A quarterly report on what paid acquisition is actually doing across the industry — written from forty-six ad accounts and the public ad libraries, with the sources printed next to every number. Not tips. Measurements.
Most industry reports are a survey of opinions with a logo on the front. This one only contains things that were measured, and it says who measured them.
What the last quarter actually did across health, wellbeing and longevity. Spend, cost, and where the money moved.
What the biggest advertisers in the category changed, and what the change tells you they learned.
Cost per acquisition, cost per lead, creative lifespan. Directional, sourced, and never flattering.
What the platforms and the regulator started enforcing. In this category that is not admin, it is your account.
The health category is enormous. The businesses inside it are small.
Everyone selling marketing into health talks about the size of the category. Almost nobody checks how many businesses in it can actually afford to advertise. We did, using public census data, and the answer reframes who your competition really is.
$180,000 a year on Meta is 2.3× the entire average small business advertising budget.
Across every channel, not just paid social. So a health business running $15,000 a month on one platform is not spending like a small business at all — it is spending like something several times larger.
Why it matters: if you are at that level, the operators you think you are competing with mostly are not in the auction with you. And if you are not there yet, the honest question is not which agency to hire. It is whether the economics support that spend at all.
Source: Intuit Small Business Advertising Trends, 2025
The average business in this category turns over less than $400,000.
Category averages, from the most recent industry data available:
Work backwards from a normal marketing budget — ten to fifteen per cent of revenue, with sixty to seventy per cent of that going to the primary channel — and the practical revenue floor for $15,000 a month on Meta is somewhere around $1.7M to $2M.
Why it matters: the qualifying filter in this category was never “health”. It is $2M and up, and that removes the large majority of every segment in it.
Sources: Mindbody Beauty & Wellness Revenue Benchmarks 2024 · IBISWorld Australia · ICF Global Coaching Study 2025
Revenue density varies by a factor of seven across the category.
Segment to segment, the share of businesses clearing $1M in revenue ranges from roughly one in fourteen at the thin end to more than half at the dense end. They are all “health”. They are not remotely the same market.
Why it matters: most operators in this category are competing hardest in one of its thinnest segments, because that is the segment they came from. The densest one is barely contested — and it is also the most heavily regulated, which is exactly why it stays that way.
Source: US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — establishment counts by revenue band
The full issue breaks the segment table out in full, with the counts, the confidence band, and what we think each one means for anyone trying to buy customers in it.
Published when the analysis is done rather than on a calendar. A quarter with nothing genuinely new in it gets skipped, and we will say so.
How long a concept actually lasts in this category before cost climbs — measured across the accounts we can see, not quoted from a US e-commerce blog.
Twelve months of health-claim rejections and what pattern sits underneath them. The compliance surface, mapped.
Segment by segment. Most operators are competing hardest in the thinnest part of the market and do not know it.
A generalist agency reporting on health is reporting on a sliver of its book. This is the whole of ours — forty-six ad accounts, one category, and the same compliance surface as the businesses reading it. That is the only reason the numbers are worth your time.
The report tells you what the category is doing. A Revenue Audit tells you what your account is doing, in thirty minutes, with your numbers on screen.
Apply for a Revenue AuditNo deck and no pitch. We will tell you transparently if it isn’t a fit.