Google Ads
What a new psychology client should cost you on Google in 2026
The band, and the two decisions that decide where your practice lands inside it.
By Pete Flynn · 27 July 2026 · 8 min read
Psychology is one of the easier professions to advertise on Google and one of the easiest to waste money on. The demand is there, the intent is sharp, and the client is worth more than in almost any other allied health profession.
The waste comes from two places. Practices set a budget without deciding which kind of work they are buying, and they let the campaign wander into searches that were never going to book a psychology session.
Here is the band we run psychology accounts to, and the two levers that decide where a practice lands inside it.
Two books, two sets of maths
The same booking price, measured against the two books a psychology practice can buy.
The full fee book
The book priced to the rebate
Fee per session
The full fee book
About $200, the psychology default every calculator on this site runs on.
The book priced to the rebate
Your call. Hold your fee and the client claims the rebate back, so this column matches the one beside it. Price to the rebate and you keep roughly half a full fee session.
Sessions per client
The full fee book
About 10, as long as the work and the diary both hold.
The book priced to the rebate
Capped by the plan, then back to the GP for a review before there are any more.
What one new client is worth
The full fee book
About $2,000 of work to the practice.
The book priced to the rebate
Roughly half of that if you price to the rebate, and it stops at the cap either way.
What $80 to $120 per booking costs you
The full fee book
Around 5 percent of the client. Comfortable, with room to bid harder.
The book priced to the rebate
Roughly double that share of a much shorter book. Still workable, and far less forgiving of a loose keyword.
Bars show relative size between the two columns, not dollar figures. Run the maths on your own fee and your own session average before you set a budget on it.
The whole point
Decide which book you are buying before you set the budget. The campaign cannot tell the two apart. Your bank account can.
The band, and what a client is actually worth
A healthy psychology Google Ads account in Australia books new clients at $80 to $120 each. That is the range every calculator on this site runs on, and it is what we hold psychology accounts to.
The number next to it is the one that matters more. A full fee session sits around $200 and a new client averages about ten sessions, so roughly $2,000 of work arrives with each booking. Spending $100 to open $2,000 of work is one of the better trades in allied health.
That is the version with your own fee and your own session average missing from it. Put them in and you get your number instead of ours.
Google cannot tell a full fee first session from a bulk billed one. Your bank account can, and it is the one paying for the click.
Patient lifetime value
What you can actually afford to spend.
Plug in the maths of one of your average patients. Three numbers, one formula: fee times visits per year times years on books. For most acute clinics, set years on books to 1 and read the yearly value as your headline. For NDIS, paeds, or chronic care clinics where patients stay for years, set years on books accordingly and read lifetime value as your headline.
Out of pocket or agreed rate per visit
Average visits per patient over a year
1 for acute, 3 to 6 for paeds or NDIS
Yearly value of one patient
$1,600
$200 per visit × 8 visits per year = $1,600 a year. Set years on books above 1 to project lifetime value.
Aggressive growth · 3× ROI
$533
Max CPA you can spend
Spending hard to win share, eg. ramp up phase or new location
Healthy growth · 5× ROI
$320
Max CPA you can spend
Sustainable, scalable, every dollar 5× back
Conservative · 10× ROI
$160
Max CPA you can spend
Profit first; small budget, disciplined targeting
Empty chair economics
During ramp up, you can spend up to $200 to acquire a patient and still break even on session one.
When the diary has white space your team is already paid for, the marginal cost of that next session is near zero. So on the first appointment alone, almost the full fee is gross profit. Every session after that is upside on the value above.
These numbers are deliberately gross-revenue based, not gross-profit. For a quick scale-confidence check, gross is the right frame; for board level reporting, swap in your gross margin percentage. The shape of the maths doesn't change.
One new patient is worth $1,600 to your clinic, and at healthy growth you can spend up to $320 to win one.
Your website is what turns that value into bookings, and most clinic sites quietly leak it.
Lever one: decide which book you are buying
A full fee book and a book priced to the Medicare rebate behave like two different businesses, and the campaign that fills them is identical. Same keywords, same ads, same cost per booking. What changes is everything that happens after the client sits down.
If you hold your fee and the client claims the rebate back themselves, the maths barely moves. If you price to the rebate or bulk bill, you keep materially less per session, and the plan caps how many sessions run before the client goes back to their GP for a review. Same $100 booking, a much shorter and thinner book behind it.
Neither is wrong. Plenty of practices deliberately run a rebate heavy book because it is the work they want to do. What is wrong is setting a budget as though you are filling one book while the diary quietly fills with the other.
Lever two: intent hygiene, and the counselling trap
The other lever is which searches you let in. Counsellor and psychologist are different professions, at different fees, reached through different pathways, and the person typing counselling is usually after a different service entirely.
Bid on both and you pay Google to bring in traffic that was never going to book a psychology session. The clicks look healthy. The cost per new client looks terrible, and it is not the campaign's fault.
If you offer counselling as well, it gets its own campaign, its own ads and its own page. The two never share keywords. The same discipline applies to the broad mental health and therapy queries that look so attractive in a keyword planner and convert so poorly in practice.
What the loose keywords buy
- Counselling and therapy searches at a different fee and pathway.
- Mental health browsing with no intent to book anyone yet.
- People looking for free or public services.
- Students, job seekers and people researching a course.
- A busy looking report and a cost per client nobody can defend.
What the tight keywords buy
- People searching for a psychologist, by problem and by suburb.
- Clients who already know the pathway they want to use.
- Parents searching on behalf of a child, ready to book.
- Searches that name the presentation your clinicians work with.
- A smaller click count and a cost per client inside the band.
Telehealth is usually the cheapest capacity you own
Most practices advertise the suburb the building sits in, then wonder why the cost per client climbs when they push the budget up. A tight radius runs out of people.
If your clinicians work online, telehealth widens the catchment without adding rent, and it usually books at the bottom of the band because the competition thins out the further you get from the dense metro suburbs. It is the only lever on this page that adds capacity instead of rationing it.
The catch is that the ad and the page have to say so plainly. A client who assumes they need to drive to you will not go looking for the telehealth line buried on page three of your website.
Advertise the capacity you actually have
A wait list is rarely one queue. Usually one clinician is booked six weeks out while the newest one has open afternoons, and the practice advertises itself as though every diary looks the same.
That is how a practice ends up paying $100 for a booking it cannot service for a month, then losing the client to the practice down the road that could see them Thursday. You paid for the click either way.
Four ways to point the budget at real capacity
Move one
Advertise by clinician, not by clinic.
If one clinician has room and another does not, the ads and the landing page should send people to the one with room. Clients want to choose a person anyway.
Move two
Advertise by presentation.
Point the budget at the problem areas your available clinicians actually work with, instead of every service the practice offers.
Move three
Put telehealth in the ad, not in the footer.
It is the fastest capacity you have. Clients only take it up if the ad and the first screen of the page make it obvious.
Move four
Turn the budget down before you turn it off.
If every diary in the building is genuinely full, keep a small spend running rather than going dark. Restarting a cold campaign costs more than holding a warm one.
Set the budget from your own numbers
Once you know which book you are filling, the budget stops being a guess. Work out what a client is worth to your practice, what you keep after wages and rent, and what you are willing to pay to open that work. That is your ceiling. The band is only useful as a sanity check against it.
Most psychology practices we work with land well above the band once they run it honestly, which is exactly why an underfed psychology campaign is such a common and such an expensive mistake.
Marketing budget calculator
Your budget from your numbers, not from a feeling.
Start with what a patient is worth. The right monthly budget follows from there.
Average across an episode of care
Wages, super, commissions
Past patients you'll bring back via email or SMS
Patient LTV
$1,040
Gross revenue per patient
Gross profit
$520
After 50% costs
Max CPA target
$208
40% of gross profit
Paid deficit
16 patients
Target minus reactivations
Recommended monthly ad budget
$3,328
16 patients at $208each. Not a guess. A derivation from your clinic's economics and the outcome you're targeting.
Illustrative estimate. Actual CPA varies by catchment, campaign quality, booking page conversion rate, and keyword strategy. Use as a starting point, then calibrate against your first 60 to 90 days of real campaign data.
Your numbers say spend $3,328 a month at a maximum of $208 per new patient.
Whether your campaigns can actually buy patients at that price is exactly what a Google Ads audit tells you.
Psychology marketing, run by clinic owners
We will tell you which searches your budget is buying, and which book they fill.
Psychologist searches split from counselling traffic, capacity mapped by clinician, telehealth priced properly, and a cost per client you can actually defend.
See how we do psychology marketingCommon questions