Dermatology PPC That Fills the Schedule

There is no cart, no product feed, and no ROAS number to report. The conversion is a phone call or a consult request, and its value is set by what that service line bills and how long the patient stays with the practice — a cash-pay laser consult and an insurance-billed rash visit are worth very different amounts and cannot share one bid strategy. Budget is capped by drive time to your office rather than by catalogue size, so scaling means winning more of a fixed local auction, not adding SKUs. Everything downstream — call tracking, front-desk answer rate, schedule capacity — sits inside the campaign, not outside it.

Search first, in almost every case, because it is universally available and gives you the search-term data that makes every other channel smarter. Local Services Ads sit above Search and charge per lead with a Google-verified badge, which is compelling — but eligibility depends on category and market, and the inventory is thin in some metros. We confirm what your specialty and geography actually qualify for before building a plan around it. Where LSAs are available, they work best alongside Search rather than replacing it: LSA captures the ready-to-book call, Search captures the researcher and the entire cosmetic funnel.

By refusing to let them share a budget. Cosmetic keywords carry higher clicks costs and attract aggressive medspa and national-chain bidding, so in a shared campaign they will consistently outbid acne, eczema, and skin-check terms and quietly drain the medical pipeline. We separate them into distinct campaigns with distinct daily budgets, distinct cost-per-lead targets, and distinct landing pages. That also makes reporting honest: you can see what a booked cosmetic consult costs versus a booked medical visit, and shift money deliberately rather than watching the auction make that decision for you.

It converts an unreadable phone number into a feedback loop. Dynamic number insertion attributes each call to a campaign, ad group, and search term; recordings and outcome coding then separate booked appointments from wrong numbers, vendors, existing-patient calls, and out-of-area inquiries. Without it, Smart Bidding optimizes toward whichever keyword generates the most ringing — often the vaguest, cheapest, least qualified terms. With it, bidding chases the terms that produced appointments. It also exposes front-desk gaps: missed-call rate by hour is frequently the biggest single leak in a dermatology account.

Two overlapping curves rather than one. Medical demand is fairly steady year-round — skin cancer screening, acne, and chronic conditions like psoriasis and eczema do not wait for a season, though sun-exposure concern tends to rise with warm weather and screening interest lifts during awareness campaigns. Cosmetic demand is far more cyclical: laser and resurfacing treatments requiring sun avoidance skew to cooler months, while injectables and body treatments spike ahead of weddings, reunions, and holidays. We build the budget calendar around both curves instead of running a flat monthly number and being surprised.

Two layers. Platform health-and-medical policies restrict claim language and personalized advertising for health-related audiences, which constrains remarketing and some targeting options. On top of that, your state medical board governs professional advertising: guarantees of outcome, unsubstantiated superlatives, and misleading credential language are common violations. Patient photography needs marketing-specific written authorization — a treatment consent does not cover promotional use — and manufacturer-sponsored results require disclosure. We write and route creative with those constraints assumed, because a suspended account or a board complaint costs far more than the click it saved.