Get found this month: pay-per-click ads for allied health and therapy practices
Clicks that book.
Google Ads for allied health practices buys the enquiry while the organic work takes hold: a search ad for the condition and suburb a patient types, a Meta ad for the parent scrolling at nine at night, and a landing page and phone line tracked through to the booking. Go Forth Digital runs pay-per-click ads for physio, psychology, OT and speech practices across Australia, in your own ad accounts, and reports cost per booking, not cost per click.
Go Forth Digital is run by a founder who has worked a physiotherapy front desk processing private health and NDIS payments, run a gym P&L, and spent five years building health and wellness websites.
What do pay-per-click ads for allied health include?
Seven pieces of work. The tracking and the landing page come before the first dollar of media, because without them an ad account is a meter with no reading.
Paid search is the one channel that can put a practice in front of a patient the same week. It is also the one channel where a badly built account spends money at full speed. The order we do it in:
- Accounts and tracking. Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager set up in your name, with billing on your card. GA4 with the booking widget tracked (Cliniko, Halaxy, Nookal, Splose, Power Diary or Zanda), call tracking on the ad number, and a consent banner that matches what the tags do. Google counts a conversion only where you tell it to (Google Ads Help), so the booking, not the click, is the conversion.
- Search campaigns by condition, funding stream and suburb. "Physio for shoulder pain" plus your suburb. "ADHD assessment psychologist telehealth". "NDIS occupational therapist" with the plan-managed and self-managed wording in the ad. Phrase and exact match, a negative list that removes jobs, courses, "free" and every profession you do not offer, and a schedule that follows reception hours.
- Landing pages that book. One page per campaign group, with the fee, the clinicians, the funding pathway and the booking widget above the fold. Never the homepage. If the site cannot hold a page like that, we build it under websites and bookings first.
- Meta campaigns where they earn their place. Facebook and Instagram reach parents, adults looking for a telehealth psychologist, and NDIS families who found the practice in a community group. Lead forms with three fields, an automatic reply within the minute, and the front desk calling the same day. Meta restricts what a health advertiser can track and target, so we build inside those limits rather than around them (below).
- A compliance check on every ad. The Ahpra advertising guidelines apply to a paid ad exactly as they apply to a website: no testimonials, no unreasonable expectation of benefit, and every offer or discount carries its terms and conditions (Ahpra, effective 14 December 2020). Speech pathology and dietetics follow their own association's policy.
- Budget control. A daily cap per campaign, a pause rule when a clinician's diary fills, and a weekly check of search terms so the money follows the searches that booked. The spend goes up when the calendar has room and down when it does not.
- Measurement. Cost per booking by campaign, first appointments attributed to ads in your practice management software, and the searches that produced them. Impressions and click-through rate sit in the appendix.
What does a booking cost through Google Ads?
No independent Australian figure exists for allied health, so we start from the US benchmark and then use your own numbers from week three.
US$40.04
average cost per lead for physicians and surgeons search campaigns in the United States, April 2025 to March 2026, with a 12.43% conversion rate.
WordStream by LocaliQ, 19 May 2026.
17.7 million
people in Australia could be reached by ads on Facebook in late 2025, 65.3% of the population. Instagram reached 15.2 million.
DataReportal, Digital 2026: Australia, 5 November 2025.
Treat the US figure as an order of magnitude, not a promise. The arithmetic that matters is yours: what a click costs in your suburb, how many clicks become a first appointment on your landing page, and what a first appointment is worth once the second and third visits are counted. A physio initial that becomes a six-visit plan is worth more than the first fee, and that is the number a cost per booking is measured against. We set that up in the first fortnight and show you the account, not a summary of it.
Ads buy the enquiry for as long as you pay. That is the reason this page sits beside SEO and AI visibility rather than instead of them. Paid fills the gap this quarter; the organic work makes next year cheaper.
Google Ads or Meta ads?
Google for the patient who already has the problem and is typing it. Meta for the parent, the carer or the adult who has been meaning to book for months.
A search ad meets intent. Someone with a locked back at 7am types "physio near me open today" and books the first practice that answers with a fee and a time. A Meta ad creates the moment instead: a paediatric speech practice showing what a two-year-old's speech milestones look like, or a psychology practice explaining what a Better Access referral covers, in front of a parent who has been putting off the GP visit. The second takes longer and costs less per view; the first costs more per click and books faster.
Both platforms treat health as a sensitive category. Google's personalised advertising policy lists health among its sensitive interest categories and stops advertisers in those categories using Customer Match, their own data segments, audience expansion and lookalike segments (Google Ads Policy Help). In practice that means no remarketing to people who visited your ADHD assessment page. Meta rolled out data-sharing restrictions for health and wellness advertisers from January 2025, limiting the later-stage events, such as a booking, that a categorised business can send back for optimisation (Cardinal Digital Marketing, 5 February 2025), and its personal attributes policy bans ads that imply knowledge of a person's medical condition. Lead forms, location, age and interest targeting still work. An agency that promises remarketing lists for a health practice has not read the policy.
Who it suits, and who it does not
It suits a practice with capacity this month and a landing page that can take the booking.
It suits a practice that has hired a clinician and needs their diary at 70% by the end of the quarter. It suits a second clinic in its first six months, before the Google Business Profile has any history. It suits telehealth psychology, where the catchment is the whole state and search is the only door. It suits a paediatric practice at the start of a school term, when parents act on the report they read over the holidays.
It does not suit a practice with a waitlist; more enquiries make that worse, and returned clinician hours are the better first buy. It does not suit a site that cannot show a fee and a booking button on one screen; fix that first, or the ads pay for clicks that leave. It does not suit an owner who cannot fund three months of media on top of the management fee, because the first month is the expensive one and the account learns from it. For pricing see what it costs.
What we will not do
- Send ads to the homepage. A patient who searched for shoulder pain lands on a page about shoulder pain, with the fee and the booking widget, or the click is wasted.
- Build remarketing or lookalike audiences from visitors to condition pages. Google's personalised advertising policy prohibits it for health advertisers, and Meta's restrictions cut the same way.
- Write ads that promise a result. "Pain gone in three sessions" creates an unreasonable expectation of benefit under the Ahpra guidelines, and the ACCC treats a claim with no reasonable basis as misleading (ACCC, updated 11 July 2026).
- Run a discount without its terms in the ad or one click away. The guidelines require the conditions to be stated, in plain language, where a patient can find them.
- Hold the ad account in our name. The account, the history and the data are yours. If you leave, you change the password.
- Bid on another practice's name. It is legal, it annoys the practice, and it brings patients who wanted someone else.
Frequently asked questions
How fast do Google Ads bring bookings?
The first clicks arrive the day the campaign is approved, and the first booking usually follows within the first week if the landing page does its job. What takes longer is a cost per booking you would sign off on. The first month is a test: which searches book, which only click, what a click costs at the hours your front desk answers. By week six the negative list is doing its work and the budget has moved to the two or three campaigns that book. If the account has not produced a booking at a cost you can live with by the end of month two, we say so and we stop, rather than adding budget to a campaign that has already answered the question.
What does it cost?
Two numbers. The management sits inside the retainer, usually $1,500 to $2,500 a month ex GST on a three-month initial term then rolling, and covers the build, the weekly search-term work, the compliance check and the reporting. The media is separate, paid to Google and Meta from your own card, and we agree the monthly cap before anything runs. We do not mark up media and we do not take a percentage of it, so there is no reason for us to want you to spend more. A practice billing $120 to $250 an hour per clinician recovers a retainer with a handful of additional booked hours a month. Tell us what you need and we will quote it in writing; the cost guide sets out the market ranges.
Can a psychology practice advertise on Google and Meta?
Yes. Google's healthcare and medicines policy requires certification in Australia for online pharmacies, prescription drug services and addiction services (Google Ads Policy Help); a psychology, physio, OT or speech practice that does none of those needs no certification. The limits are on targeting and wording, not on advertising at all. No remarketing or customer lists, because health is a sensitive category. No ad that names a condition the reader has, because Meta's personal attributes policy prohibits it. No testimonial, no guaranteed outcome, and the terms stated on any offer, because the National Law and the PsyBA guidelines apply to a paid ad as they apply to your website. Within those lines a search campaign for "psychologist under a mental health care plan" or "ADHD assessment telehealth" runs like any other.
Should we run Google Ads or SEO?
Both answer the same search; they differ in when the enquiry arrives and how long it keeps arriving. Ads book this week and stop the day the budget stops. SEO takes three to six months on a contested page and then keeps working at no extra cost. A practice with empty slots now and no organic presence runs a capped search campaign while the service pages index, then turns the spend down as the organic enquiries replace it. A practice already ranking in the map pack for its main searches usually gets more from a second clinician's landing page than from ads. We tell you which of those you are in the first conversation, and the SEO page covers the organic side.
Do Meta ads work for a physio clinic?
Rarely for the patient in pain today; that person is on Google. They work for the things a physio clinic sells that nobody searches for at 7am: a running assessment, a strength class for people over 60, a pre-season screening for a local club, a new clinician with a Saturday diary. They also work for the parent of a child who needs a paediatric physio, because parents scroll and search in that order. We test Meta for a physio clinic with a small cap and a lead form, and keep it only if the first month books. For paediatric speech, telehealth psychology and NDIS-funded practices, Meta earns its place more often, because the family is deciding over weeks, not hours.
How do you report it?
Monthly, one page first. Cost per booking by campaign, bookings attributed to ads in your practice management software, tracked calls that became appointments, and what we changed. Then the search terms that booked and the ones we removed. Google Ads and Meta exports sit behind it for anyone who wants the detail, and you have your own login to both accounts, so nothing in the report is a number you cannot check yourself. If a campaign is not booking, the report says so in the first line, with the decision we recommend.
Tell us what you need
Bring last month's ad spend and the bookings it produced, or the empty diary you want filled. We will read the account with you and tell you what a booking should cost in your suburb.