Grow My Therapy
Grow My TherapyFree calculator
Therapy clicks are expensive and a therapy client is valuable. Which of those wins depends entirely on your numbers, so put them in below. The answer is one comparison: what a new client costs to acquire, against what a course of care with you is worth.
The verdict
Workable, if the numbers hold
3.9x with clients costing $457 against $1,800 of value. Worth running, worth watching monthly, and worth rechecking against what actually happened rather than what you estimated here.
Cost per new client
$457
What you pay Google to win one.
Value per client
$1,800
Fee × sessions, across their care.
Return on ad spend
3.9x
Fees earned per $1 given to Google.
Monthly profit
$2,938
Revenue from these clients, less spend.
How that happens, each month
At your funnel, you break even at a cost per click of $31.50. Above that, every click costs more than it returns.
An estimate from the numbers you entered, not a forecast. Real campaigns vary by location, competition, season and how well the page behind the ad is written. Nothing here is a projection of earnings.
Reading it
Most advertising calculators stop at revenue, which always looks good. The number that decides this is the margin between acquiring a client and what that client is worth — and the reason to want a wide one is that you pay for ads in money and deliver therapy in hours.
Below 1x
Losing money
The clients cost more to win than they pay you. More budget makes this worse, not better.
1x to 2x
Working for Google
Technically positive. In practice you carry a full caseload and most of the fee leaves again, before rent or supervision.
3x and above
Worth running
Enough margin to survive a quiet month. The limit becomes how many new clients you can take, which is the good problem.
Where campaigns break
Every figure above is set by something you control. When a therapy campaign fails, it is almost never because the bid was wrong.
The page behind the ad
Most failed therapy campaigns fail here, not in the ad account. A click that lands on a page with no clear next step, a contact form that asks eleven questions, or a phone number nobody answers converts at 1% instead of 5% — and that single change is the difference between a campaign that pays and one that does not.
Matching the search to the intent
Someone typing "anxiety therapist in Ann Arbor" is ready. Someone typing "how to stop panic attacks" is reading. Bidding on both at the same price puts your budget into an audience who were never going to book this month.
What happens in the first hour
Enquiry-to-client rate is the input with the most room in it, and speed of reply moves it more than anything else. The same campaign converts far better for a practice that answers the same day than for one that replies on Thursday.
Whether you can take the work
Ads scale faster than a calendar does. A campaign that works is one you have to be able to turn down, and practices that discover this late end up paying for enquiries they waitlist.
Questions
It depends on one comparison: what a new client costs you to acquire against what a course of care with you is worth. Therapy keywords are expensive — often $5 to $15 a click — but a client who stays for twelve sessions at $150 is worth $1,800, which absorbs a lot of clicks. Ads tend to work for practices with a high fee, a long average course of care, and a page that converts. They tend not to work for low-fee, short-course, or highly saturated niches.
Mental-health terms are among the more expensive in local search because the value of a converted client is high and the competition includes directories with large budgets. Most practices see somewhere between $5 and $15 for terms like "therapist near me" or "anxiety therapy [city]". Google Keyword Planner will show you the current range for your own city and specialisms, which is more useful than any national average.
Multiply your two conversion rates. If 5% of visitors enquire and 35% of enquiries become clients, then about 1.75% of clicks become a client — roughly 57 clicks each. At $8 a click that is around $460 to acquire one client. The calculator above does this from your own figures.
Higher than you might expect, because your real constraint is hours rather than money. At 1.5x you are handing about two thirds of the fees from those clients to Google while still doing all the clinical work. Most practices want at least 3x before ads are worth the caseload they create, and want to see it hold for a few months before increasing spend.
When your website does not convert yet — paying for traffic to a page nobody enquires from is the most expensive way to discover that. When your fee is low and your average course of care is short, the margin often will not cover therapy click prices. And when you have no capacity, ads buy you enquiries you have to turn away, which costs money and goodwill at once. SEO, directories and referral relationships are slower and cheaper.
No. The budget field is what you give Google. If someone manages the campaign for you, add their fee to your real cost before judging the return — a $1,000 budget with a $500 management fee needs the campaign to clear $1,500, not $1,000.
If the numbers did not work
If the calculator said no, that is useful — it is a month of budget you now keep. The practices we work with mostly grow on the slower routes: a site that converts the traffic it already has, and content that earns the search rather than renting it.