Healthcare brands in competitive markets should take advantage of every paid media tool at their disposal—and many of them overlook Google Shopping as an option.
Google Shopping ads are the product-specific ads that appear at the top of the search results page and on the Shopping tab. Shopping ads require a well-maintained product feed in Google Merchant Center (GMC), and they’re typically deployed via Performance Max campaigns.
For healthcare brands that sell tangible products, the effort can be worthwhile. This format is inherently lower-funnel: users engaging with Shopping ads are typically already searching out specific products, meaning the ads often drive more qualified traffic and can perform more efficiently than traditional Search ads.
But many healthcare brands don’t resemble eCommerce businesses: their products often require approval to purchase, and the advertisers are subject to both legal and platform-based regulatory considerations. Even if your products are eligible, GMC setup and approval can be more complex than it would be for something like a T-shirt brand—and some products that were once eligible may no longer be.
In this blog, we’ll explain what types of health brands and products are eligible to deploy Google Shopping, which are not, and what has changed over the past year.
Health Brands That Can Benefit From Google Shopping ads
Google Shopping can still work for healthcare brands, but success depends much more heavily on compliance and how the product and purchase experience align with what the channel is designed to support.
Google Shopping is built to promote clearly defined, tangible products. Users see a product image, a price, and a merchant, and they compare options with the expectation that they can buy a specific item outright. For many healthcare brands, that underlying model hasn’t changed.
Healthcare advertisers that continue to see success with Google Shopping typically sell physical, direct-to-consumer products where the product itself is the primary thing being purchased. Common examples include:
- Over-the-counter medications and supplements that are not on Google’s Unapproved pharmaceuticals and supplements list
- CBD products (only in select markets and with proper certification)
- At-home diagnostic or lab test kits, such as consumer medical tests
- Medical or wellness devices sold directly to consumers
For these health offerings, Shopping can function much like it does in traditional eCommerce. The product is concrete, pricing is visible upfront, and intent is high. For healthcare brands operating in this category, the fundamentals remain largely the same: Shopping is most effective when the product is easy to understand, easy to compare, and easy to purchase.
Healthcare Brands That Can’t Run Google Shopping Ads
Some healthcare products are fundamentally incompatible with Google Shopping. Purely intangible healthcare services are not a fit for Shopping. Those would include:
- Purely intangible services like online consultations, therapy or counseling sessions, coaching, or care management programs
- Service-only healthcare models with no discrete product purchase
- Offerings built around access, enrollment, or participation (like a care club membership) rather than ownership of a tangible item
- Unapproved pharmaceuticals or supplements, or products that fall under Google’s prohibited healthcare categories (obviously)
Even if these services are clinically legitimate or central to a brand’s business, they don’t align with the expectations users—and Google—bring to Shopping ads. For these healthcare brands, Search ads or paid social advertising are typically a better fit.
Subscriptions: Where Things Get Complicated
Subscription-based healthcare models sit in a gray area for Google Shopping—and that area has become even grayer over the last year or so.
At a conceptual level, Google Shopping is designed around one-time product purchases. Subscription models complicate that expectation, because even if you’re offering a subscription to a physical product, the subscription itself is the service being sold.
These models are, however, particularly common in direct-to-consumer healthcare—think GLP-1 or erectile dysfunction medications. In the past brands that offered recurring deliveries of medical products like these frequently utilized Google Shopping ads without issue—provided their pricing was transparent, landing pages were clear and accurate, and all other GMC conditions had been met.
In early 2025, that began to change, and Google began keying in on healthcare brands in these spaces. As enforcement has become more consistent, Google is now applying greater scrutiny to healthcare subscription offers, resulting in ad disapprovals for numerous brands throughout the industry.
In October of 2025, Google issued an update clarifying that physical goods subscriptions are now explicitly allowed on Google Shopping across a number of categories, including healthcare—but excluding prescription drugs.
With policies and enforcement continuing to evolve, it’s vital that subscription-based healthcare brands seek professional guidance before attempting to launch Google Shopping Ads. It can help to reach out to Google support or to partner with a specialized healthcare marketing agency that can help navigate compliance and setup.
Elements of Effective, Compliant Shopping Campaigns for Healthcare
Unlike many other categories, success in Shopping is gated by how GMC evaluates the product offering as a whole. While landing page consistency is important to all Google Ads campaign types, it’s paramount in Shopping.
At a baseline level, healthcare Shopping campaigns work best when Merchant Center can clearly understand three things: what the product is, what it costs, and what the user is buying. When any of those elements are ambiguous, ads run a higher risk of disapproval.
Health advertisers must account for:
- Product and pricing clarity in Merchant Center: Shopping ads are generated directly from product data in Merchant Center, not from ad copy. If product titles, descriptions, or prices are unclear—or don’t consistently reflect what appears on the landing page and at checkout—campaigns are far more likely to run into approval or serving issues.
- Consistency across the user experience: Merchant Center doesn’t evaluate products in isolation. It looks for consistency between product data, landing pages, and the checkout process itself. In healthcare, where additional steps like eligibility checks are common, consistency can be more important—and more fragile—than in other verticals.
- Alignment with healthcare-specific policies: Healthcare advertisers are subject to additional Google Ads policies that don’t apply to eCommerce brands, and those impact Shopping Ads as well—think messaging, user targeting, and more.
- The stakes of compliance: Finally, healthcare brands need to approach all paid media efforts with full confidence in their ability to remain compliant. Merchant Center issues won’t just pause a single campaign—they can suppress all of your campaigns or even lead to GMC account suspension. For brands whose growth plans depend heavily on Shopping, that makes upfront compliance and ongoing monitoring especially important.
Building effective Shopping campaigns for healthcare can be complicated—but it can also be worthwhile. If you’re wondering about your brand’s eligibility, or you are eligible but need a skilled partner to help you set up your campaigns effectively and compliantly, consider reaching out to the ADM team. As both a Google Premier Partner and an expert healthcare marketing agency, we combine unique experience in this space and dedicated Google Ads account support to help clients navigate nuanced marketing challenges and deliver superior results.
