Med spa advertising lives in a restricted category, and owners who don't know that tend to learn it the hard way, through disapprovals and suspended accounts.
The good news is that compliant campaigns run just fine. You just have to build inside the rules instead of tripping over them.
🔒 Why the rules exist
Both Google and Meta treat health and cosmetic procedures as sensitive, because they involve personal information people don't want used against them.
That drives most of the restrictions: limits on how you can target, what you can show, and what you can claim, all aimed at protecting user privacy around health.
Understanding the why makes the specific rules easier to follow, because they're consistent once you see the logic.
🎯 Targeting limits
Personalized advertising for health-related audiences is restricted.
You generally can't target based on inferred health conditions or treatments someone appears interested in, which is the same principle behind HIPAA-aware retargeting.
Build audiences on general engagement and location rather than sensitive attributes, and you stay on the right side of the line.
🖼️ Creative and claims
Rules shift over time, so check current policy, but the safe default is to assume before-and-afters may be limited and to lead with lifestyle, education, and offers instead.
✅ Running compliant campaigns
Getting approved is mostly about respecting the category from the start.
- Keep targeting general, not health-attribute-based
- Use creative that doesn't rely on restricted imagery
- Avoid guaranteed-result claims in copy
- Send clicks to a clear, honest landing page that matches the ad
Pair this with the broader marketing-laws node, because ad-platform policy is only one layer of the compliance stack a med spa lives under.
❓ Frequently asked questions
What ad restrictions apply to med spas?
Both Google and Meta treat health and cosmetic-procedure advertising as sensitive. That means limits on personalized targeting, restrictions on before-and-after imagery and certain claims, and extra scrutiny on landing pages. The rules exist to protect user privacy around health, and violating them gets ads or accounts suspended.
Can med spas use before-and-after photos in ads?
It's heavily restricted, especially on Meta, where close-up and before-and-after body imagery is commonly disallowed. Rules change over time, so check current policy, but plan your creative assuming before-and-afters may be limited rather than building your whole campaign around them.
Why did my med spa ad get disapproved?
Usually a health-policy issue: restricted imagery, a claim that reads as a guaranteed medical outcome, targeting that isn't allowed for the health category, or a landing page problem. Fixing the specific flagged element and staying inside the sensitive-category rules is how you get approved.