohibitions?Testimonials, unstated offer terms and outcome promises are as much a risk in an ad as on a page
- If we offer cosmetic consultations, have we removed every prescription-medicine reference, direct or generic?Google and the TGA both restrict this for Australia-targeted ads; there is no currently safe substitute phrase
- What is our spending ceiling, and who is checking it weekly?Decide the number that makes you pause before you need it, not after
- Is this solving an enquiry problem or a capacity problem?More leads doesn't help a fully booked practice; it adds to a queue nobody has warned about
If you want a second opinion on whether ads make sense for your practice right now, that judgement call is exactly what a free growth plan is for, alongside the rest of what Google Ads for healthcare actually involves in practice.
Questions practices ask us about Google Ads
Is Google Ads worth it for a small practice?
For urgent, symptom-driven searches in your local area, often yes. For broad, generic terms competing against every provider in a city, usually not, because you're bidding for volume rather than intent. The honest answer depends on which kind of search your practice actually needs to win, not on the platform itself.
Can we advertise a new-patient special or a discount?
Yes, provided the terms and conditions are stated in the advertisement itself, the same requirement that applies on your website. A discount that only reveals its conditions once someone clicks through is the kind of gap the National Law specifically targets.
Can we retarget people who visited our website?
General site-wide remarketing is different from personalising ads around a health interest. Google's policies restrict the latter, so building an audience from visitors to a page that reveals a specific condition or treatment interest is the part to avoid. Retargeting based on broad site visits, without segmenting by health condition, sits on safer ground.
Do we need special certification to run healthcare ads?
Only for specific categories: online pharmacies and telemedicine providers need Google's certification before those ad types are available, along with relevant state pharmacy registration where it applies. A general medical or allied-health practice advertising its own services doesn't sit in that certified category, but it's worth confirming your specific offering against Google's current policy before you launch.
We've never run ads before. Where do we actually start?
Work out what an enquiry is worth before you touch the platform, wire up tracking so you can see what's actually working, and start with a modest budget tightly targeted to the suburbs you can realistically serve. Expand only once you can see, in your own numbers, which searches are converting.