Google Ads · Private GP Clinics
Google Ads for private GP clinics, and the rules that shape them
Private general practice sells two very different things through the same front door. One is access, bought by somebody who cannot get an NHS appointment this week. The other is investigation, bought by somebody who is worried and wants tests. They need separate campaigns because they search differently, convert differently and are worth different amounts.
In short
Google Ads for private gp clinics in the UK needs a different build from a generic Google Ads account, and this is how PipelineOS structures it. Campaign one is access. Same-day GP appointment, private doctor near me, GP appointment without registration, doctor open Saturday. The first ad group to build is Same-day and urgent access: the highest-converting group in the account and the one that punishes an unanswered phone hardest. The most common way this goes wrong: naming a prescription-only medicine in keywords or ad copy because a competitor is.
How we build it
Campaign one is access. Same-day GP appointment, private doctor near me, GP appointment without registration, doctor open Saturday. This is impatience, and impatience converts within the hour. It runs long hours, leans on call extensions, and the landing page should show the next available slot rather than describe the philosophy of the practice. If the phone is answered by a person, expect this campaign to carry the account.
Campaign two is investigation and screening: private blood tests, full body health check, cardiac screening, allergy testing, menopause consultation. Longer consideration, higher ticket, more comparison shopping. It wants a different landing page, one that lists exactly which markers are in a panel, what the appointment involves and how quickly results come back, because the entire purchase decision is a comparison of inclusions. Campaign three covers documentation work that most clinics under-advertise and shouldn’t: HGV and taxi medicals, pre-employment medicals, fitness to fly letters, visa medicals, private sick notes. Predictable, unglamorous, extremely cheap to acquire and profitable per hour. Campaign four is travel health, which is aggressively seasonal and should be scaled from March and again from October.
Now the constraint that catches clinics out. Prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the public in the UK under the Human Medicines Regulations. That means no branded weight-loss injections, no branded treatments of any kind, in keyword targeting or ad copy, whatever a competitor appears to be doing this week. Advertise the consultation and the service — a weight management consultation with a GP, an assessment for treatment suitability — and let the clinical conversation happen in the room. Google layers its own healthcare and medicines policies on top, and accounts that get this wrong are suspended rather than warned. In England the clinic also needs to be CQC registered, and saying so plainly is worth more in ad copy than any adjective.
Geography behaves unusually. For access and documentation work, people travel further than you would expect — thirty or forty minutes is nothing to somebody who wants to be seen today — so a wider radius than a dental or physiotherapy account is justified. For screening it goes wider still, because a comprehensive health check is a planned trip. Location bid adjustments belong here rather than a hard boundary.
Ad groups
The account structure in practice. Ad groups stay tight so the ad can genuinely match the search, which lowers cost per click for the same position.
| Ad group | Example keywords | Bids and handling |
|---|---|---|
| Same-day and urgent access | private GP appointment today, see a doctor without registering, walk in GP [town], doctor open weekend | The highest-converting group in the account and the one that punishes an unanswered phone hardest. Long hours, call extensions, next-slot visible on the page. |
| Screening, panels and blood tests | private blood test [town], full health check, cardiac screening, private allergy test | Comparison-driven, so the page must publish exactly what is included and the turnaround time. Bid confidently here; the ticket carries it. |
| Medicals and certification | HGV medical [town], taxi driver medical, pre employment medical, fitness to fly letter | Low competition, low click cost, near-perfect intent. Book these into set clinic sessions so they fill gaps rather than displace consultations. |
| Womens health and menopause | private menopause clinic, HRT consultation [town], coil fitting private, private gynaecology appointment | Growing demand and long patient relationships. Advertise the consultation only, never a named medicine, and be explicit about who the clinician is. |
| Travel health | travel vaccinations [town], yellow fever centre, rabies vaccine private, malaria tablets consultation | Sharply seasonal. Scale from March for summer travel and again in October, cut it back between. Yellow fever centre status, where held, deserves its own ad. |
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Call 07443 392243WhatsAppBudget and the arithmetic
Set the values out honestly. A private GP consultation is commonly £60–£150 depending on length and city, a medical £80–£160, a blood panel with review £120–£350, and a comprehensive health assessment £350–£900. Direct costs are the clinician session and, for screening, the laboratory fee, which is a real number and not a rounding error — a wide panel can take a third of the fee before anyone has been paid to interpret it.
The figure that changes the arithmetic is what happens afterwards. A patient who comes once for a same-day appointment and is looked after properly frequently returns two to five times over the following few years and brings family. Treating a first appointment as a £95 transaction understates it by a factor of three or four. Working on a conservative repeat pattern, a new patient is realistically worth £250–£600 of revenue over three years, with contribution after clinical time somewhere near half of that.
So the break-even is generous. If a new patient contributes £150 over the relationship and two in three enquiries become an appointment, you can pay up to £100 an enquiry before the campaign stops paying for itself. Access and medicals terms typically deliver enquiries at £20–£60; screening terms are dearer, often £45–£130, and are carried by the higher ticket. The number to watch is not cost per click but the proportion of calls answered inside four rings during clinic hours, which quietly determines whether any of the above is true.
Four ways this goes wrong
- Naming a prescription-only medicine in keywords or ad copy because a competitor is. That is a Human Medicines Regulations breach and a fast route to a suspended account, not a clever growth tactic.
- One landing page for the whole clinic, so the person who wants an appointment at 4pm has to scroll past a health screening price table to find a phone number.
- Advertising same-day access with a phone line that diverts to an answering service at 5pm, in a service whose entire proposition is availability.
- Ignoring medicals and certification work because it feels unexciting. It is the cheapest acquisition in the account and it fills sessions that would otherwise be empty.
- Running travel vaccination ads at the same budget in November as in May, and reading the resulting cost per enquiry as a failure of the campaign.
The two pages behind this one
This page is the intersection. For the wider picture:
Google Ads in general
Everything about marketing for private gp clinics
Questions
Can we advertise weight-loss treatments?
You can advertise a weight management consultation with a clinician, an assessment of suitability and ongoing monitoring. You cannot advertise a prescription-only medicine to the public, which rules out naming the drug or its brand in keywords, headlines, descriptions or on the landing page you send ads to. Google enforces its own layer on top of the law and tends to suspend rather than warn.
Should the screening campaign publish prices?
Yes, and the inclusions with them. Screening buyers are explicitly comparing what is in each panel and how quickly results arrive. A page that says “from” and nothing else loses to the clinic that lists forty markers and a 48-hour turnaround. Publishing also filters out the enquiries that were only ever going to end at the price question.
How wide should the targeting radius be?
Wider than most clinics assume. Somebody who cannot get seen locally will drive half an hour today, and a comprehensive health assessment is a planned journey people will make across a county. Rather than drawing a hard boundary, bid down with distance and watch where enquiries actually convert into attended appointments over the first two months.
Is Google Ads worth it for a single-site private GP practice?
Usually, because the intent is unambiguous and the patient relationship is long. The condition is operational rather than financial: the phone has to be answered by someone who can book, during the hours the ads run. A single-site practice with reception cover and clinic capacity does well. One where calls go to voicemail between patients will pay for enquiries that book with somebody else.
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