Healthcare Google Ads CTR Benchmarks India 2026 (By Intent)

The Benchmarks

By Intent Tier (Search campaigns, India healthcare, 2025):

By Ad Format:

By Position:

What to Do When CTR Is Below Benchmark

For Treatment Intent campaigns below 3% CTR:

1. Review headline relevance — are all 15 headline slots written specifically for the search intent?
2. Add site extensions, call extensions, and location extensions — these increase the ad's visual footprint
3. Test a question-format headline: "Looking for an IVF Specialist in Delhi?" outperforms "IVF Treatment Delhi" in most A/B tests
4. Check match types — if broad match is surfacing irrelevant queries, CTR will naturally be low

For Branded campaigns below 7% CTR:

A low branded CTR usually means you have a competitor bidding on your brand name and appearing above your ad. Pull the Auction Insights report and check who is outranking you on branded queries.

2026 update: what has moved since we published these CTR benchmarks

Two shifts in the last twelve months have quietly reshaped what a healthy CTR looks like for a healthcare Google Ads account in India. Both are worth adjusting your dashboards for before you judge a campaign as underperforming.

1. AI Overviews are absorbing top-of-funnel symptom clicks. T6 symptom and condition queries (e.g. tooth pain at night, irregular periods causes) now surface an AI Overview above the ad block for a majority of Indian mobile searches. Expect T6 CTR to drift from the 1-3% band we published toward 0.8-2%. Do not raise bids to compensate — reallocate budget to T3 and T4 intent instead. Our teardown of how AI Overviews are reshaping healthcare search covers the funnel implications.
2. Performance Max has become the default, not the outlier. When we first shipped these benchmarks, PMax was 15-20% of most healthcare accounts. In the 40+ accounts we audited between Jan and Jul 2026, PMax now averages 55% of spend. That pulls the blended account CTR down, which looks like a problem but usually is not. Judge PMax on CPQL and consult-show rate, not CTR.

Five CTR mistakes we see in almost every healthcare account we audit

• Running one RSA per ad group. Google needs three RSAs minimum to learn headline combinations. Single-RSA ad groups cap CTR at 60-70% of the format ceiling.
• Bidding on symptom queries without a symptom-language landing page. Ad copy about treatment against a search for symptom is a relevance mismatch — CTR halves.
• Ignoring the Search Terms report weekly. Healthcare has a long tail of near-medical queries; without negatives, your CTR bleeds against irrelevant impressions.
• Doctor-name ads without a doctor-name landing page. T4 clicks land on a generic homepage and bounce; the ad CTR looks fine but Quality Score punishes the next auction.
• No competitor campaign at all. T2 competitor campaigns often carry the highest ROAS in a healthcare account — skipping them leaves the easiest CTR on the table.

Fixes to all five are baked into the Google Ads pillar of our Client Elevation Programme. If you would rather diagnose your own account first, our healthcare Google Ads audit checklist and CPQL benchmarks by specialty are the two most-shared resources with founders on the diagnostic call.