Most clinic ad accounts are built by people who have never treated a patient. They bid on the word physiotherapy, they report on clicks, and nobody ever finds out what a booking cost.
The word "physiotherapy" is one of the most expensive and least useful terms a clinic can buy. It collects students researching courses, people looking for NHS waiting times, job seekers, and patients three counties away. All of them cost you the same as a patient two streets from your door who has been in pain for six weeks.
What a clinic actually needs is a narrow account. A patient rarely searches for a profession. They search for a problem in a place, which is why terms like "sciatica physio Clapham" or "sports physio near me" behave completely differently from the generic head term, both in cost and in whether anyone books.
Advertising a regulated health service is not the same as advertising a restaurant. The ASA CAP Code applies to your ads, HCPC standards apply to you as a registrant, and CSP guidance applies to how you present the profession. Superlatives such as "the best physiotherapy in London" fall under CAP Rule 3.1 on misleading advertising, and they need objective evidence that almost no independent clinic can produce.
Outcome language is the other common problem. Ad copy that promises recovery, or a number of sessions, or a guaranteed result, is making a clinical claim in a commercial setting. The safe construction uses language such as "may help" or "can support", which is both compliant and, in practice, no less persuasive to a patient who is comparing clinics.
Bar width is search volume. The narrowest term brings the fewest people and the most patients, which is why an account built on the profession name spends most of its budget on the row at the top.
Impressions, reach and click through rate tell you an ad was seen. They do not tell you whether anyone walked through your door. The 2026 UK Private Practice Barometer surveyed 715 clinic owners and found only 25.8 per cent track their cost per acquisition at all. Among those who do, the median cost of a new patient is around £25.
Conversion tracking is set up first, before any budget is spent, so that every enquiry can be traced back to the term that produced it. The monthly report shows spend, enquiries, bookings reconciled against your diary, and the resulting cost per new patient. Where a number is counted by hand rather than captured automatically, it says so.
It depends on your turnover and your local competition, so there is no single right number. For context, the 2026 UK Private Practice Barometer found clinics under £100k turnover spend around 11.2 per cent of turnover on marketing, while clinics above £500k spend around 4 per cent. The median monthly marketing budget across clinics under £1m is about £1,000, and that figure has to cover management as well as media.
Yes, provided the copy describes what the treatment is rather than promising what it will achieve. Naming a condition you treat is fine. Stating that you will fix it is not. The distinction is between describing a service and making a clinical claim, and it is the single most common issue found in clinic ad accounts.
Search ads can produce enquiries within days, which is the main reason clinics start there rather than with SEO. What takes longer is getting the cost per booking down, because that depends on accumulating enough search term data to cut what is not working. Expect the first few weeks to be about learning which terms convert.
No. The retainer covers building and managing the account. Media spend is paid directly to Google on your own card, so you can see exactly what was spent and you keep the account if we stop working together. Full detail is on the pricing page.