Skip to content
The walk through guide

Google Ads for Therapists: A Practical Guide

Seven sections, one idea each. This written guide covers the ideas taught in our Google Ads webinar. Read it in fifteen minutes, or work through one section at a time.

Built from accounts we manage Written for practice owners, not marketers Updated October 2026
Section one

The directory stopped carrying a practice

For a decade the default plan was a directory profile. It cost about thirty dollars a month, people found you in the directory, and being listed was better than not being listed.

That arrangement has changed. Large funded platforms now publish their own managed profiles and fill the results a person used to scroll through to reach you. Your profile did not get worse. The shelf space moved.

A directory profile on its own
A practice that appears when someone searches your specialty
Reach with the people actively looking, not the size of an audience. A directory is a room you hope to be seen in. A search result is the moment someone asks for help.
The point. A directory listing is a place people browse. Search is where people arrive with a question already formed.
Section two

The minute a client chooses a practice

Most people do not start at a therapy directory. They start at Google and type the problem, the method and the place. What they see next decides who they call.

  • "anxiety therapist in [city] accepting new clients"
  • "CBT therapist near me"
  • "trauma therapy for adults [city]"
  • "couples counsellor evening appointments"
The words people use, read from the search terms of accounts we manage. Each of these carries a specialty, an age group or a schedule. A practice that answers only "therapy" answers none of them.

A listing shows a paragraph. A search result shows a sentence about the exact problem the person typed, then a page about that same problem. When you are the one who replied to the question, you are not competing on a photograph.

The point. You are not buying attention. You are answering a question that was already asked this minute.
Section three

What an inquiry should cost you

Most practices judge an account on the wrong number. The click is not the result. The inquiry is the result, and the client is the outcome.

Ad spend
$3,400
Inquiries
91
Consults booked
73
Clients started
12
An Ontario group practice with four specialties, one 30 day window. Cost per inquiry $37. Visitor to inquiry rate 13%. Consults booked 80% of inquiries. Twelve clients started from that spend.

Read the chain, not the click price. Spend divided by inquiries gives the number you can improve month after month, and it is a number a practice owner can hold in their head.

The point. Ask what an inquiry costs, then what an inquiry is worth. The rest of the account is detail.
Section four

What you can measure without touching client information

Most practices that come to us have a compliance story rather than a marketing story. Analytics get switched on, a review looks at what passes through the tags, and everything is switched off. Then the account runs blind.

Safe to measure

  • That a form was submitted
  • That a call connected
  • Device type
  • Traffic source
  • Which page led to the inquiry
  • Which ad and which search term produced it

Never send to a tracking tool

  • Who submitted a form
  • What they wrote in it
  • Their email address or phone number
  • The fact that a named person is seeking therapy
  • Anything from a clinical record or a portal
The line is simple: measure the event, never the person. An inquiry count and an inquiry's identity are two different things.
The point. Compliant tracking is not less tracking. It is the same numbers with the person left out of them.
Section five

One ad group per presenting issue

The most common structural mistake is treating therapy as one keyword. It is not. Someone looking for couples counselling and someone looking for trauma therapy are different people, with different words and different urgency.

Anxiety

Its own terms, its own ad, its own page.

Depression

Its own terms, its own ad, its own page.

Trauma

Its own terms, its own ad, its own page.

Couples

Its own terms, its own ad, its own page.

Four specialties, four doors. In the practice above this structure took a general agency's $2,100 with four inquiries and turned the same channel into 91 inquiries in a month.

Separate groups also tell you which specialty actually fills, so budget follows the open schedule instead of the busiest clinician.

The point. A specialty you cannot name in one sentence is a campaign you cannot build.
Section six

Five things to have in place before you spend a dollar

Paid search does not fix a practice that is not ready for inquiries. It multiplies whatever the practice already does with them.

A capacity goal

Which slots, for which clinician, by when. Not "more clients".

An intake that answers quickly

Intent cools in hours. Calls and forms need an owner and a window.

Tracking that works

A form submission and a connected call, measured before the first dollar.

A clear offer

What a first session costs and how someone books it.

A market with demand

Enough people searching the specialty inside the area you serve.

The five signals we check before recommending a budget increase. A practice missing two or three of them gets a smaller budget and a fix list, not a bigger number.
The point. Run the first four weeks to gather evidence, not to grow. The second month is where budget moves.
Section seven

The first 90 days, honestly

Days 1 to 30

Build, launch, watch search terms daily, cut what does not belong. Expect the first inquiry in the first fortnight, not the first week.

Days 31 to 60

Structure settles. Cost per inquiry becomes readable, and budget moves toward the specialties with open capacity.

Days 61 to 90

The account runs on its numbers. Requests to raise spend are decided from cost per inquiry, not from impressions.

Our published projections put a $750 a month account at roughly 14 new clients a month inside 45 days. Your market, your specialties and your intake decide where you land.
The point. Decide the review date before you launch. An account judged weekly on revenue is an account turned off in month one.

Run your own numbers next

The calculator asks four questions about your practice, your sessions and your budget, then shows the inquiries, the clients and the return that spend should produce.

Open the calculator Book a call

Request this resource by email

Everything on this page is available without signing up. If you would like a copy, leave your name and email. We use these details to respond to your request and follow up about this resource.