Short answer: med spa Google Ads sit under two rulebooks at once — Google's healthcare and medicines advertising policies, and the National Law that governs advertising a regulated health service in Australia. Campaigns that ignore either one get disapproved, suspended, or complained about. The workable approach is to structure by treatment category, keep prescription medicines unnamed, describe process rather than outcomes, and send every click to a page built for that specific treatment.
Two rulebooks, not one
Google restricts how healthcare and medicines can be advertised, and its systems apply those restrictions automatically. Prescription medicines cannot be promoted to consumers, and ads that appear to do so are disapproved without much explanation. Repeated disapprovals put the account itself at risk, which is why aesthetics accounts need someone actively managing policy rather than reacting to it.
Separately, the National Law governs advertising a regulated health service. It prohibits false or misleading advertising, testimonials about the service, claims creating an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment, offers without their terms, and content that encourages the unnecessary use of health services. Both regimes apply to the same ad simultaneously — an ad can be perfectly acceptable to Google and still breach Australian advertising obligations.
The safest working rule: write for the stricter of the two, then check it with the free AHPRA advertising compliance checker before it goes live.
Never name the medicine
The most common breach in this category is naming a prescription product in ad copy, keywords, headlines or landing pages. Compliant campaigns refer to anti-wrinkle injections and dermal fillers as treatment categories, without brand names, and without implying that a specific product is available or discounted.
This has a practical consequence for keywords too. People do search for brand names, but bidding on them and building landing pages around them creates exposure on both fronts. Structuring around treatment language keeps the account defensible and, in our experience, does not meaningfully reduce reachable demand because the treatment terms carry substantial volume of their own.
Campaign structure by treatment category
A single "aesthetics" campaign fails because the treatments have different values, different audiences and different objections. Separate campaigns give you separate budgets, separate negatives and separate landing pages.
- Injectable treatments — anti-wrinkle injections and dermal fillers, kept to treatment-category language throughout.
- Skin treatments — peels, microneedling, medical-grade facials and skin health programmes.
- Laser and energy-based treatments — pigmentation, vascular, resurfacing and hair reduction, each with distinct intent.
- Body treatments — where offered, kept carefully away from outcome and weight-loss claims.
- Brand and clinic name — a small, cheap campaign that protects your own name from competitors bidding on it.
Location targeting should reflect where patients realistically travel from. Aesthetic patients are less willing to drive than most healthcare patients, so a tight radius with strong local relevance usually outperforms a broad metropolitan campaign.
Keywords, negatives and search intent
Intent splits three ways: people researching a treatment, people comparing providers, and people looking to book. Research terms are cheaper and useful for building an audience for remarketing; booking terms are expensive and should point to pages with immediate availability.
Negatives do as much work as keywords in this category. The recurring waste comes from training and course searches, job and career queries, product and cosmetic-purchase searches, DIY and at-home terms, wholesale and supplier searches, and searches for complications or reversal that are usually looking for someone else's problem. Read the search terms report weekly rather than monthly; aesthetics attracts an unusually wide fringe of irrelevant queries.
Ad copy that survives both regimes
Describe the treatment, the clinic and the process. Do not describe the result. Copy that promises a look, an outcome or a duration of effect creates an expectation of beneficial treatment, and it is also the copy most likely to be disapproved.
Avoid urgency devices built on insecurity, avoid comparative superlatives, and avoid anything resembling a testimonial. Where you run an offer — a consultation fee, a package, a redeemable amount — the terms have to appear with it, including expiry and any conditions. An offer without terms is a straightforward breach, and it is the one clinics make most often in ad extensions where space is tight.
Useful angles that stay compliant: qualifications and registration of the treating practitioners, that a consultation is required before treatment, how the clinic assesses suitability, location and parking, appointment availability, and what happens at a first visit.
Landing pages and the consultation-first model
Every campaign needs its own page, and the page has to match the ad exactly. Sending injectable traffic to a general treatments page wastes expensive clicks and reads as bait to a reviewer.
Build the page around the consultation rather than the treatment purchase. Explain that a consultation and assessment happen first, who conducts it, what it costs, what suitability depends on, and what the process involves afterwards. That framing is both clinically appropriate and commercially better: it converts people who are not yet ready to book a procedure but are willing to be assessed.
Before-and-after imagery on a landing page is permitted only under conditions — consistent lighting, angle and framing, no editing or filtering, documented consent, matching patient characteristics and appropriate qualifying information. The full requirements are in the before-and-after photos checklist, and the broader rule set in med spa advertising rules.
Measurement, remarketing and sensitive-category limits
Track calls, form submissions and online bookings as distinct conversions, and import the ones that turn into attended consultations so bidding optimises towards attendance rather than form fills. Aesthetics has a high no-show rate on free consultations, and an account optimised to raw leads will happily buy more of them.
Remarketing is available but constrained: health and medical conditions cannot be used to build audiences, so lists must be based on page visits and behaviour in ways that do not infer a condition. Keep remarketing creative general rather than treatment-specific for this reason.
Then measure over a quarter, alongside your organic and local performance. Paid search rarely works well in isolation in this category — it works when a maintained med spa marketing programme, a strong local profile and a website built for consultations are all pulling together, with the technical foundations described on medical SEO and the compliance process on AHPRA-compliant marketing.
Budget pacing and seasonality
Aesthetic demand is seasonal in ways paid search punishes if you ignore it. Interest rises ahead of social seasons and holidays and falls sharply afterwards, and treatments with a recovery or downtime component behave differently again — people book them when they can hide for a week.
Pace the budget accordingly rather than setting one figure for the year. Increase in the weeks before peak demand so you are visible while people are researching, and reduce during troughs instead of buying expensive clicks from a smaller pool. Where a treatment has a natural lead time, start the campaign that far in advance.
Watch daily patterns too. Aesthetic browsing concentrates in the evening and on weekends, and clinics that only answer the phone from nine to five are paying for clicks they cannot service. Either extend answering, add online booking with real availability, or shift ad scheduling to match when the clinic can actually respond.
Review this quarterly against your own booking data, not against generic industry seasonality, because catchments differ more than most operators expect.
