Industry
Healthcare and dental marketing
The only vertical where what you may measure is a legal question before it is a technical one.
Healthcare is the vertical where measurement stops being a preference and becomes a compliance constraint. Google restricts personalised advertising around health, and in the United States tracking technology on patient-facing pages sits inside HIPAA, which means the gap between what a marketer wants to measure and what may lawfully be collected is wider here than anywhere else.
What differs
What makes healthcare marketing different?
Measurement is a legal question before it is a technical one, so the usual audience, remarketing and conversion tooling is constrained rather than merely awkward.
In every other vertical, measurement decisions are engineering decisions with a privacy dimension. In healthcare the order reverses: what you are permitted to collect is settled first, and the measurement design has to fit inside it. That single inversion explains why healthcare accounts that were built like ordinary local service accounts tend to be quietly non-compliant rather than merely inefficient.
The platform layer is the easier half. Google restricts personalised advertising around health conditions, which removes or reduces audience segmentation, remarketing and similar-audience tooling that works everywhere else. An account that depends on those levers has to be redesigned rather than adjusted.
The harder half, for United States providers, is that ordinary web analytics and advertising tags on patient-facing pages can implicate HIPAA. This is not theoretical. The regulator issued guidance on it, hospitals litigated it, and a federal court struck down part of that guidance in 2024, which means the boundary moved recently and anyone working from older advice is working from a superseded position.
Dental sits in the same regulatory frame but with a different commercial shape: shorter consideration, higher local intent, more price sensitivity, and a service mix that runs from routine hygiene to high-value elective work. The compliance constraints are the same; the account economics are not.
Intent
What are the intent patterns in healthcare search?
Symptom-led, insurance-led and provider-led, arriving in that order, with a large informational layer that converts poorly on a booking ask.
Symptom-led searches
Someone describing a problem rather than naming a service. Very high volume, dominated by informational content and health publishers, and it converts badly against a booking ask. Worth serving with genuine explanation rather than a form.
Insurance and coverage queries
Whether a provider takes a plan is frequently the deciding factor and it is searched directly. Accounts that cannot answer it on the landing page lose people who were otherwise ready to book.
Provider and practice name searches
Late stage and high intent, often after a referral or a recommendation. Contested by directories and aggregators bidding on practice names, which is why brand defence matters more than practices expect.
Urgent and same-day intent
Emergency dental, urgent care and walk-in queries behave completely differently from planned care: they convert by phone, they are time-of-day sensitive, and availability beats persuasion.
Elective and high-value procedures
Cosmetic dentistry, implants and elective procedures are considered purchases with long research phases and heavy price comparison. They justify separate campaigns and separate landing pages from routine care.
Negative keyword themes this vertical needs
Themes that matter here specifically. A generic negative list will not contain them, and each one is a recurring source of spend that looks like relevant traffic.
- Symptom and self-diagnosis research
- Enormous volume of people looking for information rather than a provider. Some is worth buying deliberately as a top-of-funnel play, but it should be a decision rather than something broad match absorbs.
- Training, courses and careers
- Dental nursing courses, medical assistant training and clinical job searches overlap heavily with service vocabulary and convert to nothing.
- DIY, home remedy and at-home kits
- At-home whitening, mail-order aligners and home remedy searches indicate someone specifically avoiding a provider visit.
- Free, low-cost and public scheme queries
- Searches for free clinics, public health schemes and charitable care are not private-pay intent, and the terms sit close to routine service queries.
- Legal and malpractice
- Malpractice, negligence and complaint queries share provider and procedure vocabulary, arrive with the opposite intent, and are expensive clicks.
Measurement
What counts as a conversion in healthcare?
A booked and attended appointment, measured without carrying identifying detail into ad platforms, which is the hard part rather than the definition.
The conversion is an attended appointment
A booked appointment that nobody attends is not revenue, and no-show rates in healthcare are high enough to change which campaigns look good. Optimising toward bookings alone systematically overvalues whatever produces easy cancellations.
You may not send identifying detail to ad platforms
The usual fix for attendance measurement, importing outcomes with identifiers, is exactly what is constrained here. The measurement design has to produce an outcome signal without carrying patient identity into a third party.
Condition-level segmentation is largely off the table
Reporting that separates performance by condition or procedure is what a marketer instinctively wants and what the constraints most directly restrict. Accounts have to be structured so that campaign-level data carries the signal instead.
Phone calls carry most of the urgent intent
Urgent care converts by phone, and call recording in a clinical context carries consent and retention obligations beyond ordinary call tracking. The measurement gain and the compliance exposure sit in the same feature.
Value varies by an order of magnitude
A hygiene appointment and an implant case are both conversions and are not remotely equivalent. Without procedure-level value, bidding optimises toward whichever is easiest to book, which is reliably the cheapest.
Constraints
What legal and platform constraints apply to healthcare advertising?
Google restricts health personalisation, and in the United States tracking technology on patient-facing pages sits inside HIPAA with recently litigated boundaries.
Google restricts personalised advertising on health
Health conditions sit in Google's sensitive categories for personalised advertising, which limits how audiences may be built and how remarketing may be segmented. Design the account so it does not depend on tooling that will be unavailable or reduced.
Tracking technology on patient-facing pages can implicate HIPAA
The Office for Civil Rights issued guidance in December 2022, revised in March 2024, on the use of online tracking technologies by HIPAA covered entities and business associates. It is the reason ordinary analytics and advertising tags on healthcare properties are a legal question rather than only a technical one.
Source: HHS Office for Civil Rights, online tracking guidance, issued 1 December 2022, revised 18 March 2024
A federal court vacated part of that guidance in 2024
On 20 June 2024 the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas vacated the portion providing that HIPAA obligations are triggered where a technology connects an individual's IP address with a visit to an unauthenticated public webpage addressing specific health conditions or providers. HHS withdrew its appeal on 29 August 2024, which made the ruling final. Anyone working from pre-2024 advice on this point is working from a superseded position.
Source: American Hospital Association, on the ruling and the withdrawn appeal, ruling 20 June 2024, appeal withdrawn 29 August 2024
What the ruling did not change
It narrowed one specific proposition about public pages. It did not make tracking on authenticated properties acceptable, and it did not remove the underlying prohibition on impermissibly disclosing protected health information to tracking vendors. Patient portals and any page where the entity knows who the visitor is remain squarely inside HIPAA, and state privacy law is a separate question this ruling did not touch.
This is not legal advice, and the position is jurisdictional
The above is a marketer's summary of a moving area, sourced so you can check it. The decision about what your organisation may deploy belongs to your counsel and compliance function, and it should be made before tags are installed rather than after a breach review.
What good looks like
What does a good healthcare account look like?
Built to work without granular remarketing, measured on attended appointments, and designed with someone who owns the compliance risk in the room.
- Designed to work without granular remarketing and condition-level audiences, because those are the levers the constraints remove.
- Attended appointments as the optimisation target, with no-shows understood well enough that they are not silently funding the wrong campaigns.
- An outcome signal that reaches the platform without carrying patient identity, agreed with compliance before it is built.
- Separate campaigns and landing pages for urgent, routine and elective work, because their intent, timing and value differ enormously.
- Insurance and coverage answered plainly on the landing page, since it is frequently the deciding factor and it is searched directly.
- Procedure-level value assigned, so bidding does not optimise toward the cheapest appointment type by default.
- A tag inventory on patient-facing properties that someone can actually produce on request, reviewed whenever the site changes.
When this vertical does not need us
If you have no compliance function and no counsel to sign off a measurement design, engage them before engaging us, because we cannot make that decision for you and would not accept a brief that assumed we could. If you are a single-location dental practice competing on local routine care, a good local freelancer will run that account for less than we would charge. And if what you need is a HIPAA-compliant analytics implementation reviewed by someone with clinical privacy credentials, hire that specialist; we would defer to them anyway.
Related services:marketing analytics servicesGoogle Ads management
Questions
What else comes up in healthcare marketing?
Whether analytics is allowed on a hospital site, what changed after the 2024 ruling, how to measure without identifiers, and where dental differs.
Can healthcare providers use Google Analytics at all?
It depends on which pages, what is collected and who your counsel is, which is a genuinely unsatisfying answer and the honest one. The regulator's guidance on tracking technologies is the starting point, part of it was vacated in 2024, and the remaining boundary still turns on whether protected health information reaches a vendor. Treat it as a compliance decision your organisation makes, not a platform setting.
What actually changed after the 2024 court ruling?
The court vacated the proposition that connecting an IP address to a visit to an unauthenticated public page about a health condition automatically triggers HIPAA obligations, and HHS withdrew its appeal in August 2024. What did not change is everything about authenticated pages such as patient portals, or the underlying rule against disclosing protected health information to tracking vendors.
How do we measure performance without identifying patients?
By moving the outcome signal rather than the identity: aggregate and delayed conversion reporting, campaign-level rather than condition-level structure, and outcome import designed so that what leaves your systems carries no patient identity. It is more work and less granular than a normal account, and it is the trade the vertical requires.
Is dental subject to the same rules?
In the United States a dental practice that is a covered entity sits in the same regulatory frame, so the tracking questions apply. What differs is commercial: shorter consideration, stronger local intent, sharper price sensitivity, and a value range from routine hygiene to high-value elective work that makes procedure-level value assignment more important than it is in general practice.
Why does this vertical suit a measurement-first approach?
Because here it is not a preference. In most verticals arguing for measurement before optimisation is a judgement about sequencing. In healthcare the measurement design is constrained by law, so it has to be settled first regardless of what anyone prefers, and an account built without settling it is carrying risk rather than merely reporting badly.
Related industries
Senior living marketing
The person searching is usually not the person moving in, and everything follows from that.
Running in this vertical?
Tell us what the account looks like now. We will tell you which of these constraints is actually costing you money, and whether the answer is us or a specialist.