5 Google Ads Mistakes Costing Therapy Practices Thousands

Why Google Ads goes wrong for therapy practices

Paying for Google Ads makes sense on paper. People look for a therapist in their area, your ad appears, they get in touch. Plenty of practices find the opposite happens: the cost per lead climbs, the clicks arrive, and the consultations do not. Budget leaves the account every day and the diary stays roughly where it was.

The problem is rarely Google Ads itself, which does work for therapy practices. It is the way the campaign has been built: which searches it buys, what the ad actually says, where the click lands, and whether anything records what happened next. Those decisions get made at setup, and then repeat every day the budget runs. Nothing fails loudly, so a badly built campaign can keep spending without ever announcing the problem.

How to tell whether this is happening to you

Four checks, none of which need an agency. First, look at where your ads send people. If the answer is your homepage, the click is landing on a page built for a general visitor rather than for someone who has just searched for help and is deciding whether to trust you.

Second, read your own ad copy back as if you were the person searching. Wording along the lines of "Professional Therapy Services | Book Today" could belong to any practice in the country, and it tells the reader nothing about whether you are the right fit.

Third, check what you are bidding on. Broad single terms such as "therapy" and "counselling" are expensive and pull in clicks from people who were never going to book with you. Fourth, try to name the ad or keyword behind your last few enquiries. If you cannot, the tracking is not set up properly, and every budget decision after that is guesswork.

What the guide covers

The guide works through the five most expensive mistakes we see therapy practices make. It starts with keyword targeting, separating the searches worth paying for from the ones that only look relevant, then moves to ad copy and what a specific, honest ad does that a generic one cannot. From there it deals with the destination problem: why your homepage is the wrong place to send paid traffic, and what the click should meet instead.

The last two sections cover remarketing and measurement. Remarketing is treated as a question of restraint as much as setup, because following potential clients around the internet with therapy ads is intrusive and reflects badly on a practice. Measurement covers connecting spend to actual consultations rather than clicks or form views, so you can tell which parts of the account earn their place and which are quietly costing you.

Who this is for

It is written for owners of UK therapy and counselling practices who are already spending on Google Ads, or are about to and would rather not learn these lessons at their own expense. It assumes you are the person deciding where the budget goes, not a specialist running accounts all day.

It also assumes a constraint that general Google Ads advice tends to skip: your marketing has to stand up ethically. Someone searching for a therapist is looking for help with something personal, and tactics that would be unremarkable for a plumber or a car dealership are not appropriate here. LogicLeap builds marketing systems for therapy practices that want more clients without compromising their ethics, and the guide is written on that basis.