Healthcare / Pharmacy and labs
Pharmacy and laboratory marketing where the ad platforms say no first.
Two businesses share this page because they share a problem. Both sell something people genuinely search for, and both find the obvious advertising route blocked, restricted or reliant on somebody else's referral.
How do pharmacies and laboratories grow when advertising is restricted?
Google gates several of these categories behind certification. Online pharmacies must be registered or certified in the locations where advertising is permitted, and the policy prohibits it outright in some countries. That makes paid search either unavailable or conditional rather than a default channel.
Growth therefore concentrates on channels that are not gated: local visibility for a community pharmacy, referral relationships with prescribers for both pharmacies and laboratories, direct business to business outreach for employer and clinic accounts, and organic content that answers the questions patients and practices actually ask.
For laboratories in particular the buyer is usually a clinic or an employer rather than a consumer, which makes the marketing closer to business to business than to healthcare.
Find out what you are allowed to advertise before planning to advertise.
This is the first conversation, not a compliance check at the end. A pharmacy planning a paid search launch can discover after building everything that the category requires certification it does not hold, or that the specific service it wanted to promote is not permitted at all.
Google's healthcare and medicines policy gates several categories behind certification before an ad can run at all, including prescription drug services, online pharmacies, telemedicine and, in the United States, health and medical insurance coverage.
Read the full breakdown: Find out what you are allowed to advertise before planning to advertise.Hide the full breakdown: Find out what you are allowed to advertise before planning to advertise.
Google's healthcare and medicines policy sets out which categories are allowed in which countries and what certification is required. Online pharmacies are permitted with registration or certification in a long list of countries and prohibited in some. Telemedicine, prescription drug services and certain testing categories each carry their own conditions.
The practical answer is to establish eligibility first, then design the plan around what is genuinely available. That is less satisfying than a campaign launch and it avoids building something that cannot run.
It also tends to redirect budget somewhere more productive. For most community pharmacies the paid search opportunity was never the main one anyway.
Community pharmacy and laboratory services do not share a playbook.
They are grouped together because both face platform restrictions. Almost everything else about them differs.
| Item | Community pharmacy | Laboratory services |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides | The patient, sometimes the prescriber | A clinic, an employer or a physician |
| Buying cycle | Immediate, habitual after the first time | Weeks, contractual |
| Main channel | Local search, maps, walk past, referral | Direct relationships and referral |
| Switching trigger | Convenience, a bad wait, an insurance change | Turnaround time, price, integration |
| What marketing does | Be visible and be the easy choice | Reach a small number of named buyers |
| Measurement unit | New patient transfers, service uptake | Accounts won and volume per account |
A single strategy covering both will serve the pharmacy adequately and the laboratory badly, because consumer marketing tools do not reach a procurement decision inside a clinic.
Five things that move an independent pharmacy.
Independent pharmacies compete against chains with enormous budgets and mediocre service. The opening is the service.
Own the local pack
Category accuracy, correct hours including holidays, and a complete profile. This is the highest intent surface in the category and it costs nothing but attention.
Make transferring obvious
Most pharmacy growth is a transfer from somewhere else, and most pharmacy websites never explain how that works. A clear page describing what the patient has to do, and how little that is, converts people who assumed it was a hassle.
Publish your services properly
Compounding, delivery, vaccination clinics, blister packing, durable medical equipment, whatever you genuinely offer. Each is a separate search with its own intent, and lumping them into one services list wastes them. We publish what you tell us you provide and nothing beyond it.
See the remaining steps: Five things that move an independent pharmacy.Hide the remaining steps: Five things that move an independent pharmacy.
Build prescriber relationships
A local physician who knows your compounding capability or your delivery service will send patients. This is business to business relationship work with no media cost.
Collect reviews deliberately
Pharmacy reviews are sparse and therefore disproportionately influential. A first party request process, run consistently, moves this quickly.
The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024. It covers buying reviews, writing your own, and suppressing negative ones. Every review we help collect is first party, requested from a real customer, and never gated on the rating they intend to leave.
The lab buyer is a practice manager, not a patient.
Laboratory marketing fails most often because it is built as consumer healthcare marketing for a business to business purchase.
A clinic choosing a laboratory is deciding on turnaround time, courier reliability, how results integrate with their record system, price, and whether somebody answers when there is a problem. Very little of that is communicated by a consumer facing website.
What works is closer to business to business marketing: a site that speaks to a practice manager, clear information about integrations and turnaround, a straightforward route to request an account, and direct outreach to a defined list of local practices.
Where a laboratory does sell direct to consumers, the platform restrictions bite immediately, and certain testing categories are restricted or prohibited outright in advertising. Establish what is permitted before designing the funnel.
There is also a growing organic opportunity in explaining what tests mean, which is genuinely useful and largely unmet. The caution is that this is health information, and the substantiation standard applies to any claim about what a test can tell somebody.
Informational health queries are increasingly answered on the results page.
Ahrefs compared 150,000 keywords with AI Overviews against 150,000 without, using aggregated Search Console data from December 2023 against December 2025.
SourceAhrefs, AI Overviews and click-through rate, 2026, 300,000 keywords
This is a tool vendor reporting on its own analysis, so read it as a well documented direction rather than a forecast. The implication for a laboratory publishing test explainers is that being a cited source matters as much as ranking.
Generative engine optimisation is already ordinary.
The CMO Survey polled 308 US marketing leaders, 97 percent at vice president level or above, in January 2026.
SourceThe CMO Survey, Duke Fuqua with Deloitte and the AMA, 2026, 308 marketing leaders
For a category where paid advertising is restricted, being the source an assistant draws on is not a futures pitch. It is one of the few growth levers that is fully available. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
What governs this category.
- Google's healthcare and medicines policy gates several categories behind certification before an ad can run at all, including prescription drug services, online pharmacies, telemedicine and, in the United States, health and medical insurance coverage.
- Google treats health as a sensitive interest category, and an advertiser promoting products or services that fall within it cannot use advertiser curated audiences. Google names those as customer match, your data segments, audience expansion and lookalike segments, and your data segments is the ordinary site visitor list that retargeting runs on. What the ads and the landing pages promote is what triggers the restriction, not how the list was assembled. Google's predefined audiences stay available, including in market and affinity segments, life events, demographics and location targeting, because Google configures those with the sensitive signals excluded.
- There is no such thing as a HIPAA certification, and no website is HIPAA compliant on its own. HHS states plainly that it does not certify any person or product as HIPAA compliant, and the Security Rule contains no requirement to certify at all. Anyone selling you a certificate is selling you a document, not a defence.
- If a vendor creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on your behalf, HIPAA treats that vendor as a business associate and a written business associate agreement is required. VIS Mountain signs a BAA where an engagement genuinely involves protected health information.
- The FTC requires competent and reliable scientific evidence behind a health claim before the ad runs, and says plainly that a "results not typical" line does not cure a deceptive impression. A testimonial is not substantiation for the claim underneath it.
- Meta does not allow an ad to assert or imply that it knows a personal attribute of the person seeing it, including a medical or health condition, financial status or criminal history. "Depression counselling" is allowed. "Depression getting you down?" is not.
Laboratories handling protected health information on behalf of a covered entity are squarely inside the business associate rules, which affects every vendor in the marketing stack that touches an enquiry, not only the clinical systems.
Count transfers and accounts, not visits.
For a pharmacy the meaningful numbers are prescription transfers in, uptake of the specific services you promote, and repeat rate. Website sessions tell you almost nothing, because a large share of pharmacy demand never touches the website at all.
For a laboratory the unit is accounts won and volume per account, tracked over time. A single clinic account can be worth more than a year of consumer enquiries, which means reporting them in the same column makes the more valuable channel look like the weaker one.
Read the full breakdown: Count transfers and accounts, not visits.Hide the full breakdown: Count transfers and accounts, not visits.
Both benefit from asking. Where attribution is genuinely unavailable, a question at the counter or at account setup gives you a truth to check any dashboard against, and in these categories the dashboard sees very little.
The vanity metric to retire is impressions. Both a pharmacy profile and a laboratory site generate plenty of them, and neither correlates with a transferred prescription or a signed account. Impressions move when Google changes how often it shows a listing, which is not a business event.
One more thing worth measuring that almost nobody does: how long it takes to respond to an account enquiry. For a laboratory competing on reliability, the speed of the first reply is a demonstration of the thing being sold. A clinic that waits three days for a quote has already learned something about your turnaround.
What an account is worth here, and how to tell the marketing is misaimed.
Neither of these businesses is well described by a cost per lead. A transferred prescription is worth its refill stream, and a clinic account for a laboratory is worth its annual volume, which means both should be measured against a year of revenue rather than a first transaction.
Define qualified accordingly. For a pharmacy it is a patient within the area you serve whose prescriptions you can fill and whose plan you accept. For a laboratory it is a practice or an employer with a volume that justifies onboarding, in a specialty you support, with systems you can integrate with. Consumer enquiries that fail those tests are noise regardless of how cheap they were.
Read the full breakdown: What an account is worth here, and how to tell the marketing is misaimed.Hide the full breakdown: What an account is worth here, and how to tell the marketing is misaimed.
The compliance surface is substantial on both sides. A pharmacy contact form asking about a medication has collected protected health information. A call recording of a refill conversation contains it. A laboratory handling specimens or results on behalf of a covered entity is squarely inside the business associate rules, which reaches every vendor in the marketing stack that touches an enquiry, not only the clinical systems.
Advertising pixels deserve particular care in a pharmacy context, because a page for a specific medication or condition is exactly the kind of surface that turns an ordinary tracking tag into an inference about a named person.
How you tell it is being done badly: a campaign built before anybody checked which categories require certification, laboratory marketing written for consumers rather than for a practice manager, and reporting that counts impressions on a profile as performance.
What we would do.
Local SEO
Map pack visibility for a pharmacy, which is the channel that is not gated.
Generative Engine Optimization
Becoming a source assistants cite, which matters more where advertising is restricted.
LinkedIn Marketing
Reaching practice managers and employer buyers for laboratory accounts.
Technical SEO
Structured data and site fundamentals so service pages can be read reliably.
CRM Implementation
One place accounts and enquiries land, with volume per account visible.
Get a pharmacy or laboratory marketing review.
We start by establishing what you are actually permitted to advertise, then build the plan around the channels that are open to you.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Can we advertise an online pharmacy on Google?
It depends on where you operate and what you hold. Google permits online pharmacy advertising with registration or certification in a long list of countries and prohibits it in some others.
Establish eligibility before building anything. The common failure is a campaign built and then blocked, which wastes both the budget and the time.
How does an independent pharmacy compete with the chains?
On the things chains do badly: service, specific capabilities such as compounding or blister packing, delivery, and knowing the customer by name.
The practical work is a complete local profile, a page that explains how simple a prescription transfer actually is, and a review process that runs consistently. Pharmacy reviews are sparse, which makes each one count for more.
Who is the buyer for laboratory services?
Usually a practice manager, a physician or an employer rather than a consumer. That makes it a business to business purchase decided on turnaround time, integration, price and reliability.
Consumer style healthcare marketing does not reach that decision. Direct outreach and a site written for a practice manager do.
Can we build remarketing audiences from our site?
You can build them, but you cannot use them for this. Google treats health as a sensitive interest category and an advertiser promoting products or services that fall within it cannot use advertiser curated audiences, a group Google defines as customer match, your data segments, audience expansion and lookalike segments. Your data segments is the site visitor list, so the restriction reaches the ordinary case rather than only the exotic one.
Campaigns are built from intent and location instead, and for laboratories the more productive route is a named account list rather than an audience at all.
Is content marketing worth it when ads are restricted?
It is one of the few fully available levers, which makes it more valuable here than in categories with open advertising.
The discipline is accuracy. Explaining what a test measures is health information, and any claim about what it can tell somebody needs evidence behind it.
Do we need a business associate agreement with our marketing vendors?
Where a vendor creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on your behalf, yes. Much marketing work does not touch protected health information, and in those cases a BAA is not the relevant control.
We will tell you which situation applies rather than signing something for reassurance.
How do we know whether this marketing is working?
For a pharmacy, count prescription transfers in and the uptake of the specific services you promoted. For a laboratory, count accounts won and volume per account over a year.
Neither business is described by impressions or sessions, and a report leading with either is describing something that cannot be banked.
Do our marketing vendors need a business associate agreement?
Where a vendor creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on your behalf, yes. A chat widget that stores conversations about medications is the example most often missed.
A great deal of marketing work does not touch protected health information at all, and in those cases a written agreement is not the relevant control. The important thing is establishing which situation applies rather than assuming.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google Ads Help: healthcare and medicines policy (opens in a new tab)Which healthcare categories need certification before an ad can run.
- Google Ads Help: personalised advertising policy (opens in a new tab)Health is a sensitive interest category, which limits audience targeting.
- HHS: HIPAA business associates (opens in a new tab)
- HHS: be aware of misleading HIPAA marketing claims (opens in a new tab)HHS does not certify any person or product as HIPAA compliant.
- FTC: health products compliance guidance (opens in a new tab)What counts as competent and reliable scientific evidence for a health claim.
- Ahrefs: AI Overviews reduce clicks, 2026 update (opens in a new tab)
- The CMO Survey, Duke Fuqua with Deloitte and the AMA (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.