Set the commercial boundary before buying clicks
Start with the treatment or consultation the clinic can actually deliver, the appointments available and the contribution after delivery costs. Agree how much uncertainty the owner can afford during a test. An average from another clinic is not a budget for yours.
Write down three separate limits: total media spend, management and landing-page costs, and available appointment capacity. Record who can approve a change. A low cost per enquiry is not useful if those enquiries cannot be served or do not become suitable consultations.
Use a transparent planning calculation
Illustrative example, not a client result: suppose a clinic allows £100 acquisition cost per attended consultation and expects one in four accepted enquiries to attend. Its planning ceiling is £25 per accepted enquiry. If one in twenty relevant visits becomes an accepted enquiry, the implied click-cost ceiling is £1.25. These are assumptions to test, not market benchmarks.
Use the same reporting period and consistent definitions for every step. Do not multiply a paid treatment price by all enquiries and call it revenue. Include cancellations, refunds and delivery costs when those outcomes can be reconciled.
Match reach to the available evidence
Choose among current broad, phrase and exact match options using the campaign objective, bidding approach and quality of conversion data. Broad match modifier is retired; legacy modifier keywords behave as phrase match. Review actual search terms and exclusions as the campaign gathers evidence.
Keep a treatment or location test small enough to diagnose. Splitting a limited budget across many near-identical campaigns makes it harder to judge which changes helped. A budget ceiling also needs an owner who checks actual spend.
Decide when to stop, repair or scale
Review accepted enquiries, qualification and attendance together. If tracking is unreliable, repair measurement first. If search terms are irrelevant, correct targeting. If suitable enquiries are not contacted, fix follow-up before increasing spend.
Scale only when the reporting window is sufficiently mature for the clinic’s decision cycle, capacity exists and the observed economics justify it. Record each budget change and its reason so the next review can separate deliberate changes from normal variation.
Sources and next steps
Google Ads keyword match types