A practice does not need more leads in the abstract. It needs the right number of the right patients, arriving at a pace the providers can absorb, with a payer mix that works. That is a narrower target than most accounts are built to hit.
What a click costs in patient acquisition right now. Median Google Ads cost per click in the United States, from the October 2026 edition of the Paid Media Cost Index, a Diwizi dataset pulled on October 15, 2026 with the date the source last refreshed each figure.
| Search | Cost per click | Source refresh |
|---|---|---|
| urgent care near me | $3.66 | Sep 16 |
| medical spa | $6.37 | Sep 13 |
| home care services | $13.51 | Sep 15 |
Healthcare median, $6.37 across 3 keywords. Free to reuse with credit to the Cost Index.
The failure is rarely traffic. It is almost always what happens after the click.
An account tuned for maximum enquiries in a practice that can take twelve new patients a month produces a waiting list, a no-show rate and a receptionist who stops calling back. The spend looks efficient and the schedule does not improve.
Bidding against the price of one appointment caps you at the margin of the cheapest visit. Bidding against what a patient is worth across the relationship changes which searches are worth winning.
Nothing in a default setup knows which enquiries carry a plan you accept. So the account keeps buying the ones that do not, and nobody notices until someone reconciles the schedule against the spend.
A general practice site is built for people who already chose you. Paid traffic arrives still deciding, and needs the specific answer to the specific search, near the top, with one obvious next step.
Everything here exists to move one number: new patients who book and keep the appointment.
We size the spend backwards from how many new patients each provider can absorb and what one is worth over the relationship, instead of forwards from an arbitrary monthly figure.
Offline conversion import from your scheduling system so the platform optimises toward patients who showed up, not toward whoever filled in a form at 2am.
Most practice enquiries are calls. Which search produced it, and whether it became a booking.
Distinct campaigns, bids and pages for the procedures and plans that carry different economics, so the high-value work can be bid up on its own.
Paid traffic dies on a general practice homepage. I build and iterate the pages the campaigns point to, with the credentials, location signals and single clear action a deciding patient needs. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns.
New patients, cost per new patient, and mix, rather than impressions and click-through rate.
Local Services Ads and the map pack usually belong in the mix here too, measured separately from standard search so you can see which one produces booked appointments.
I would rather describe real work honestly than invent a case study with invented numbers. Some engagements have figures I can publish. My healthcare experience comes from an employed role, so nothing from it appears here at all, which is a deliberate choice rather than false modesty.
I have also worked in paid media in healthcare. Nothing from that work is published anywhere on this site: no employer named, no budgets, no results, no internal detail. It is listed only because it is where a large part of my healthcare experience comes from.
Google Ads and a monthly report for a reseller of health plans. On almost the same spend as September, quote requests went from 566 to 651 and the cost per request fell from R$ 16.42. It is health insurance, not a practice, so what carries over is the measurement and the lead quality work, not the patient journey. Read the case.
Google Ads and Performance Max in one of the most competitive local markets in the US, with expensive clicks, ZIP code choices and seasonal demand. The performance data is confidential by contract, so the case covers the work and the lessons, not the numbers. Read the case.
Cumulative account history since 2020: 5,707 clicks and R$ 63.61 per conversion. Conversions are contact actions recorded by Google Ads, not sales. I also created the brand identity and built the site. Read the case.
I go through the account, the tracking and the patient journey and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how patients actually search, and around what your compliance rules allow.
Weekly optimisation against booked appointments rather than form fills, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
Practices with a procedure or specialty that justifies the cost of a new patient.
Not a fit: A practice that cannot measure booked appointments, only calls.
The useful way to set this is backwards from capacity, not forwards from a percentage of revenue. Work out how many new patients each provider can absorb per month, what one is worth over the relationship rather than the first visit, and how many enquiries it takes to book one. The budget falls out of that. Spending more than your schedule can absorb just buys you no-shows.
For a practice, search usually comes first, because someone typing your service into Google has already decided they need it. Meta earns its place for elective and discretionary work where demand has to be created rather than captured. Running both without measuring them separately is the mistake.
It varies far too much by specialty and market for a single number to mean anything, and anyone quoting you one without knowing your market is guessing. The number that matters more is the ratio between it and what a patient is worth to you over time, which is the calculation most practices have never actually run.
Possibly, but for a different goal. At capacity, the point is not more volume, it is better mix: shifting the schedule toward the procedures and payers you want more of. That is a bidding and targeting problem, not a budget problem, and it is one of the more interesting things you can do with a mature account.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
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