Case study

The advert that tripled its CTR and halved the cost per patient

Facial aesthetics and medical clinic · Fifteen months of managed advertising with monthly reporting

An aesthetic clinic does not compete for traffic. It competes for calendar bookings. And the difference between a campaign that fills the calendar and one that leaves it half empty is rarely the budget, but whether the adverts speak to what people are actually searching for.

When we started, in November 2024, the account was spending €2.708 to generate 808 clicks with a CTR of 2,28% and fifteen appointments, at €54,45 per appointment.

Fifteen months later, with €2.598 —less than at the start— the same account was bringing in 1.987 clicks with a CTR of 7,21% and a combined cost per acquired patient of €23.

Let’s dive in:

2,28% → 7,21%

Search CTR

€54,45 → €23

Cost per acquired patient

808 → 1.987

Clicks with similar ad spend

Monthly reports delivered

1. The starting point: it was only found by people who already knew it

The September 2024 audit delivered a very clear organic diagnosis. The website was technically healthy —26 pages crawled, site health at 98%, zero errors— and commercially silent.

Out of the seventeen search queries recorded by the site:

The clinic’s name plus its city held rank 1, with 110 monthly searches.
The name on its own sat in position 9.
From there on, every single service-related term ranked between positions 46 and 99: a facial treatment at rank 46, a radiofrequency device at rank 70, and local searches for that same device at rank 86.

In plain terms: the clinic only appeared for people who already knew its name. That is clearly not lead generation; it is a directory listing.

2. What we did

The main lever was structural, not creative. Allow me to explain 🙂

A clinic account usually starts with a generic “aesthetics” campaign where completely unrelated treatments overlap —unrelated in price, urgency, and search intent. Because of this, the first step was to split it by service.

The work, in summary:

Restructuring by service: Separate campaigns for facial hygiene —with three dedicated ad groups—, laser hair removal, hyaluronic acid fillers, neuromodulators, radiofrequency, microneedling, and facial hydration.
A Performance Max campaign dedicated to the highest-volume service, active during the first quarter.
Reallocating budget across platforms: Social media campaigns that failed to book appointments were paused, concentrating investment where it actually converted. In March 2025, social media ad spend was stopped completely, with the reasoning documented in the report.
Setting up WhatsApp as a secondary conversion, after identifying that a large proportion of patients made contact there rather than via forms. Without this adjustment, the campaign was optimizing blindly on half of the demand.
Date-documented pauses: One ad group removed in September 2025 due to performance, and a campaign reactivated in January 2026 and paused again on 24 February after failing to close any appointments.

3. The results

Metric	Nov-Dec 2024	February 2026	Source
Ad spend	€2.708,16	€2.597,74	Google Ads
Views	35.427	27.566	Google Ads
Clicks	808	1.987	Google Ads
CTR	2,28%	7,21%	Google Ads
Average CPC	€1,01	€1,31	Google Ads
Form appointments	15	12	Google Ads
WhatsApp contacts	Not measured	98	Google Ads
Cost per acquired patient	€54,45	€23	Google Ads

Comparison between the first and last reports in the series. The cost per patient for February 2026 is combined (form submissions plus WhatsApp contacts); the figure for November 2024 only counted forms, as WhatsApp was not yet tracked. This difference is explained in the following section.

The highest-performing campaign of the latest period closed 52 contacts —7 form appointments and 45 via WhatsApp— at an average cost of €23,94. The laser hair removal campaign generated 36 contacts at €26,69, showing sustained growth that led to an increase in its budget.

4. The methodological note this case study needs

Halfway through the series, what counted as a conversion changed. In the early reports, “conversions” mixed appointments and WhatsApp contacts; from May 2025 onwards, the reports split the two, and the cost per appointment suddenly spiked because only form submissions were being counted.

Why this doesn't invalidate the case study, but does require explanation The two indicators that remain fully consistent from start to finish —because they do not depend on how a conversion is defined— are the CTR (2,28% → 7,21%) and click volume on equivalent spend (808 → 1.987). The case study relies on those two core metrics. The cost per patient is presented in its combined version, which is the fair point of comparison.

I recommend carrying out this double-check on your own reports every quarter: if the front-page headline and the detailed breakdown table don’t add up, someone copied the figures without reviewing them. It is the single most common mistake in monthly reporting, and the easiest to spot.

In summary: why isn't your campaign filling your calendar?

Essentially, because you are speaking in the same way to someone looking for a £40 facial hygiene treatment as to someone seeking a £1.000 procedure. And because you are probably not tracking the channel people actually use to reach out to you.

Three takeaways for tomorrow: Split your account by service, even if it leaves you with smaller campaigns: the algorithm learns much better around a specific user intent than around a catch-all group. Look at how patients are actually getting in touch and track that channel, even if it is awkward to configure. If you change a metric’s definition halfway through the year, document it in the following month’s report: it will save you an uncomfortable meeting in December.

Remember, at the end of the day, it’s all about filling the calendar, not the dashboard 😉