Plastic Surgery PPC: How To Book More Consultations With Paid Ads

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated September 11, 2026

Plastic surgery is one of the few industries where paid search math works almost immediately, because a single case is worth thousands of dollars and the people searching are usually ready to talk to someone. The problem is that the same high case value makes clicks expensive, and expensive clicks punish sloppy targeting faster than anything else. This covers the four channels worth running for a plastic surgery practice, the order I would add them, the Keyword Planner method I use to find procedure keywords that actually convert, and the single biggest mistake I see: writing ads that try to sell the surgery instead of filling the consultation calendar.

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1What the results page actually looks like

Search "plastic surgeon Charleston SC" and watch what comes back before you see a single organic listing.

A sponsored text ad at the very top. Then a sponsored maps listing right underneath it. Scroll a little further and there are more paid placements mixed in. When I ran that search, the same advertiser held two separate spots on page one.

That tells you two things. They have the budget for it, and the campaign is built well enough to earn more than one placement for the same query. Neither of those happens by accident.

Here is why that matters for you. The top of the results page for high-value procedure searches is almost entirely paid. You can rank number one organically and still be the fourth thing somebody sees. Ranking well is worth a lot, but it does not put you above the fold on the searches that produce cases.

Plastic surgery also has the economics to make paid search worth it in a way most industries do not. A single case is worth thousands. You do not need a huge volume of leads to make the math work. You need the right leads, and you need to convert enough of them into booked consultations.

Question to Answer:

Search your top procedure plus your city. How far down the page do you have to scroll before you see your practice?

2Watch the full tutorial

I walk through live search results, real ad examples from New York and Nashville, and the full Keyword Planner process in this video.

Plastic Surgery PPC: How To Get More Cases With Paid Advertising

Question to Answer:

Do you know what a click costs for your highest-value procedure in your market?

3The four channels, in the order I would add them

There are four channels worth your attention, and the order you add them matters more than how much you spend on any single one.

Two of those capture demand that already exists. Two of them work further up the funnel. Get the first pair producing consultations before you spend anything on the second pair, because the search data is what tells you which procedures and which messages are worth putting money behind elsewhere.

One channel that is not on the list: Local Services Ads. They sit above everything else on the page and they charge per lead instead of per click, which makes them excellent for the trades and for some healthcare categories. Plastic surgery is not one of them. It is not a channel you can run, so do not spend time looking for it. Google does add categories over time, so it is worth rechecking once a year, but plan your budget as though it does not exist.

Google Maps ads deserve a note here too. People treat them as a separate channel, and they are not. They run out of your existing search campaigns. The difference is a setting, which is the next section.

Question to Answer:

Are you spending on Meta before your search campaigns are consistently producing booked consultations?

4Google Maps ads and the location asset

Maps ads are one of the strongest placements available to a local practice, and most accounts leave them switched off without realizing it.

The requirement is a location asset connected to your Google Business Profile. Link your Business Profile to your Google Ads account, set up location assets, and your search campaigns become eligible to show in the map results. That is it. There is no separate campaign type to build.

What you get in return is a placement that looks nothing like a text ad. Somebody searching for a plastic surgeon in your city sees your listing with your star rating, your review count, a call button, and directions. They can tap through to read reviews, look at your photos, and see the services you have listed on your profile.

That changes the conversation before it starts. By the time somebody reaches your website they already know your rating and they already know what you do. A fair number of people never reach the website at all. They tap the call button from the map listing and ask about booking a consultation directly.

This is why reviews are a paid search asset, not just an SEO one. Your star rating sits inside the ad. Two practices can bid the same amount on the same keyword and get very different results because one has 300 reviews at 4.9 and the other has 40 at 4.3. If your review generation is weak, your Maps ads will underperform no matter what you do with bidding.

Same for your Business Profile itself. Good photos, an accurate service list, and a clear description of who the surgeon is all do work for you inside that placement.

Question to Answer:

Is your Google Business Profile linked to your Google Ads account with location assets active?

5The Keyword Planner method for procedure keywords

Here is how I build a keyword list for a specific procedure. I will use rhinoplasty as the example, but this works for any procedure you offer.

1. Find the best competitor page for that procedure. Look at the top organic result in your market and find their page for the specific procedure, not their homepage. A practice that ranks number one usually got there by building out a thorough page for every procedure, which means their page is already written around the terms that matter.
2. Copy that exact URL. The nose reshaping page, the facelift page, whichever one you are working on.
3. Open Google Keyword Planner and choose "Start with a website." Paste the URL in and select the option to use only that page rather than the entire site.
4. Look at what comes back. In my example that single page returned around 800 keyword ideas. That is far more than you can use, which is the point. You are about to cut it down.
5. Sort by top of page bid range. Keywords with higher bids tend to be more valuable keywords, because advertisers are willing to pay for them. Nobody bids high on a term that does not produce revenue. The bid range is the market telling you what is worth money.
6. Add a filter so the keyword text contains your procedure. Set it to "rhinoplasty" and 800 ideas collapse into a list you can actually read through.

That filtered list is where the real work starts. You will see things like "rhinoplasty near me," "rhinoplasty doctor near me," "cosmetic rhinoplasty near me," and "rhinoplasty cost." You will also see things like "rhinoplasty for large nostrils" and "age to get rhinoplasty."

Those two groups are not the same, and telling them apart is the difference between a campaign that produces cases and one that burns money.

One more thing about the bid data. When you look at those numbers for a procedure like this, they will probably look low. Reported bid ranges are an estimate, and in competitive markets the real cost of a click for a high intent procedure search runs well above what the tool suggests. Treat the bid range as a ranking signal for which keywords matter, not as a budget forecast.

Question to Answer:

Have you run this on every procedure you want cases for, or just the one you assume is most popular?

6The intent trap in plastic surgery keywords

This is where most plastic surgery accounts leak money, and it is not obvious from inside the Google Ads interface because the wasted spend looks exactly like the productive spend.

Here is the rule. Target searches that name a person or a place. Avoid searches that ask a question.

Somebody searching "age to get rhinoplasty" is gathering information. They are trying to work out whether this applies to them at all, and they have three or four more questions after this one. They are not going to book a consultation from that click, and that click is not cheap.

Somebody searching "rhinoplasty doctor near me" has already done that thinking. They want a surgeon. That is the search you pay for.

The pattern to look for is a location, a practitioner, or proximity. A city name, the word doctor or surgeon, or "near me." Those three signals separate people choosing a provider from people still deciding whether they want the procedure.

The one exception. There is a case for bidding on informational keywords at very low bids to drive people to your blog content, building an audience you can remarket to later. I would only do that after your high intent campaigns are fully funded and performing, and I would keep it in a completely separate campaign with its own budget. The reason is that Google will happily blend those cheap informational clicks in with your expensive high intent ones if they share a campaign, and then you cannot tell which half of your budget is working.

If you want that informational traffic, the better play is usually to write the article and earn it organically instead of paying for it.

Question to Answer:

Pull your search terms report for the last 30 days. How much did you spend on questions rather than on people looking for a surgeon?

7What makes a plastic surgery ad work

I pulled live examples for a few procedure searches to see what the strong advertisers are actually doing. The good ones had most of these in common.

• The surgeon's name in the ad. Every strong ad I looked at named the doctor. People are not buying a procedure from a clinic, they are trusting a specific person to operate on their face. Putting the name in the headline starts building that trust before the click.
• Reviews and ratings visible. Star ratings in the ad do real work in a category where trust is the whole decision.
• Images. Image assets make the ad physically larger and give somebody something to look at. In a stack of text ads, that matters.
• Years of experience. "30+ years" is a credibility claim that takes up four characters and does more work than most of what people put in a description line.
• The address. Location assets make it immediately clear you are actually near them, which for a surgical consultation is not a small thing.
• Call and directions options. Give somebody the fastest possible path to talking to your office.

The weaker ads were not bad ads exactly. They led with the outcome rather than the practice. Something like "ready to get rid of saggy skin" with a promise of natural results. That is not wrong, but it competes on a claim any practice can make, and it does not tell you who is performing the surgery.

The most important point in this entire article. Your ads do not have to sell the surgery. They have to fill the consultation calendar.

Nobody is scheduling a facelift off a search ad. The decision to have surgery takes weeks or months, involves a conversation with a surgeon, and usually involves talking to family. What your ad has to do is make it easy and low risk for somebody to say yes to one small next step: a phone call or a consultation.

Once you accept that, a lot of decisions get easier. Your goal from Google Ads is phone calls and form fills. Your landing page exists to make booking a consultation obvious. Your offer is a conversation, not a procedure. An initial phone consultation works, an in-office consultation works, and both are a much smaller commitment than what you are ultimately selling.

Then you do good work, the reviews come in, and that feeds everything else.

Question to Answer:

Read your top ad out loud. Is it selling a procedure or is it offering a conversation?

8Structure your campaigns by procedure

Budget in Google Ads is set at the campaign level. That one fact should drive your entire account structure, because it means a campaign is a budget decision, not an organizational one.

If your face procedures and your med spa services share a campaign, you do not get to decide how much goes to each. Google decides, and it will usually push budget toward whatever gets clicks most cheaply. Cheap clicks and valuable cases are not the same thing.

So split your campaigns along the lines you actually want to control spend across:

1. A campaign per procedure group. A face campaign covering rhinoplasty, facelift, eyelid surgery and related terms. A body campaign covering tummy tuck, liposuction, and so on. Group them by how you think about your practice and by what a case is worth.
2. A separate campaign for med spa and aesthetic services. Injectables, microneedling, laser treatments. These do not carry surgical case value, but they bring in consistent customers and they often become surgical patients later. They belong in their own campaign because their acceptable cost per lead is completely different.
3. A branded campaign. Your practice name and your surgeon's name. Cheap, high converting, and it stops competitors from taking traffic that was looking for you specifically.

Use monthly specials properly. If you run a special on a service, say microneedling, then when somebody clicks your ad for that term the special should be the first thing they see on the landing page. Most practices bury specials on a separate promotions page that nobody visits. Matching the offer to the search is how you turn an expensive click into a lead.

Specials also give you something specific to advertise on Meta, which is the next section.

Question to Answer:

Can you say exactly how much you spent on your highest-value procedure last month, or is it mixed in with everything else?

9Meta Ads and Microsoft Advertising

These are your second and third channels, and they do different jobs.

Meta Ads reach people before they search. Facebook and Instagram put you in front of somebody who has been considering a procedure but has not started actively looking for a surgeon yet, or who is in the middle of deciding.

What works on Meta is the surgeon's face and the surgeon's voice. The strongest example I found was a short video from the practice where the doctor was on camera. When you see a face and hear somebody explain what they do, you build a connection that a text ad cannot produce. That is the entire advantage of the channel, and most practices waste it by running stock photos and a discount.

Meta is also where specific angles work well. One ad I looked at led with the fact that a particular procedure can be covered by insurance and listed the areas the practice serves. That is a specific, useful message that changes somebody's thinking, and it is a much better use of the platform than a generic brand ad.

Your monthly specials also belong here, because you are reaching people who were not already looking. The offer gives them a reason to act now instead of later.

Microsoft Advertising is the cheap third channel. Bing and Yahoo carry less volume than Google, and clicks come in cheaper as a result. In a larger market or with multiple locations, that lower cost per click can produce a few new patients a month on a modest budget. Five hundred to a thousand dollars a month is a reasonable place to test it.

The audience skews older, and for plastic surgery that is a point in its favor rather than against it. An older audience generally has a higher net worth and more ability to pay for an elective procedure out of pocket.

If you are a single-location practice in a smaller market, Microsoft may not have enough volume to be worth the setup time. Test it once your Google campaigns are stable, not before.

Question to Answer:

Do you have any video of your surgeon talking to camera that you could run on Meta this month?

10Tracking, cost per consultation, and compliance

Everything above is worthless if you cannot tell which campaigns produced cases. Set this up first, not last.

Track three things:

1. Phone calls. Calls from the ad, calls from the website, calls from your Maps listing. For a practice where most leads come by phone, call tracking is not optional.
2. Form submissions. Every contact form and consultation request form on the site.
3. Third-party booking. If you use an outside scheduling tool, track completions from it. This is the one people skip, and it is often where the highest intent leads go.

Then measure two numbers, not one. Cost per lead tells you what Google Ads is doing. Cost per booked consultation tells you what your practice is doing. They are different numbers and the gap between them is where most of the money is lost.

Expect leads in the range of $50 to $100 or more depending on how competitive your market is. Booked consultations will cost considerably more than that, because not every lead books, and in a competitive market a booked consultation can run into the hundreds. Those are ranges from the accounts I work in rather than industry benchmarks, and yours will move depending on your market, your procedures, and how fast your front desk responds.

That last part matters more than most practices admit. If your cost per lead is fine and your cost per booked consultation is terrible, the problem is not your ads. It is what happens after the phone rings.

Work backwards from the case. If a few consultations a day turn into a predictable number of surgeries a month, and you know what a case is worth, you can calculate what you can afford to pay for a consultation and set your budgets from there instead of guessing.

On compliance, three things.

• Stay HIPAA compliant and protect patient data. This constrains what you can do with tracking, remarketing, and any audience built from patient information. Involve whoever handles your compliance before you set up audience lists.
• Get consent for any patient imagery. Before and after photos need documented consent from the patient, every time.
• Keep claims honest and backed by your actual results. Do not promise outcomes you cannot support.

Platform policy on before and after imagery has shifted over the years, so check the current ad standards for whichever platform you are on before you build creative around it rather than assuming what was true last year still holds.

Question to Answer:

Do you know your cost per booked consultation, or only your cost per lead?

The short version. Start with Google Search and make sure your Business Profile is linked so Maps ads run alongside it. Build your keyword lists from competitor procedure pages in Keyword Planner, sort by bid range, and filter to the procedure. Bid on searches that name a place, a doctor, or "near me," and leave the question-shaped searches alone. Split campaigns by procedure group because budget lives at the campaign level. Write ads that name your surgeon and offer a consultation rather than a surgery. Add Meta once search is producing, lead with the surgeon on camera, and test Microsoft if your market is big enough. Then track calls, forms, and bookings, and manage to cost per booked consultation rather than cost per lead.

If you want help setting any of this up, or you have an account running and cannot tell whether it is working, get in touch. We build and manage campaigns for plastic surgeons, med spas, and medical practices, and a lot of that work is making sure Google is spending your budget on people who will actually book.