Facebook ads
for health clinics.

Meta's personal attributes policy covers physical and mental health, including medical conditions. Its own examples of ads that break it include 'Do you have diabetes?' and 'Depression getting you down? Get help now.'

Most clinic ads trip over this in the first line, because the habit is to open with the patient's problem. 'Struggling with anxiety?' implies the viewer has anxiety. 'Psychologists in Penrith, Saturday sessions available' says the same thing, about you rather than them.

It feels like an odd rule until you picture the feed. Nobody on the train wants an ad announcing their condition to whoever's looking over their shoulder. The rewrites below are mine, written to show the pattern, not wording Meta has approved.

Ahpra is plain about it: the National Law and its advertising guidelines apply to social media. A social ad that uses a testimonial breaches the law, and so do unsupported claims about how well a treatment works on a practitioner's Facebook page.

Reels and carousels make before-and-after content tempting. The photos need matching angle, lighting and posture, with any editing explained. Meta separately requires ads for cosmetic procedures and weight loss to target people 18 or older, and its unrealistic outcomes policy bans health claims and guarantees, and specific claims without qualifying language.

Then there's the comments section. Reviews and testimonials on social pages you control are your responsibility, and a comment under your ad saying 'fixed my shoulder in two sessions' sits on a page you run. Hide clinical comments and check the page every week. The reviews page covers replying without a breach.

Photos are the other trap. Ahpra suggests checking the background of a photo before sharing it, because small details posted together can identify a patient. A whiteboard of names behind the smiling team shot is enough.

This is where clinics get into trouble without knowing it. The fact that someone is a patient of a physio or a psychologist is health information: the OAIC counts details of a health service someone has had that way. Under the Privacy Act, sensitive information can only be used for direct marketing if the person has consented, and health service providers are covered regardless of turnover. A NSW clinic has the state's Health Privacy Principles to follow on top, and Victoria has its Health Records Act.

So uploading a patient list as a Custom Audience, or building a lookalike from it, needs a hard look before anyone clicks upload. Meta's own Business Tools Terms say advertisers won't share data that includes or is based on health information.

Google is stricter on its side. For personal health content, such as conditions and treatments, its policy rules out Customer Match, your data segments, lookalike segments and audience expansion. The Google Ads page covers that platform.

The Meta pixel reports which pages people visit. On a page called /anxiety-treatment or /pelvic-floor-physio, the visit itself says something about the person. The OAIC's guidance on tracking pixels says sensitive information generally shouldn't go to third-party platforms that way, that simply visiting a mental health or counselling page may reveal it, and that express opt-in consent is generally expected where it might be disclosed.

The practical fix: keep the pixel off condition pages and booking forms, track a booking as a plain event with no service name, and say in your privacy policy which tools you use. The OAIC also warns against treating tracking as 'set and forget', so recheck it whenever the website changes.

Meta has also been limiting the data some advertisers can send since early 2025, sorting businesses by whether they're associated with medical conditions, specific health statuses or provider and patient relationships. Most coverage of it is about the US, and I couldn't confirm from Meta's own pages how it applies to Australian clinics. Check Events Manager for any notice on your account.

Tick the audiences and tracking you use now, or plan to. Each gets a verdict and the rule behind it, as published on 2 November 2026.

Location, age and broad audiences do most of the work now anyway. Meta removed detailed targeting options about health causes, such as 'Lung cancer awareness' and 'Chemotherapy', from January 2022, so there's far less to target by condition than there used to be. The creative does the targeting.

What tends to earn its place: short videos of the real practitioners explaining what a first visit involves, a walk from the car park to the front desk, new practitioner introductions, and service ads for the suburbs patients actually come from. People who've engaged with your page or videos can be a reasonable audience, because that list is built from activity on Facebook and Instagram, not from your patient records. The ad still can't imply they have a condition.

Boosting a post is fine for reach. For bookings, send people to the page for that service with online booking on it, and count completed bookings, not clicks.