Contextual advertising for the sale of medicines (gray segment)
Sale of medicines (gray segment)
Project: online store of medical products
The client approached us with a project related to the sale of medical products, including prescription drugs, without the mandatory requirement to provide a prescription. The main goal was to create a stable flow of customers from search engines while bypassing the restrictions of Google Ads policies, which strictly regulate pharmaceutical advertising.
Issues: Why drug advertising is a difficult niche
-
Strict regulation of Google Ads. Advertising of medicines requires verified licenses and certificates.
-
Banning certain categories of drugs. Even legal drugs are often rejected by the moderation system.
-
High moderation rejection rate. Even well-designed campaigns are often blocked for formal reasons.
-
This creates a situation where the usual launch of campaigns is practically impossible, and additional technical and marketing solutions are required.
Promotion actions and strategy
1. Cloaking
-
Two versions of the site have been created:
-
for moderators - an informative health blog with tips and articles;
-
for real customers - a commercial site with a product catalog and an ordering function.
-
-
A dynamic redirect was used: Google moderators saw a "white" site, users saw a store.
2. Working with advertising creatives
-
The ad texts were adapted to Google's policies: the words "sale" and "drug delivery" were avoided, replacing them with "consultation" or "information about drugs."
-
Neutral images were used, without photos of pills or packaging.
3. Geotargeting
-
The main emphasis is on countries with more loyal policies in the field of medical advertising.
-
In Ukraine, we managed to launch test campaigns because the rules turned out to be softer than in the US or the EU.
4. Account rotation
-
For stability, multiple Google Ads accounts were used.
-
If one account was blocked, campaigns were launched from another one, prepared in advance.
Advertising campaign results
-
CTR (click-through rate): average 4.5% thanks to relevant texts and correct targeting.
-
ROI: every $1 invested brought about $3.2 in profit.
-
Traffic: about 15,000 visitors per month from search engines.
-
Stability: Thanks to cloaking and constant monitoring, advertising campaigns remained active for a long time.
Conclusions: how to work with advertising in gray themes
Advertising in the drug sales niche requires a non-standard approach:
-
using cloaking to bypass moderation,
-
adaptation of texts and images to Google policies,
-
account rotation to maintain campaign stability.
This case proved that even in the most complex topics, it is possible to achieve high results and stable profits if the right technical and marketing solutions are applied.
The basis of the team
Denis
Denis is the voice of our company. He spends hours making sure that our clients feel cared for and enjoy their interactions with the company. If you have any suggestions or ideas, you can write to us.
Christina
Khrystyna is responsible for the product concept, manages the creative team. Her task is to help the customer formulate a message for the target audience and visually package it so that it is correctly perceived.
Eugene
Evgeny is the main creative engine of our team. Logical thinking, analytical mindset, but at the same time can always impress our clients with a unique approach to business.
Daria
Daria's job is to formulate the client's objectives and desires, and then communicate them to the team of specialists. The project manager has to gather his or her will into a fist and finish the task with shocking force.
Nikita
Responsibility, broad horizons, marketing vision and many more qualities that can be said about Nikita. A unique tandem is the quality and speed with which Nikita performs her work.
Karina
A native speaker and expert in foreign languages with over 10 years of experience in writing texts for various tasks. She will study your tone of voice and craft the perfect text for each specific need.
Google Ads case: contextual advertising for selling medicines
This case study examines an online medical product store project operating in a complex and tightly regulated niche. The client sold a wide range of medications, including items that advertising systems pay special attention to. The challenge was to get a steady stream of targeted search traffic without losing profitability.
The drug sales niche belongs to the so-called “gray” segment for contextual advertising, as Google Ads policies contain a number of restrictions on wording, content on the site, and permitted drug categories. The usual launch of campaigns in such a topic often ends in moderation rejections or quick ad blocking.
UP-NP's role in this case was to build a thoughtful Google Ads strategy around the client's real business goals, while taking into account the increased requirements for the medical topic. The focus remained on CTR metrics, search traffic, and return on investment, rather than just a formal campaign launch.
Online pharmacy project: source data and contextual advertising goals
The online pharmacy project started with an already working website and some organic traffic, but the contextual advertising channel was not yet used systematically. The client wanted to receive a managed flow of requests from users who enter specific drug names, product groups, or symptoms in the search that indicate an intention to purchase a medicine.
The basic goals were to increase the number of transactions, increase the volume of high-quality search traffic, and build a model for the return on advertising investments. For an online pharmacy, it is important not only to bring people to the site, but also to retain them thanks to the correct catalog structure, availability of assortment, and a convenient ordering system.
The contextual advertising strategy was based on understanding which drug categories were a priority for the business, which queries brought the most value, and which audience segments had the highest probability of repeat purchases. This allowed us to immediately identify the core around which advertising activity was formed.
Regulated topics: risks, platform policies and niche challenges
Advertising of medical products on Google Ads is accompanied by increased attention to licenses, wording, and the content of the pages to which the ads lead. Some categories require special permits, and certain groups of drugs are not allowed to be promoted at all, even if they are sold legally and comply with the country's legislation.
For advertising systems, it is important that advertising pages do not mislead users, contain information blocks, and do not emphasize direct calls to purchase sensitive drugs. Because of this, even correctly designed campaigns often face moderation rejections and require refinement of creatives or landing pages.
For businesses in this area, the challenge is to find a balance between policy requirements and the need to show the real range of products offered by an online pharmacy. In the case of selling medicines, it was necessary to take all these factors into account and design an advertising system that could work in the long term, not just as part of a short experiment.
Approach to setting up Google Ads under constraints
The contextual advertising strategy for this project involved careful work with semantics, campaign structures, and ad copy. The focus was on queries that combined interest in drugs with neutral or informational wording so as not to violate the requirements of the advertising platform. For each product group, keyword clusters were selected based on user intent.
The ads focused on a consultative format and descriptions of useful information, rather than direct promises to “buy here and now.” This approach increased the chances of passing moderation while maintaining the relevance of the ad to people looking for specific solutions to their problems. The visuals also remained neutral and did not focus on images of pills or packaging.
Campaign optimization was carried out based on key indicators: CTR, cost per click, user behavior on the site and conversion rate. Inefficient links "request → ad → page" were gradually eliminated, and the most effective ones received the majority of the budget. Thanks to this, the advertising cabinet gradually turned into a managed system, where every change was based on data.
Results: CTR 4.5%, ~15,000 visitors and ROI ≈ 3.2
According to the results of advertising campaigns, the average CTR of ads reached about 4.5%, which indicates a high relevance of impressions to user queries. Traffic from search engines remained stable at about 15,000 visitors per month, which gave the online pharmacy a significant increase in audience.
Economic indicators also demonstrated the viability of the model: for every dollar invested in advertising, the project received approximately $3.2 in profit. This level of ROI for a complex topic suggests that traffic not only came to the site, but also turned into real orders with the necessary margin.:contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}
Campaign analytics provided a clear picture of which query groups and ad formats were performing best. These relationships became the foundation for subsequent waves of launches and the basis for scaling when the client was ready to increase budgets while maintaining ROI targets.
Case conclusions and benefits for businesses in the “gray” segment
The case of contextual advertising for the sale of medicines shows that even in a "gray" topic, it is possible to build a customer acquisition channel with predictable indicators. Competent selection of semantics, careful attention to the policies of advertising platforms and phased optimization allow you to receive stable traffic without excessive risks for the advertising account.
For businesses operating in such niches, hypothesis testing and clearly recording the results of each change become especially important. When it is clear which relationships give the desired CTR, conversions, and ROI values, decisions about scaling budgets are made much easier, and marketing ceases to be a "black box."
Cooperation with the UP-NP — Needed People agency in this case confirmed that the contractor's role is to build a system where the key hero remains the online pharmacy project itself. Thanks to this, the business receives not only a good example of the Google Ads case, but also a working model that can be adapted to other areas within limited and regulated niches.