For a UK dental or private healthcare clinic, a new patient from Google Ads typically costs between £60 and £150 for general treatments, and between £150 and £500 or more for high-value treatments such as implants, Invisalign or cosmetic work. Those ranges are wide because the final number is not one figure the platform gives you. It is the product of four steps, and each step varies from clinic to clinic.
If your cost per new patient sits inside those ranges and the treatment value justifies it, your account is broadly healthy. If you do not know your cost per new patient at all, and most clinics do not, that is the first problem to fix, because everything else is guesswork without it.
What is the funnel maths behind the number?
Cost per new patient is built from four multiplied steps. Here are honest UK ranges for each:
- Cost per click (CPC). £2 to £6 for general dentistry searches; £5 to £15 for implant and Invisalign keywords, where competition is fierce.
- Landing page conversion rate. 5 to 12 per cent of visitors submit an enquiry on a decent dedicated page. Homepages often manage 1 to 3 per cent.
- Lead to booked appointment. 40 to 70 per cent, depending almost entirely on how fast and how persistently the front desk follows up.
- Appointment to patient. 50 to 80 per cent, driven by show-up rates and the consultation itself.
Multiply the middle of those ranges: a £4 click at a 10 per cent conversion rate gives a £40 lead. If half of leads book, an appointment costs £80. If 70 per cent of appointments become patients, a new patient costs about £115. Change any single step and the final number moves with it, which is why quoting one "normal" figure without the maths is meaningless.
Why is the average a trap?
Averages blend high-intent and low-intent traffic into one comforting number. A campaign can show an acceptable average cost per lead while half the budget goes to keywords that produce enquiries which never book. The useful view is always segmented: cost per booked patient by campaign, and ideally by keyword theme. It is common to find that 30 per cent of the spend produces 70 per cent of the patients, and that finding is worth more than any optimisation trick.
The other trap is judging the account at the lead stage. Leads are not revenue. A campaign with £25 leads that never answer the phone is more expensive than a campaign with £60 leads that book reliably.
What moves the number most?
Three levers do most of the work, in this order:
Keyword intent. "Dental implants cost [your town]" signals someone comparing options with money in mind. Broad terms such as "tooth pain" bring cheaper clicks and far fewer patients. Cutting low-intent spend is usually the fastest single improvement available.
A dedicated landing page. Sending paid clicks to your homepage, with its menu, blog links and generic copy, wastes most of them. A page about one treatment, with proof, pricing context and one clear action, routinely converts at two to four times the homepage rate. Same clicks, same budget, multiplied output.
Follow-up speed and measurement. Calling enquiries within 15 minutes instead of the next day visibly lifts booking rates. And unless booked appointments are recorded against their source, you cannot know which campaigns produce patients, so the account gets optimised on leads, which rewards exactly the wrong traffic.
When is a high cost per patient still profitable?
Always do the maths against treatment value, not against your comfort level. Paying £400 to acquire an implant patient whose treatment plan is worth £4,000 or more is excellent business. Paying £90 for a patient who books one £60 check-up and never returns is not, unless your recall system reliably turns them into a long-term patient. Lifetime value, even estimated roughly, is the honest denominator. This is also why implant and orthodontic campaigns tolerate high click costs that would sink a general dentistry campaign.
Does location change the ranges?
Yes, and more than most owners expect. Click prices in central London for implant keywords can run 50 to 100 per cent above the national figures quoted here, while a practice in a smaller regional town may sit comfortably at the bottom of every range. Competition density matters more than city size: three aggressive implant clinics bidding in one postcode area will inflate costs for everyone, regardless of where that postcode is.
Seasonality plays a part too. January and September typically bring more searches and better conversion rates as people act on resolutions and post-summer plans, while late December is slow for everything except emergencies. Judge your numbers against your own recent months first, and against national ranges second.
How do you find out your real number?
You need exactly two things: a record of which enquiries came from which campaign, and a record of which of those enquiries booked and attended. Most practice management systems can produce the second list; the first comes from your ads account. Match them once a month. It is unglamorous work, and it is the difference between managing marketing by evidence and managing it by anecdote.
If you would like that maths done for your clinic, request a free audit through the contact form at brand-developer.com. We will break your account down to cost per booked patient and show you which lever is worth pulling first.