How India's Healthcare Advertisers Split Their Money
We tracked 4,040 ads from 71 advertisers across three healthcare niches in India. Multispeciality hospitals put 93 percent of their ads on Google. IVF clinics put 98 percent on Meta. Same industry, opposite playbooks, and both sides are right.
Built from Muffin Intel, our in-house ad-intelligence tool. Advertisers in each niche were resolved by domain and their ads counted by advertiser ID across Google Ads Transparency Center and Meta Ad Library. n = 71 advertisers and 4,040 tracked ads across three Indian healthcare niches: multispeciality hospitals, IVF and fertility clinics, and eye-surgery centres. Tracked August 3 to September 1, 2026.
Ask where healthcare advertising happens and you will get a confident answer either way. Search, obviously, because patients google symptoms. Or social, obviously, because trust is built before the search.
We tracked three healthcare niches in India through Muffin Intel: multispeciality hospitals, IVF and fertility clinics, and eye-surgery centres. 71 advertisers, 4,040 ads, every one counted by advertiser ID. Add up the whole dataset and the split looks almost balanced, 2,201 ads on Google against 1,782 on Meta.
Then split it by niche and the balance disappears completely. No niche in this data actually splits its money. Each one has picked a side, and the sides are opposite.
Three niches, opposite playbooks
Multispeciality hospitals run 1,437 Google ads and 109 Meta ads. IVF clinics run 25 Google ads and 1,516 Meta ads. Eye-surgery centres sit between the two poles at 739 Google and 157 Meta. Same country, same industry, same regulator, and the money flows in opposite directions.
Hospitals buy the emergency. That is why they live on search
The 30 multispeciality hospital advertisers put 93 percent of their ads on Google. It makes sense the moment you picture the patient. Nobody plans a fracture. When a family needs emergency care, maternity admission, or an orthopedic surgeon, someone types the need into a search box and the decision happens within hours. The hospital that is present at that search wins the admission. The hospital that is not does not exist.
Search is also where a hospital's breadth pays. A multispeciality hospital can hold a separate ad for every department and every procedure, which is exactly what a 1,437 ad footprint across 30 advertisers looks like. You cannot do that in a social feed. You can do it in a search auction.
Emergency and procedure intent lives on search. Nobody scrolls their way into an admission.
Fertility is decided in the feed, months before any search
The 24 IVF advertisers made the opposite call, 98 percent of their ads on Meta and just 25 Google ads across the entire niche. That is not neglect. It matches how the decision is actually made.
Fertility treatment is researched quietly, over months, often before a couple has said the word IVF out loud to anyone. It is a considered, emotional, private decision, and the feed is where a clinic can tell success stories, introduce doctors, and normalise the conversation long before anyone is ready to type a clinic's name into a search box. By the time the search happens, the shortlist is already written. The IVF clinics are advertising at the moment the shortlist forms, not the moment it is typed.
The commitment shows in freshness too. Of the 1,592 ads we tracked in this niche, 1,544 were live. This is not a graveyard of old campaigns. It is an active, continuously fed channel.
Eye surgery sits between the poles, because the decision does
Eye-surgery centres split 739 Google against 157 Meta. That mix mirrors the patient. Cataract surgery arrives with a diagnosis and a search, which is intent, so most of the money follows the hospital playbook. But refractive surgery is elective. Nobody needs LASIK the way they need a fracture set, so a share of the budget goes to the feed, where the idea of ditching glasses can be planted. One niche, two kinds of patient, and the ad split lands exactly between the two pure plays.
What this means if you market healthcare
The lesson is not that Google beats Meta or the reverse. It is that 71 advertisers who live on these decisions every day have already voted, niche by niche, and the vote follows one question: does the patient arrive with intent, or does the intent have to be built?
If the condition announces itself, an emergency, a diagnosis, a referral, be on search and be there exhaustively, one ad per procedure, the way the hospitals are. If the decision is private, emotional, and slow, build presence in the feed months ahead, the way the IVF clinics do. And if your niche has both kinds of patient, split the way the eye centres split, weighted to wherever your version of the diagnosis moment lives.
The expensive mistake is running the wrong niche's playbook. On this data, a fertility clinic living on search keywords or a hospital waiting to be discovered in the feed is not contrarian. It is alone, and not in the good way.
How we know this
This report is built from Muffin Intel, the ad-intelligence engine we run in-house. Advertisers in each niche were resolved by their website domains and their ads counted by advertiser ID, with Google activity read through Google Ads Transparency Center and Meta activity through Meta Ad Library. The figures cover 71 advertisers and 4,040 tracked ads across the three niches, tracked between August 3 and September 1, 2026. Counts of real ad activity, not modeled estimates.
We update this dataset continuously, so the numbers move. The pattern does not.
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