Spine clinic
The clinic wasn’t short of traffic. It was short of calls.
Thirty patient calls a month, on one campaign. Four months later: eighty-three — and the cost per lead never left $24.
Industry
Healthcare — spine & orthopaedics
Channel
Google Ads
The account
A clinic treating spine and orthopaedic patients. Almost every enquiry arrives as a phone call, clicks are expensive, and every practice within thirty miles is bidding on the same words.
The diagnosis
The account was running — one campaign, some keywords, a budget going out every month. That is the state most healthcare accounts sit in for years.
The problem was that nothing in it knew what a patient was worth. Phone calls were the actual business outcome and the account could not see them, so it optimised for the thing it could see: clicks.
Grow an account in that condition and the cost per lead climbs with the volume. That is the trade most clinics accept, because nobody has shown them the alternative.
You cannot scale an account that is measuring the wrong end of the funnel.
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The treatment
We audited before we spent. Keyword targeting, audience structure and campaign organisation were rebuilt first, so the extra budget had somewhere efficient to land.
Then the reach widened deliberately. Performance Max opened up Search, YouTube, Maps and the rest of Google’s inventory instead of one surface — not to buy more traffic, but to reach the patients a single campaign had never been shown to.
Underneath it, nearby-location campaigns went after the searches that actually convert in healthcare: “near me”, local spine treatment, a specialist within reach. Someone typing that is not researching. They are in pain and choosing.
Then we fixed what the account could see. Phone call conversion tracking went in, so bidding optimised on real patient enquiries rather than the click that preceded them. Every decision after that was made on the right number.
Reach without measurement is spend. Measurement without reach is a ceiling. The clinic needed both, in that order.
The results
- Patient calls: 30 → 83 a month (+176%)
- Clicks: 326 → 676 (+107%)
- Interaction rate: 3.07% → 16.53%
- Cost per lead held at roughly $24 — against a $30–$100 healthcare benchmark
Volume more than doubled and the unit cost did not move.
Twice the patients from the same market, at the same price each.
