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PMax products limited for "Personalized advertising: health"?

· 1 min read

In short

Google treats health as a sensitive category for personalized ads, so health related products can still serve but not through Customer Match, your data segments, audience expansion or lookalikes. In Performance Max, look for anything that feeds your own customer lists, including the new customer acquisition goal, because those lists are the audiences the policy rules out.

What the policy says

Google's personalized advertising policy treats health as a sensitive interest category, so health promotions cannot use every audience. Google's examples of health content include treatments for chronic conditions like diabetes or arthritis, counseling for depression, anxiety or addiction, medical devices like CPAP machines, and treatments for pregnancy and infertility.

The product itself can still be advertised. What changes is how Google may pick the people who see it.

Which audiences are out

Not supported for health promotionsStill supported
Customer MatchPredefined Google audiences
Your data segmentsIn-market and affinity
Advertiser-curated audiencesDemographics and life events
Audience expansionLocation targeting
Lookalike segmentsCustom segments

Where PMax may still use your lists

In a thread on r/googleads this week an advertiser saw established PMax products fall from hundreds of Shopping impressions a day to almost zero from September 26, with the asset group marked Eligible (limited). They had no audience signals in the asset group, but the new customer acquisition goal used their customer lists at account level.

Check every place a customer list enters the campaign:

  1. Audience signals in each asset group.
  2. The customer acquisition goal and the lists it uses to tell new from existing customers.
  3. Shared audience lists at account level.

Then compare impressions and conversions before and after the day the flag appeared, so you know which change brought them back.

Measure before and after

Ads MCP connects your AI assistant to your Google Ads account in read only mode. did_it_work compares spend, conversions and cost per conversion in the days before and after a date you choose, for example the day the policy flag showed up or the day you removed a customer list.

Ads MCP is a read-only Google Ads connector for ChatGPT, Claude and other AI assistants. It finds the searches that spend without converting and hands you a file to import. Free: 50 tool calls a month.

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