The three questions that decide it
1. Is there a gap you need filling now? Ads buy time, not authority. If you have opened a second room, hired an associate, or moved and lost your visibility, ads put you at the top of the results this afternoon. If your diary is comfortably full, they mostly buy you patients you would have got anyway.
2. Does your page convert? Paid traffic lands on the same page as free traffic. If a visitor cannot see your prices, your location and a way to book within one screen, ads amplify a leak. Fixing the page first regularly halves the cost per enquiry, at no monthly cost.
3. What is a patient worth to you? Not the first appointment. A course of treatment, plus the chance they come back next year and mention you to somebody. Until you have that number, you cannot tell whether a click costing several pounds is expensive or cheap.
What clinic ads actually cost
Costs per click vary enormously by treatment and by town, so treat any single figure as a starting hypothesis rather than a budget. What is more useful is understanding the shape of it.
- Competitive city terms cost multiples of small-town terms for the same treatment. A clinic in a market town frequently gets its clicks for a fraction of what a London borough costs.
- Broad terms are the expensive mistake. "Physiotherapy" attracts students, job hunters and people two counties away. "Sports massage" plus your town, plus a treatment page that matches, is where small budgets work.
- Not every click enquires, and not every enquiry books. Two separate drop-offs, and both are worth measuring before you conclude ads do not work.
- Management fees sit on top. A percentage-of-spend model on a small budget usually means very little human attention. Ask how many hours a month the account actually gets.
A workable way in for most clinics: pick one treatment you want more of, one town, a small daily budget, and run it for eight weeks with call tracking on. That is enough to learn something and small enough that being wrong is cheap.
The healthcare rules that catch clinics out
Advertising a health service is more constrained than advertising a shop, in two directions.
Google's own policies. The healthcare and medicines policy restricts what can be promoted and in some categories requires certification. Most physiotherapy, osteopathy and massage advertising is fine; anything touching prescription treatments, weight-loss medication or certain therapies is not, and accounts get suspended without much warning.
UK advertising law. Your ads and the pages behind them sit under the CAP Code, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority. Claims about treating named conditions need to be substantiated, and testimonials do not count as evidence of efficacy. Health advertising is one of the ASA's most complained-about sectors, and a ruling against you is published under your clinic's name.
The practical version: advertise what you do and how you work, be specific about the service, and keep clinical outcome claims off the ad and off the landing page unless you can point to evidence for them.
Ads or SEO?
They answer different questions, and the honest framing is a sequence rather than a contest.
- Ads start today, stop the day you stop paying, and are ideal for testing. Two months of ads tells you which treatments people search for in your town, which is expensive research to buy any other way.
- SEO and your Google Business Profile take months, cost less over time, and keep working. For a clinic with a full diary and a five-year horizon, this is where the money belongs.
- Together, the sensible pattern is ads to cover a gap and to learn, feeding what you learn into the pages that will still be earning in two years.
Knowing whether it worked
Set this up before you spend anything, because retrofitting it is how clinics end up arguing with an agency about whose numbers are right.
- Call tracking, so a phone enquiry from an ad is distinguishable from one from your profile.
- Form submissions recorded as conversions, with the treatment enquired about.
- A note in your booking system of where new patients came from. Imperfect, and still the most honest number you will have.
- One monthly figure that matters: cost per booked patient. Compare it to what a patient is worth, and the decision makes itself.
How this works at ClinicGrowth
Crawley and the Gatwick commuter belt produce a specific pattern worth knowing about. Search demand there spikes in the evening and at weekends, from people who work in London and cannot attend anything during the day. Clinics running ads on a flat 24-hour schedule spend a large share of their budget at 11am on Tuesday, when the people searching are mostly comparing rather than booking, and then run out of budget on Sunday evening when the ready-to-book searches happen.
At ClinicGrowth we see this most often in accounts that were set up correctly and never revisited. What separates the clinics for whom ads pay is not a cleverer campaign structure. It is that they know what a patient is worth, they send paid traffic to a page built for that one treatment, and they check the cost per booked patient monthly rather than the click-through rate. Clinics missing any of those three usually cannot tell you whether the last twelve months of spend made money.
If you want to work out which of those pieces you are missing, here is the range of what we do.
Questions we get asked
What is a sensible starting budget?
Small enough that eight weeks of it is affordable as research, focused on one treatment and one town. Spreading a small budget across every service you offer teaches you nothing.
Should I bid on my own clinic name?
Sometimes. It is cheap, and it matters if a competitor or a directory is bidding on it. If nobody is, you are often paying for clicks you would have had for free.
Do ads help my organic rankings?
No. Paid and organic results are ranked separately. What ads do give you is fast data about which searches convert, which is genuinely useful for deciding what to write.
Is Facebook or Instagram advertising better value?
It is a different job. Search ads reach people who already have the problem and are looking. Social ads create awareness among people who are not looking yet, which needs a longer run and more patience.
Run them to fill a gap or to learn something specific, measure cost per booked patient, and stop when the answer is clear.
Find out what your clinic is missing
A free 20-minute review of your website, Google Business Profile, reviews and booking flow. You get a written summary of what to fix first, whether or not you work with us.