Google Ads for a medical practice.

How does paid search work for a practice?

A practice chooses the searches it wants to appear for, such as a service and a town, sets a daily budget and a bid, and writes short ads. When someone searches, Google runs an auction among the advertisers whose keywords match, weighing each bid against how relevant the ad and its landing page are. The practice pays when someone clicks, not when the ad is shown.

Three settings decide most of the result. Location targeting keeps the ads to the area patients actually travel from. Keyword choice separates people ready to book from people reading about a condition. The landing page, the page the click opens, decides whether a click becomes a call or a booked visit; sending clicks to the home page wastes most of them.

Count what matters. A click is not a patient; a call or a form is a lead; a lead who books and shows up is a new patient. Track calls from the ads and ask new patients how they found you, so the practice can see the cost per new patient rather than the cost per click.

What does the healthcare benchmark say?

LocaliQ publishes search ad benchmarks for healthcare, drawn from a large sample of US campaigns. For healthcare overall, a click costs $5.64 (benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026), 8.09% (benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026) of clicks turn into a lead such as a call or a form, and LocaliQ puts the cost per lead at $66.02 (benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026). Working from the click and conversion figures gives a similar answer, $69.72 (worked out from the benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026) a lead.

The figures differ widely by field, as the table shows: emergency medicine clicks are cheap, and dermatology and ophthalmology clicks convert far more often than average. LocaliQ's figures are medians across campaigns, not a forecast for one practice, and costs in a large city with many competing practices can run higher than in a small town. Use them to plan, then replace them with your own numbers after a month or two.

What will Google not let a practice advertise?

Google treats healthcare as a restricted category. Ads for ordinary practice services, such as checkups, procedures or a specialty, fall outside the restricted subcategories, but several kinds of healthcare advertising need certification or are not allowed, and the rules differ by location.

What do the federal rules add?

Google's policies are a platform's terms. The federal rules apply on top of them, and the two that matter most for paid search concern tracking on the practice's own website and what the ad says.

How do you read the patient acquisition calculator?

The patient acquisition cost calculator turns a monthly ad budget into an expected number of new patients. In its paid search mode it divides the budget by the cost per click to get clicks, applies the conversion rate to get leads, and applies the share of leads who book to get new patients. Leave the click cost and conversion rate blank to use the LocaliQ benchmark for the category you pick, or enter your own once you have them.

The second half of the calculator asks what a patient is worth: revenue per visit, visits a year and years a patient stays. Compare the cost per new patient with that lifetime figure. A specialty with long-term patients can afford a higher cost per new patient than one where patients come once.

Each marketing guide opens the calculator on its specialty's benchmark where LocaliQ publishes one, for example the dermatology guide and the ophthalmology guide.

Should a practice run Google Ads at all?

Ads make sense when the practice has room on the schedule, offers something patients search for and choose themselves, and has a landing page that answers their questions. They make little sense for a full practice, for care that comes almost entirely by referral, or for services Google's policies restrict.

Start small, run for long enough to learn, and judge by cost per new patient, not by clicks. An agency can help with setup, but ask how it reports results, whether it will hand over the account if you part ways, and how it keeps tracking off pages with patient information.

Questions to ask

• Does the schedule have room for the patients the ads would bring?
• Which service would the ads promote, and does it have its own landing page?
• How will calls from the ads be counted, and new patients traced to them?
• Who owns the ad account if the practice changes agencies?
• Are any tracking tags on pages where patients book or log in?