The chains bid on the generic words
“Physical therapy near me” costs $8 to $20 a click in most cities because the national chains treat it as a branding line. Independents who bid on the same word fund the auction for them.
A $40 copay times twelve visits is a $1,500 patient. Worth fighting for, within reason.
PT marketing used to mean lunch for the orthopedic office. Direct access changed that: people now search “physical therapy near me” after a tweaked back or a bad 5K, and the hospital systems and national chains (ATI, Select, Athletico) bid on every one of them with budgets you will never match.
We go narrower than they can. Campaigns by condition and by program, cash-pay services where insurance is a mess, and tracking that runs from the click to the first completed visit, so you know what an ad-sourced plan of care actually costs.
Plans of care from $800 to $2,500, cash programs more. The upside is real. So is the waste, and here’s where it usually comes from.
“Physical therapy near me” costs $8 to $20 a click in most cities because the national chains treat it as a branding line. Independents who bid on the same word fund the auction for them.
Half the calls from a generic ad are “do you take my plan”. If the front desk spends ten minutes on that and the answer is no, the click was a loss twice.
An online booking is not a patient. First-visit no-shows on ad-sourced evaluations run 20 to 30 percent in clinics with no confirmation flow.
Condition and program campaigns: Back and neck pain, post-surgical rehab, sports injuries, pelvic floor, vestibular and balance, dry needling, running analysis. Each with its own page written for the person who has that problem.Cash-pay where it makes sense: Dry needling, performance programs, pelvic health and wellness visits are easier to sell outside insurance and have no copay ceiling. They get their own campaign and their own pricing on the page.Insurance named on the page: List what you take and what you do not, with a short form that asks for the plan. It trims calls that would have gone nowhere and lets Google learn from the right ones.Track to the completed evaluation: Call tracking plus WebPT, Prompt, Raintree or Jane, so bidding learns from patients who arrived, not from forms that were filled.Examples from physical therapy accounts. The real lists run to hundreds of terms and get reviewed every week.
Your account is run by two PPC pros with 20+ years each. No handoff to a coordinator juggling 35 accounts.
Not quarterly. Not “when the algorithm settles”. Every week, by hand, so the junk never gets a chance to pile up.
Your Google Ads account, your data, your tracking, from day one. Leave anytime and take it all with you.
Who likes 12-month contracts? We don’t. We earn the next quarter by making the last one pay.
For a one or two location clinic, $2,500 to $6,000 a month is the practical range. The chains make the generic words expensive, so we spend on specific conditions and cash services where the cost per new patient stays under $100.
No. One physical therapy clinic per metro. If you have several locations we cover them all; we just will not take your competitor as well.
Partly. We build confirmation and reminder flows into the booking, and we write ads and pages that set expectations about cost and insurance before the visit. The rest is your front desk, and we will tell you if that is the bottleneck.
Cash-pay, $5k to $20k a procedure, and a patient who researches for months. Patience and precision win.
How we run it →Botox every 3 months for 10 years is the business. One cheap syringe is not.
How we run it →Medical, cosmetic and surgical derm are three businesses. Your ads should know which one they’re selling.
How we run it →High-ticket procedures. Patients who research for months. Campaigns that respect both.
How we run it →Talk to a senior PPC expert who has run physical therapy accounts. Never a junior.