Private clinics and aesthetics

The consultation is the product being advertised. The treatment is the product being sold. Confusing those two is the most expensive mistake in this sector.

You run a private clinic: aesthetics, dermatology, cosmetic, weight management, fertility or another self pay speciality. Patients choose you rather than being referred, and they pay for the result.

Book a call What we do

A practitioner carrying out a facial treatment on a patient in a clinic room

Consultations are being booked and the treatment room is not as full as the diary suggests it should be. Nobody can tell you where between the two it goes wrong.

What we keep finding

Four things that cost clinics money quietly.

Consultations are sold like treatments
A free or low cost consultation converts well as an advert and tells you almost nothing about whether a treatment will follow. Clinics that do not measure the step between them are effectively buying appointments at random.
A course of six is counted as one booking
The value of a patient here is rarely one treatment. Where courses, top ups and maintenance are normal, a first booking measured at its face value undersells the customer by a large multiple.
Meta gets blamed for something it was never told
Advertising platforms optimise toward what they are fed. Fed a lead form completion, they will find you people who complete lead forms. Fed an attended, paid treatment, they find somebody else entirely.
Compliance is treated as a barrier rather than as a constraint to design around
Advertising rules on cosmetic and medical treatments are strict and they are workable. The clinics that struggle are usually the ones who tried to ignore them and lost an account, not the ones who planned for them.

The change

What the ad platforms are told.

Same budget, same creative, different instruction. This is usually the whole intervention.

Now

Lead form submitted
Value: none
Optimising toward: form fills
Result: a diary full of enquiries

After

Consultation attended, then treatment paid
Value: the actual amount taken, courses included
Optimising toward: paid treatments
Result: fewer enquiries, more treatment room hours

Patients receiving light therapy treatments in a clinic setting

Room hours are the constraint. Everything upstream of them is only interesting to the extent that it fills them with work worth doing.

What we measure here

The numbers a clinic runs on.

Enquiry, consultation booked, consultation attended and treatment paid, separately
Course and package value counted in full rather than at the first appointment
Conversion from consultation to treatment, by practitioner and by treatment
No show and cancellation rate by source, with deposit policy tested against it
Retention and repeat treatment measured over twelve and twenty four months
Ad platform feedback built to carry values without carrying patient detail
Advertising reviewed against the sector's rules before it runs, not after an account is suspended

Questions people ask

The ones that actually arrive.

Can we advertise this at all? Our last account was restricted.

Usually yes, with care over how claims are worded, how before and after imagery is used and which targeting options are chosen. Restrictions in this sector are rarely random. We would review what triggered it before spending anything.

What about patient data going to Meta or Google?

It does not. The feedback we send is an anonymous identifier with a value and a timestamp. That is enough for the bidding to learn from and it carries no clinical information. Where a measurement approach requires more than that, we do not use it.

Should we keep offering free consultations?

Test it rather than assume. Free consultations increase bookings and reduce attendance, and a small deposit often produces fewer appointments and more treatments. That is an experiment with a clear answer, and it is one of the first we usually run.

How much does the website matter here?

A great deal, because people are assessing whether you are safe as much as whether you are good. Named practitioners, real qualifications, real photography of your actual rooms. That is usually worth more than another thousand a month in advertising.

Proof

An Australian taxi company

More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.

From a different sector entirely, and it earns its place here for one reason: it is a worked example of changing what counts as a conversion and halving what a real one costs.

Read the case study

+27%

more booking calls

−56%

lower cost per call

$2.10

average cost per click

Where this usually starts