Drug Rehab Clinic: 56 Conversions at $43.64 Per Lead

The Situation Before

The clinic came to me after working with a previous agency that had built and managed the account for several months. On paper there was activity. Money was being spent, clicks were coming in, and reports were being generated. In practice the account was barely producing qualified inquiries. The intake team was not getting calls from people who were actually looking for treatment, and the leads that did come through were often from the wrong geography or the wrong situation entirely.

When I pulled the account open the reasons were not subtle. Match types were left wide open so Google was matching paid traffic to searches that had little or nothing to do with treatment intent. There was almost no negative keyword work in place, which meant the budget was bleeding into informational queries, job seeker queries, and unrelated drug related searches. Conversion tracking was either incomplete or firing on actions that did not represent a real lead. There was no honest way to tell which keywords were producing inquiries and which were just burning money.

What Changed

The fix was a full restructure rather than a series of small tweaks. The first step was rebuilding the keyword list around long-tail treatment terms with clear intent, the kinds of searches someone actually types when they or a family member are looking for help. Match types were tightened across the board so Google could not stretch a phrase keyword into a loosely related search. A real negative keyword list was built out and added to weekly, filtering out information seekers, job applicants, and unrelated drug related queries that had been draining the budget for months.

The other half of the work was on the measurement side. Proper conversion tracking was implemented so phone calls and form submissions were both counted as real conversions, with call duration thresholds in place to filter out misdials and wrong numbers. Once the data was clean, the weekly optimization work had something honest to work from. Bids could be adjusted based on which keywords actually produced inquiries, ad copy could be tested against real intent, and the budget could be shifted toward what was working instead of spread evenly across everything.

The Results

Over the measured window the account produced 56 conversions on $2,440 in total spend, which works out to a $43.64 cost per lead. For an addiction treatment account that had been struggling to produce any qualified inquiries at all under the previous setup, the change in efficiency was significant. The leads coming through were also a better fit. Because the keyword and negative work had filtered out so much of the wrong intent, the intake team was spending less time on calls that were never going to turn into admits and more time on conversations with people who were genuinely seeking treatment.

It is worth noting that the $43.64 cost per lead figure reflects the specific market, budget, and conversion tracking setup of this particular 2023 engagement. The addiction treatment category has become significantly more competitive since then and CPLs in this space today typically range from $200 to $800 or higher depending on geography, program type, and how conversions are being counted. A lower budget campaign in a less saturated market with soft conversion events counted alongside phone calls will naturally produce a lower CPL than a national private pay program running in a major metro. The number is real: it reflects what the account actually produced during that window, but it should be read in that context rather than as a benchmark for what every rehab facility should expect today.

This account was managed as part of an agency contracting engagement. The audit, campaign restructure, keyword strategy, negative keyword build, conversion tracking implementation, and ongoing weekly optimization were all performed directly by me. The results reflect the work I did on the account.

Related Work

The same playbook applies across regulated and high intent service industries. You can see how I approach the same kinds of structural problems for law firms and HVAC companies, or visit samuelhenkeppc.com to learn more about how I work with local service businesses.

Frequently Asked Questions