Google Ads for medical tourism: rules, campaign structure and tracking

Running Google Ads for a medical tourism clinic is different from running an ordinary search account in two ways. Turkish law limits who may advertise, in which language and to whom. Google's own healthcare policy adds rules on targeting and content. This post is for the marketing manager of a clinic that treats patients from abroad. It covers both frameworks, then campaign structure, landing pages and the tracking that ties a patient enquiry back to an ad.

The legal framework here comes from the text of the Turkish Regulation on Promotion and Information Activities in Health Services (Sağlık Hizmetlerinde Tanıtım ve Bilgilendirme Faaliyetleri Hakkında Yönetmelik), published in the Official Gazette on 12 November 2025, issue 33075 ("the Regulation"). Article references are to that text; the translations are ours. This is not legal advice: check with your own counsel before you launch.

Start with the law: who may advertise, to whom, in which language?

The Regulation bans covert or open advertising in health services and allows promotion and information only within set principles (Art. 5(1)). The key provision for search ads is Art. 5(1)(i): health facilities and health professionals may register on social media platforms and search engines only "provided it is not paid, sponsored or aimed at prominence". The same clause says keywords used on search engines and the information shown on the results page must not breach the Regulation. Paid search ads aimed at patients in Türkiye are, as a rule, closed.

There are two exceptions:

• Opening period: for the first month after its opening date, a health facility may run sponsored promotion on all platforms, as long as it complies with the Regulation (Art. 5(1)(j)).
• International health tourism: facilities and intermediaries that provide international health services under an authorisation certificate from the Ministry of Health may run sponsored promotion aimed abroad, on the conditions in Art. 8.

Art. 8 is what makes Google Ads possible for a medical tourism clinic, and its conditions shape the account directly:

Under Art. 8(4), the rest of the Regulation still applies to health tourism facilities wherever Art. 8 is silent. Claims that create a perception of superiority (Art. 5(1)(h)) and statistics presented as something they are not (Art. 5(1)(ğ)) are banned in ads aimed abroad too.

We cover the Regulation's wider framework and its link to Turkish commercial advertising rules in our post on the health advertising regulation.

What does Google's healthcare policy say?

What Turkish law allows and what Google allows are not the same thing. As of October 2026, Google Ads' Healthcare and medicines policy raises these points for medical tourism accounts:

• Local law is your responsibility. The policy expects you to know the local law of every location your ads target. The destination country's rules apply as much as Türkiye's: an ad shown to a patient in the UK is also subject to UK rules.
• Certification covers specific areas. Certification is defined for areas such as prescription drug services, online pharmacies and telemedicine, pharmaceutical manufacturers and addiction services. The policy has no separate section for general clinic services, and Türkiye does not appear in its country-by-country section. In certified areas, ads that target allowed locations run with an "Eligible (limited)" label.
• Experimental treatments are out. Ads for speculative and experimental medical treatments and for cell and gene therapies are not allowed; the only exceptions are licensed products in the US and ads that are purely educational.
• Prescription drug terms are restricted. Prescription drug names are restricted in ads, landing pages and keywords. Check this before naming a drug or product used in a treatment.

The second policy concerns targeting. In Google's personalised advertising policy, health is one of the sensitive interest categories. Advertisers in these categories cannot use advertiser-curated audiences: Customer Match, your data segments (formerly remarketing), audience expansion and lookalike segments are all included. Google's predefined audiences can still be used, because the policy says they are built with sensitive signals excluded. In practice, Google Ads for medical tourism rests mostly on search intent and a sound keyword structure.

Campaign structure: treatment × country × language

Demand in medical tourism changes by treatment. Someone researching a hair transplant and someone looking for dental work differ in how long they research, what they ask and what they compare. Country and language are a separate variable. So the structure we recommend sets campaigns by treatment and market, and spreads the budget over that split.

• Campaign: one treatment area × one country (or a group of countries that share a language).
• Ad group: intents within the treatment, such as the method's name, cost research or clinic comparison.
• Location setting: select the target country and exclude Türkiye. Google's default "Presence or interest" option can show ads to people who are interested in your target location but located elsewhere. To keep ads from showing to someone in Türkiye who searches for a treatment in Istanbul, we use "Presence" (people in, or regularly in, the targeted location); that is our reading of what fits Art. 8(1)(c).
• Language: ad copy and landing page in the target market's language. Turkish stays out of this structure under Art. 8(1)(a).

You can see this structure in two of our published cases. In the EsteMoon Clinic case the unit of the split is the service line: hair transplants, dental work and aesthetic treatments run as separate set-ups. The published figures are "an average 13x return on investment, a conversion rate of 7% (reaching up to 8% depending on the campaign) and a lead cost of $13 (which can vary seasonally)". In the Istanbul Care case, Google Ads and Meta Ads are set up separately for 11 country and language combinations; the published figures are "an average 12x ROI, a 6% conversion rate reaching up to 8% depending on the campaign, and a $14 lead cost that can vary seasonally". These figures are not a promise. They are a published snapshot of two projects; your results will depend on the treatment, the market and your site.

Landing pages: where the ad goes is regulated too

Google Ads reviews the landing page as well as the ad, and so does Turkish law. On a landing page for patients abroad, check:

1. The right site. Art. 8(1)(a) requires sponsored promotion to run through a separate website or platform aimed abroad. The text does not say whether a language folder on the same domain meets that condition; make that call with your lawyer.
2. Mandatory elements. The health tourism statement (Art. 8(1)(a)), the authorisation certificate (Art. 8(1)(b)) and the HealthTürkiye logo (Art. 8(1)(e)). The facility name, title and URL on the site must match the title and owner name on the licence issued by the Ministry (Art. 8(1)(f)).
3. Message match. The treatment, language and offer in the ad must be met on the page. A German hair transplant ad should land on a German hair transplant page, not on the home page.
4. Patient reviews and prices. On a site aimed abroad, patient stories, reviews or thank-you messages may be shown, provided the patient's explicit consent is documented (Art. 8(1)(ç)); discounts, campaigns and competitive prices may be announced (Art. 8(3)). These permissions apply only to promotion abroad under Art. 8.
5. No promised outcomes. Claims that create a perception of superiority (Art. 5(1)(h)) and statements about unproven methods (Art. 5(1)(ç)) are banned on pages aimed abroad as well.

For page design and conversion, see our landing page design service.

Tracking: forms, calls, WhatsApp and bookings

In medical tourism the sale does not end where Google Ads can see it. A patient fills in a form or writes on WhatsApp, photos and quotes go back and forth for a few days, and then the booking is confirmed. If you optimise ads on form volume alone, budget drifts toward the cheapest and least valuable enquiries. Build tracking in four layers:

• Forms and WhatsApp clicks: count form submissions and clicks on the WhatsApp button as conversions with the Google tag. The WhatsApp click is the first signal of where an enquiry came from.
• Phone calls: Google Ads can swap the number on your site for a Google forwarding number and count calls longer than a length you set as conversions. Forwarding numbers are available only in certain countries; check that your business's country is on the list before setting up. If it is not, record calls in your CRM with their source and import them.
• Source data in the CRM: each enquiry's campaign, keyword and page go on its CRM record, together with Google's click ID (GCLID).
• Offline conversions: when an enquiry reaches "qualified" or "booking confirmed", that stage is sent back to Google Ads with the GCLID. As of October 2026 Google recommends enhanced conversions for leads for new set-ups, which match on hashed first-party data alongside the GCLID. Google has also announced that from 15 June 2026 these uploads moved to the Data Manager API; check this if you run a custom upload script.

What WhatsApp tracking means, and what it doesn't. "Tracking" here means measuring which ad and which page brought a WhatsApp message: source attribution. It does not mean monitoring people, reading messages or sending conversation content to an ad platform. Our post on WhatsApp conversion tracking goes into the details.

Mind health data. Under Art. 6(1) of Türkiye's data protection law (KVKK, Law 6698), health data is a special category of personal data. Keep the conversion names and values you send to ad platforms neutral ("qualified enquiry", "booking"); never send diagnoses, treatment details or photos. Art. 6(2) of the Regulation also requires promotion to comply with KVKK and the Regulation on Personal Health Data. Google, for its part, asks you to inform the people whose data you collect and to get consent where the law requires it. Set up privacy notices and consent flows with your lawyer. Our call tracking and WhatsApp integration service covers these layers together.

Budget: structure before numbers

We don't give a "right" monthly budget for medical tourism, because costs vary widely by treatment, market and competition. This order works for budget planning:

1. Inventory of splits. Which treatments, which countries, which languages? Each is a separate campaign and a separate budget line.
2. A measurability threshold. Each split should produce enough conversions to support a decision within a few weeks. If the budget can't cover that, cut the number of splits rather than spreading the money thinly across many campaigns.
3. A reallocation rule. Move budget based on qualified enquiries and bookings in the CRM, not on form counts. That is why offline conversions sit at the base of budget decisions.

For context: in our published cases the monthly ad budget is $120,000 at Istanbul Care and $150,000 at EsteMoon Clinic, and in both the budget is spread over the split rather than drawn from one pool. These figures are not a threshold or a benchmark; they only show that the structure works the same way at any scale.

Pre-launch checklist

• The facility holds a health tourism authorisation certificate, published on its site (Art. 8(1)(b)).
• Ads point to the site aimed abroad, which shows the health tourism statement and the HealthTürkiye logo (Art. 8(1)(a), 8(1)(e)).
• Every campaign excludes Türkiye and uses the "Presence" location setting; there are no Turkish ads (Art. 8(1)(a), 8(1)(c)).
• No keywords or ads for procedures not permitted in Türkiye, experimental treatments or prescription drug names (Art. 8(2); Google policy).
• No remarketing, Customer Match or lookalike audiences (Google personalised advertising policy).
• Form, phone and WhatsApp conversions are measured separately; source data and GCLID are written to the CRM.
• The booking stage is sent back as an offline conversion; conversion names contain no health data.

How we build campaign architecture, landing pages and tracking together for medical tourism clinics is on our health tourism marketing page; account management is covered on our Google Ads agency and performance marketing pages. If you also want to build the organic side, our post on medical tourism SEO picks up from here.

Sources

• Regulation on Promotion and Information Activities in Health Services, Official Gazette 12 November 2025, issue 33075 (Turkish): resmigazete.gov.tr (accessed October 2026)
• The same regulation, consolidated text (Turkish): mevzuat.gov.tr (accessed October 2026)
• Law No. 6698 on the Protection of Personal Data (KVKK, Turkish): mevzuat.gov.tr (accessed October 2026)
• Google Ads Help, Healthcare and medicines: support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/176031 (accessed October 2026)
• Google Ads Help, Personalized advertising: support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/143465 (accessed October 2026)
• Google Ads Help, About advanced location options: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722043 (accessed October 2026)
• Google Ads Help, About offline conversion imports: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2998031 (accessed October 2026)
• Google Ads Help, Set up offline conversions using Google Click ID (GCLID): support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7012522 (accessed October 2026)
• Google Ads Help, Set up tracking calls to a phone number on a website: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6095883 (accessed October 2026)
• Roicool, Istanbul Care case study: /case-studies/multi-market-ad-architecture (accessed October 2026)
• Roicool, EsteMoon Clinic case study: /case-studies/service-line-campaign-split (accessed October 2026)