Google Ads for aesthetics and skin clinics

An aesthetics clinic is not short of demand. It is short of the right enquiry at the right cost.

The searches that convert are competitive and expensive, the searches that are cheap are mostly people who will never book, and the gap between the two is where an unattended account quietly spends its month. Meanwhile the treatments with the best margin are frequently the ones the account is worst at reaching, because they are the hardest to advertise legally.

Much of what an aesthetics clinic does best cannot be advertised to the public at all, because the treatment is a prescription-only medicine, and in the UK, across the European Union and in many other countries, advertising rules do not permit those to be promoted to the public.

It is wider than most people expect. It is not only the brand names — it catches the generic descriptions too, and hashtags, and even listing your services in a way that implies the treatment by what sits next to it. And it applies to your website, not just to the advert. The page an advert points at is inside the same rule.

Most agencies find this out after a disapproval, and their answer is to bid on the brand name anyway and hope. It is the wrong answer, and it puts the clinic at risk rather than the agency.

The right answer is to build the account around the concern rather than the product. Patients search for the thing they want fixed long before they search for the thing that fixes it, and that search is cheaper, larger and entirely advertisable. It needs the campaign structure, the ad copy and the landing page to be built for it deliberately, which is work, which is why most accounts do not have it.

Cost per consultation booked, not cost per click and not cost per form fill. A form fill from someone who never attends is not a result, and an account optimised toward form fills will cheerfully produce more of them.

Where your clinic uses a booking system, a booked consultation is traced back to the campaign that produced it, so you can see which treatments your advertising is actually filling the diary with.

Aesthetics advertising is judged on how the work looks, and stock photography of a model who has never been in your clinic reads as exactly what it is.

On the top tier, a fresh set of ad creative is produced each month from your own photography — your rooms, your team, your results where you have consent to use them — with every claim checked against the advertising rules before it runs. No before-and-after imagery is used unless you have both the consent and the permission for it.

Because the rule reaches your website too, the free review looks at the page your adverts point at as well as the account itself. A campaign built correctly that sends people to a page one click from a prescription-only price list has not solved the problem, it has moved it.

This is included, and you keep the findings whether or not you hire us.

The review and the monthly work are done remotely, on a shared screen. Before the first call the competitive picture in your own area is researched, so it is known rather than generically described.

£495 setup, then £395 a month, or £695 a month with monthly creative. Founding prices for the first three clinics; £750, £595 and £995 after that. You pay Google directly and the account stays in your name.