Paid ads that actually book patients.

Honest answer: it depends on your specialty, your suburb, your average patient value, and how well your landing page converts. A cosmetic clinic in Bondi and a regional GP in Bendigo have completely different economics. As a rough starting point, most single-doctor practices we work with start somewhere between $1,500 and $4,000 a month in ad spend, then scale up or down based on what the data says. We'll give you a specific recommendation after the initial strategy call, not a generic number pulled from a pricing page.

Google classifies healthcare and medicines as a restricted category. Common reasons for disapproval include: mentioning specific conditions or medications in ad copy, using language Google reads as targeting users based on sensitive health categories ("personalised advertising"), landing pages that lack clear business information, and certain specialties (like cosmetic procedures) that require certification. We navigate these rules daily, most disapprovals come from copy or landing page issues we can fix quickly, not hard bans. We don't try to bypass Google's policies; we work inside them properly.

No, and anyone who does is either lying or about to disappoint you. Paid ads are a system with too many variables, your specialty, your competitors' budgets, seasonality, your landing page, your phone answering rates, and Google's auction dynamics. What we can guarantee is that we'll measure the right things (cost per booked appointment, not clicks), be transparent about what's working, and stop spending on things that don't.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If you're in a competitive urban market with strong patient demand and good margins per patient, ads can pay for themselves quickly. If you're in a quiet suburb with low search volume and mostly bulk-billing work, organic SEO and Google Business Profile will usually give you better returns for the money. We'll tell you honestly which camp you're in before you sign anything.

Yes, Facebook and Instagram, with the same healthcare considerations. Meta has its own ad policies for health and wellness, its own restrictions on targeting health-related audiences, and its own privacy rules that matter for medical advertisers. Meta works well for visual, demand-generation campaigns (cosmetic, dermatology, dental, allied health). It works less well for high-intent search-style demand, where Google is still the right channel.

Campaigns can be live within a week of strategy approval. That's from the point where we've agreed on structure, budget, keywords, and landing pages. If we also need to build landing pages from scratch, add a week. The slow part is never the platform. It's making sure the copy, tracking, and pages are right before you spend a dollar.

Yes, with the usual healthcare caveats. Google and Meta both restrict retargeting based on sensitive health categories, you can't retarget people who visited a page about a specific condition, for example. What you can do is retarget general site visitors with broad brand messaging, and use first-party data (your own email list, with consent) for list-based audiences. We set this up in a way that respects both the platform rules and patient privacy.

No. We charge a flat monthly management fee. The percentage-of-spend model means your agency earns more whenever you spend more, even when they probably shouldn't be. We think that's a quiet conflict of interest, especially for doctors who aren't watching the account every day, so we don't work that way.

Honest minimum: below about $1,500 a month in ad spend, paid search usually isn't the right tool, the daily budget gets too thin to gather statistically meaningful data, and you end up optimising on noise. If your budget is smaller than that, we'll recommend putting the money into SEO, Google Business Profile, and content instead, and revisiting ads once your practice can support a sensible spend.

Yes. We start with an audit, account structure, keywords, match types, negatives, quality scores, landing pages, conversion tracking, and spend allocation. You get a written summary of what's working, what isn't, and what we'd change. From there we can either hand the report back to you, or take over and run the account properly.