TheraPPC toolkit, the five pieces in one document

Contents

What is in this pack

One. How therapists win with Google Ads, the walk through guide.
Two. The tracking checklist, measure the event, never the person.
Three. The therapy negative keyword starter list, sixty three phrases in five groups.
Four. What a monthly budget buys, six budgets from $500 to $5,000 a month.
Five. The caseload gap worksheet, what an open slot is worth in a year.

Piece one

How therapists win with Google Ads

Seven sections, one idea each. This is the guide version of the session on Thursday 22 October. Read it in fifteen minutes, or work through one section at a time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Piece two

The tracking checklist

A one page checklist a therapy practice can hand to whoever sets up the advertising. Work through it once and the numbers stay clean. Fifteen checks across four stages, and the line between counting an inquiry and holding a client's details.

Why this page exists

Standard advertising tracking was built for shops and booking sites, and it collects whatever it can reach. On a therapy site that includes the form someone filled in to ask for help. That form is a health record in waiting, and the tools holding it were never built for one.

When a review finds that, the usual fix is drastic. Every tag comes off the site at once. A practice that came to us lost its whole analytics stack on the day of a compliance scan. It ran blind for six weeks. The ads still spent money, and nobody could say which inquiries came from where.

The point. The line is not hard to hold. It only has to be drawn before the tracking is built, rather than after a review finds it.

The line: measure the event, never the person

An inquiry and the identity of the person behind it are two different things. The first is a number you can act on. The second is clinical information, and it does not belong in an advertising tool.

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
The count of inquiries in a period

Never sent to a tracking tool

Who submitted a form
What they wrote in it
An email address or a phone number
The fact that a named person is seeking therapy
Anything from a clinical record or a patient portal

The count of inquiries in a month tells you what you need. A name tells you nothing you can use.

This page is not legal advice

It describes how to keep clinical information out of the tracking tools. It cannot make a practice compliant, and your privacy officer or lawyer decides what your practice needs.

The point. Keep the setup inside this line and the risk goes down. The numbers stay just as useful.

The checklist

Work through the four moments in order. Each one is short, and the whole list takes about an hour the first time.

Moment one: Before anything is built

Confirm who owns the analytics account, and that the practice can sign in without asking someone else.
List every tag already firing on the site, and note what each one sends.
Decide the one action that counts as an inquiry.
Read the form fields, and flag anything a tag should not carry.

Moment two: When the tracking is built

Place the form submission tag on the thank you step, not on the button.
Record a call as connected, not as clicked.
Load the container in one place, so a later page change cannot leave a tag behind.
Turn off any setting that matches a form email address back to a person.

Moment three: The week it goes live

Land a test submission yourself, and confirm it appears in the report.
Call the practice number from your own phone, and confirm the call shows as connected.
Open the site on a phone, and check the container loads there.
Compare the inquiries in the report with the inquiries the practice actually received that week.

Moment four: The monthly review

Review the search terms and the inquiry count together each month.
Compare the inquiry count with the bookings the practice recorded over the same month.
Recheck the tag list after any change to the site or a form.

The point. The checklist is written to be run by the practice. It does not need a marketing team in the room.

The two mistakes we see most

Both mistakes make the report look better than the practice is. Both are quick to check.

Counting a button click

The tag sits on the submit button, so the report counts the tap. A person can tap, hit a validation error and leave. The report shows an inquiry the practice never received.

Counting a click to call

The tag fires when the number is tapped, and that tap may open a dialler that is never used. A call that connected lasts at least a minute on the line.

A tag on the button and a tag on the dialler both report an inquiry that never reached the practice.

The point. Count the finished action, not the tap before it.

You can do all of this yourself

None of it needs an agency. The account owner, whoever builds the site and an hour of patience are enough. The only step that cannot be skipped is the monthly read, because that is where a drifting tag shows up.

Run the calculator first, so you know what the numbers should be before you spend. The walk through guide covers the wider picture, and the blog holds the longer pieces.

Open the calculator, read the walk through guide, read the blog, or see the whole toolkit.

Piece three

The therapy negative keyword starter list

Five categories of search that never become a client. Each one can reach your ad today. Here is the list, and the steps to paste it into your account. Sixty three phrases, five categories.

Why negatives decide whether a therapy account makes money

A therapy account rarely loses money on the wrong specialty. It loses money on the right specialty answered to the wrong person.

Someone types free therapy near me. Your ad is a fair answer to that search. You pay for the click. That person was never going to pay for a session.

The same thing happens with a student looking for a placement and a person looking for a worksheet. Both searches read like the work you do. Neither one books.

A search that can become a client

Names a presenting issue
Names a place or a schedule
Comes from someone who can pay for a session
Asks about booking or a first appointment

A search that never books

Asks for free or low cost help
Comes from a student or a job seeker
Wants a worksheet or a technique
Wants a definition or a comparison
Is a crisis

The five groups on the right do not book at any price. Removing them is not a budget trick. It is how you stop paying for the wrong conversation.

Negatives are the one part of an account that lowers spend without lowering reach to real clients. They do not change your budget or your bids. They remove searches you have already decided cannot become a client.

The point. A dollar spent on a search that cannot book is a dollar missing from a search that can.

The five categories to exclude

These are the five groups we see in every therapy account. Each one has real examples from search terms, and a plain reason it is not a client.

Category	What it looks like in the search terms report	Why it is not a client
Free and low intent	free therapy near me, cheap counselling, no cost, sliding scale only	The person needs a service you do not sell at that price.
Study, job and training intent	therapist jobs, how to become a therapist, practicum placement, supervision	The person wants the career or the training, not the session.
Instructional and do it yourself	how to, worksheets, techniques, self help, meditation script	The person wants to treat themselves. A practice must never pay for that.
Third party and research	reddit, quora, wikipedia, pdf, template, quiz, review of, vs, scam	The person is gathering or comparing. Nothing on the page is the answer.
Crisis and emergency	crisis, emergency, suicide, self harm, hotline, 988, urgent, hospital	The person needs a crisis service now. A paid ad is the wrong door.

Read left to right. The first column names the group. The second shows how it arrives. The third says why it cannot pay for a session.

The house rule on do it yourself searches

A practice must never pay for people who intend to treat themselves. A worksheet, a technique or a meditation script is a person who will not book this month. It is a hard rule, not a preference.

The crisis searches belong somewhere else

Crisis, suicide, self harm and 988 searches belong with crisis services, not with a paid ad. A person in that moment needs a free line in the first second. Excluding these searches is the right call and the safer one. It also keeps an ad away from the most sensitive searches a clinic can attract.

The point. Every category above is defensible in front of a clinician. None of them is a client.

The list, ready to paste

Everything below goes in as a negative phrase keyword. A term in quotes is phrase match in Google Ads. Add it exactly as written at campaign level. One term per line.

Group	Negative phrases
Free and low intent	"free", "free therapy", "free counselling", "free therapy near me", "free counselling near me", "cheap therapy", "cheap counselling", "no cost", "low cost", "low income", "sliding scale only", "pro bono"
Study, job and training intent	"jobs", "therapist jobs", "counselling jobs", "careers", "salary", "how to become a therapist", "internship", "practicum", "placement", "student", "course", "certification", "training", "supervision", "webinar for therapists"
Instructional and do it yourself	"how to", "do it yourself", "exercises", "worksheets", "techniques", "tips", "self help", "workbook", "meditation script", "breathing exercises", "journal prompts", "coping skills"
Third party and research	"reddit", "forum", "quora", "wikipedia", "pdf", "template", "quiz", "test", "review of", "vs", "scam", "lawsuit", "meaning", "definition"
Crisis and emergency	"crisis", "emergency", "suicide", "self harm", "hotline", "988", "urgent", "hospital", "crisis line", "emergency room"

Sixty three negative phrases. All of them are phrase match. If you offer a free consultation then check the free group first. A phrase negative on free will block that search too.

Phrase and exact only. Do not add these as broad negatives yet. A broad negative can block a good search from the same word, and you will not see it happen until your inquiries drop.

The point. The list is the same for every practice. What you find in your own search terms is not.

How to apply it, and how often to review it

Where you add a negative matters as much as which term you add. Do it in the practice account, at campaign level, and start with phrase and exact.

Open the practice account

Sign in to the account itself. Add negatives at campaign level.

Never use the manager account

A manager account holds many practices. A negative added there is not this practice's decision.

Do not import a shared list

A list built from another practice carries another practice's choices and its market.

Phrase and exact first

Broad negatives can block good searches. Add broad only after you have watched your own search terms.

Review on a fixed date

Weekly while the account is new. Monthly once it settles.

Promote only what cannot book

If a search term brought one inquiry, leave it alone.

The order matters. The first three steps decide whether the list belongs to this practice. The last three decide whether the list stays useful.

Review the search terms report once a week for the first four to six weeks. After that, once a month is enough. Each review covers the window since the last one, and you write down what you added and what you left.

A new search term becomes a negative only when it cannot become a client. A term that brought one inquiry stays, even if it looks odd. The inquiry is the evidence.

The honest limit of a starter list

This list is a starting point, not a finished one. It covers the searches we see in every therapy account. Your practice will have searches of its own. Your area, your specialties and your fees decide which ones reach you. After four weeks, your own search terms report is a better list than this page.

The point. Add the list today. Replace it with your own list by month three.

Where to go next

How therapists win with Google Ads, the walk through guide, seven sections, one idea each.
The toolkit, every guide and worksheet in one place.
How it works, what we do in the first 90 days.
Results, numbers from accounts we manage.
Pricing, what a month of management costs.
The calculator, four questions, then the inquiries your budget should produce.
The blog, guides and case studies for therapy practices.

Piece four

What a monthly budget buys

A practice owner usually asks one question first. What does my monthly budget actually buy? This page answers it with one table and the assumptions behind every number in it.

What the numbers look like at each budget

This table is a projection on one set of assumptions, not a promise. Your own market, your intake and your specialty decide where you land. Read it as a shape, then check your own numbers against it.

Ad spend a month	Inquiries a month	Consults a month	Clients started a month	Client value over the time they stay	Management fee a month	Total monthly cost	Return per $1 spent, lifetime value ratio
$500 a month	11 inquiries	9 consults	2 clients	$6,000 over the time they stay	$1,500 a month	$2,000 a month	3 times back
$750 a month	17 inquiries	13 consults	3 clients	$9,000 over the time they stay	$1,500 a month	$2,250 a month	4 times back
$1,000 a month	22 inquiries	18 consults	4 clients	$12,000 over the time they stay	$1,500 a month	$2,500 a month	5 times back
$2,000 a month	44 inquiries	35 consults	7 clients	$21,000 over the time they stay	$1,500 a month	$3,500 a month	6 times back
$3,400 a month	76 inquiries	61 consults	12 clients	$36,000 over the time they stay	$1,500 a month	$4,900 a month	7 times back
$5,000 a month	111 inquiries	89 consults	18 clients	$54,000 over the time they stay	$1,500 a month	$6,500 a month	8 times back

Every figure is rounded to whole units and each one carries its unit and its period. The client value column is the whole value of those clients over the time they stay, not one month of it. The last column divides that whole client value by one month of total cost, so it is a lifetime value ratio rather than cash in the month.

For reference, the account we publish started 12 clients from $3,400 of ad spend in 30 days. That is the same 12 clients as the $3,400 row above. You can see that account on our results page.

What the table assumes

These are the numbers behind the table. They are a starting set, not a rule. If any one of them is different for your practice, the whole table moves.

Cost per inquiry: $45. This is a planning number. It sits between the $37 our published account paid and what a more competitive market costs. Geography and specialty decide where a practice lands.
Inquiries a month: ad spend divided by $45. So $1,000 of ad spend buys about 22 inquiries in a month.
Consults: 80% of inquiries. Eight in ten people who get in touch book a first consult.
Clients started: 16% of inquiries. About one in six inquiries becomes a client who starts.
Client value: $3,000 each. That is the whole value of one client over the time they stay, not one month of it.
Management fee: $1,500 a month, flat. It does not change with the ad spend. Total monthly cost is the ad spend plus the fee.
Return: the whole client value divided by one month of total cost. It is a lifetime value ratio. Read it as value over time, not as money in the bank this month.

The published account paid $37 for an inquiry over one 30 day window. We plan at $45 because a crowded market costs more. Your own result sits somewhere between the two.

The point. One inquiry costs about $45 and one client is worth about $3,000 over the time they stay. Everything between those two numbers is the work.

What changes the answer

Each assumption above moves once you are in a real market. Here are the five that move it most.

Specialty competition

Some specialties have more practices bidding. More competition lifts what an inquiry costs above $45.

Geography

A large city usually costs more per inquiry than a small town. The same budget buys fewer inquiries in a crowded area.

How fast intake answers

An inquiry that waits a day is often gone. A fast reply pushes the consult rate above 80%.

Whether you take insurance

Insurance panels change who can say yes and what a client is worth over the time they stay.

How well the page matches the ad

A page about the exact problem in the ad turns more visitors into inquiries, which lowers what an inquiry costs.

Each item moves one assumption in the table. Two or three of them moving at once is normal, and that is why we run your numbers rather than quote ours.

Piece five

The caseload gap worksheet

Two parts. First you enter six numbers about your practice. Then you see what your open slots are worth in a year and how many inquiries it takes to fill them.

Your numbers

Fill in the six fields below. Use the defaults to try it, then put in your own figures. The fields already hold a set of sensible starting numbers. The starting figures are shown here so the worksheet works on paper.

Field	Starting figure	What it means
Clinicians in the practice	3	Count everyone who sees clients.
Open sessions each week you could fill	4	Sessions you could add this week without hiring.
Average session rate, in dollars	$150	Your usual fee for one session.
Sessions a client attends each month	4	Most clients come once a week.
Months a client stays with you	9	How long a client usually keeps coming.
Inquiries that turn into clients	60 percent	Out of ten people who call or write, how many book. The worksheet offers 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 or 80 percent.

If you are not sure about a field, leave the default in and see what moves. The answers are yours to change.

The point. An open slot is not a missing client. It is a known amount of money you are not collecting yet.

What the gap is worth

Six answers, in plain numbers, using the starting figures above. Each one carries its unit. You always know what it counts and over what period.

$150

per week

What one filled slot earns

$7,800

per year

What one slot earns in a year

$31,200

per year

What your open slots earn in a year

$5,400

per client

What one client pays while they stay

4.3

clients per month

New clients you need

7.2

inquiries per month

Inquiries you need each month

Across 3 clinicians, 4 open weekly slots works out at 1.3 slots each week for each clinician.

These numbers are your own. In the online worksheet they update as you type, and they cover one month unless the unit says a week or a year. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.

The point. A gap you can price is a gap you can close. Start with the inquiries you need each month.

What each answer tells you

Four answers, each with a unit. Here is what each one means for your practice.

One slot, one week

Your session rate. This is what you collect when a single open slot is filled for one week.

One slot, one year

Your session rate for 52 weeks. This is the year of income a single open slot can carry.

All open slots

Every open slot added up for a year. This is the size of the gap you are carrying.

Clients and inquiries

The new clients you need each month and the inquiries that come with them. It uses your own conversion rate.

The maths is short. One slot a week is your rate. A year is your rate for 52 weeks. Clients a month is your open slots times 4.33 weeks, divided by the sessions a client attends in a month. Inquiries is clients divided by your conversion rate.

If you want the wider picture, the walk through guide covers what an inquiry costs and what to measure each month. Read the walk through guide.

Printing this page

Print this page for a clean worksheet. The navigation and the booking band are left off the print out. The fields print with your numbers in them, so you can work on it away from the screen.

The pack

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