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What a new psychology client should cost you on Google in 2026
The band, and the decisions that decide what a new client actually costs you to acquire.
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 knowing which kind of client 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 levers that decide where a practice lands inside it.
What a client is worth, what a client should cost
One new psychology client opens about $2,500 of work. Acquiring one should cost $80 to $120.
Step one, what one client is worth
$250 to $275
What one session is worth
About 10
Sessions per new client
$2,500
Work opened by one new client
Ten sessions at $250 to $275 each. That is the work one new client opens, not the profit on it.
Step two, the same scale, twice
What one new client is worth
$2,500
What one new client should cost to acquire
$80 to $120
Drawn on the same scale as the bar above it. That sliver is the whole acquisition cost.
The gap
4 to 5%
Acquiring a new psychology client costs roughly 4 to 5 percent of the work that client opens. That is the trade a psychology practice is actually being offered, and it is why underfeeding the campaign is the expensive option.
One thing moves the value side of this. Most clients claim a Medicare rebate back under a Mental Health Care Plan, and the plan caps how many sessions run before they go back to their GP for a review. That changes how many of the ten a client completes, so run the maths on your own fee and your own session average.
The whole point
Set the budget from what a client is worth, not from what the spend feels like. The campaign cannot see the difference. Your bank account can.
The band, and what a client is actually worth
A healthy psychology Google Ads account in Australia acquires new clients at $80 to $120 each. That is the cost to acquire a client (CAC), it 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 psychology session sits between $250 and $275, and a new client averages about ten sessions, so roughly $2,500 of work arrives with each new client. Spending $100 to open $2,500 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.
The campaign cannot see what a client is actually worth to you. 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
$2,630
$263 per visit × 10 visits per year = $2,630 a year. Set years on books above 1 to project lifetime value.
Aggressive growth · 3× ROI
$877
Max CPA you can spend
Spending hard to win share, eg. ramp up phase or new location
Healthy growth · 5× ROI
$526
Max CPA you can spend
Sustainable, scalable, every dollar 5× back
Conservative · 10× ROI
$263
Max CPA you can spend
Profit first; small budget, disciplined targeting
Empty chair economics
During ramp up, you can spend up to $263 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 $2,630 to your clinic, and at healthy growth you can spend up to $526 to win one.
Your website is what turns that value into bookings, and most clinic sites quietly leak it.
Lever one: know your client mix before you set the budget
Clients pay your practice fee, which for most psychology practices sits between $250 and $275 a session. Most of them then claim a Medicare rebate back under a Mental Health Care Plan, so what leaves their account is the gap between the two. The rebate is the client's to claim, not a discount you hand over.
The plan matters for a second reason. It caps how many sessions run before the client has to go back to their GP for a review, and plenty of clients stop at the cap rather than book past it.
So your mix moves three things. The gap a client pays, how many of the roughly ten sessions a plan client actually completes, and therefore what one new client is worth to you. Move those and you move what you can afford to pay to acquire the next one.
None of the mixes is wrong. What is wrong is setting a budget without knowing yours, then being surprised when the maths does not behave the way the spreadsheet said it would.
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 to acquire a 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 to acquire 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 to acquire inside the band.
Telehealth widens the catchment. It does not make growth cheap.
Most practices advertise the suburb the building sits in, then wonder why the cost to acquire a client climbs when they push the budget up. A tight radius runs out of people.
Telehealth solves that and creates a different problem. Advertise online sessions and you are no longer competing with the three practices near the client. You are up against every online provider in the state, so the auction is wider and a telehealth client usually costs more to acquire, not less.
There is a second thing the maths misses. The things a client wants to talk about are very often problems at home, and being at home for the session means someone in the next room might hear it. Plenty of clients specifically want to leave the house so the conversation is private, safe and secure.
So treat telehealth as capacity worth advertising deliberately, with its own campaign and its own page, not as cheap growth. Say it plainly in the ad. 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 client it cannot see for a month, then losing them 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 real capacity and it costs more to fill than a local search, so it earns its own campaign and its own page rather than a line nobody scrolls to.
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.
The numbers behind this article
See what a new patient enquiry costs across every discipline.
The lower quarter, median and upper quarter for psychology, next to every other discipline we run, on one scale. Then put your own budget and fee in and see what a month of ads is worth.
Open the benchmarksSet the budget from your own numbers
Once you know your client mix, 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
$2,630
Gross revenue per patient
Gross profit
$1,315
After 50% costs
Max CPA target
$526
40% of gross profit
Paid deficit
16 patients
Target minus reactivations
Recommended monthly ad budget
$8,416
16 patients at $526each. 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 $8,416 a month at a maximum of $526 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 what each new client is worth.
Psychologist searches split from counselling traffic, capacity mapped by clinician, telehealth priced properly, and a cost to acquire a client you can actually defend.
See how we do psychology marketingCommon questions