What's a good cost per booking for physio Google Ads in 2026?

A healthy physio Google Ads account in Australia costs roughly $80 to $100 per new patient booking. That assumes a tight catchment, a booking page that doesn't leak, and clean keyword segmentation. We've seen it lower with sharper symptom-targeting. We've also seen physio clinics paying past $200 because the campaign was chasing the wrong keywords.

The number on the screen matters less than what each new patient is worth to your clinic over their first six months. A $100 cost per booking is excellent if the average patient stays for 8 sessions at $120 each. The same number is poor economics if the average patient is single-visit and out the door.

The single biggest variable is how tightly the campaign is geographically targeted. A physio clinic in inner-city Sydney that bids on the whole metro area will pay materially more per booking than the same clinic bidding on a 5-7 km radius around the practice. Patients further away convert at a lower rate because the practical drive time gets in the way.

Most agencies set the radius once and never revisit. The number to optimise is bookings per dollar, broken down by distance band. Some bands are profitable, others aren't.

Bidding on 'physio' or 'physiotherapist' captures both pain-led searchers and browsers comparing options. Bidding on symptom queries (lower back pain, sciatica, postpartum recovery) captures patients with much sharper intent. The cost per click is often higher on the symptom queries; the cost per booking is almost always lower.

If your campaign is built around the bare specialty keywords, expect a higher cost per booking than the benchmark. If it's built around symptom queries, expect to land near the bottom of the range.

A patient who clicks an ad has done their job. The booking page has to do the rest. If the page takes more than 30 seconds to convert from landing to confirmed booking, half the spend is wasted before the patient finishes scrolling. The fix isn't more spend. It's a faster booking flow, integrated with your practice management software, with a click-to-call option visible on every screen.

Every physio clinic has an ideal client list. The mistake we see most often is treating that list as a direct keyword target. Post-surgical knee replacement patients might be on it. They don't search Google for a physio. Their surgeon hands them a shortlist. CDM plan patients are definitely not an ideal Google Ads target, because they arrive with a GP referral letter in hand. They never book through a Google Ads click. The cost per booking on those avatars approaches infinity.

There's a step before that one most clinics also skip. For many physio clinics, CDM plan patients don't fit the ideal client avatar at all. The CDM fee structure makes the economics tighter than fee-for-service, and the patient mix that comes through CDM is different from the patient mix the clinic actually wants more of. The right question isn't only 'can Google deliver this avatar.' It's 'do we even want more of this avatar.' If the answer to either is no, the avatar comes off the campaign target list.

The fix is to strip both the unwanted and the unreachable avatars off the campaign target list before launch. Your overall cost per booking comes down because the budget concentrates on the patients who actually search and the patients you actually want.

Compare your account to the $80-100 range. If you're inside it, the campaign is working. If you're materially above, walk through the four levers in order: catchment first, keywords second, booking flow third, avatars fourth. Most accounts have at least one of the four wrong. Fixing it is what brings the number down.