Here’s the deal for rehab centers at scale:
- Revenue per patient: $23,800 ($850 × 28 days)
- Cost per admission: $6,500
- ROAS: 3.66X
At $1M/mo in spend, that’s $3.66M back. We run around $4M/mo in rehab ad spend across clients right now. Here’s the exact channel mix.
1. Google Ads — $825K/mo
The workhorse. Majority of ROI comes from here.
- Focus on non-brand keywords. “Rehab near me”, “addiction treatment [city]”.
- Geo-segment campaigns by state. Every market has different CPAs — you can’t run one national campaign and expect it to clear.
- Train the algorithm on VOB leads, not form fills. Verification of Benefits is the real down-funnel signal. Form fills are noise.
- Mix Search, PMax, and some YouTube inside the account.
2. Bing Search — $50K/mo
Copy the same Google playbook straight over. Two reasons Bing punches above its weight in rehab:
- Bing skews older. In rehab, that’s parents searching for their kids.
- CPCs run 30-40% cheaper than Google, but with limited volume.
Not a primary channel, but it’s cheap incremental volume from a higher-intent demographic.
3. Meta + SEO — $75K/mo
Meta ($50K): Retarget site visitors, build lookalikes from Google converters. Our best-performing Meta ads are alumni video testimonials — real people talking about their recovery. Nothing outperforms it.
SEO ($25K): Local SEO is everything in rehab. Google Maps, reviews, “rehab center in [city]” pages. Takes 6-12 months to really kick in, but once it does, it compounds on itself.
4. ABM to hospitals and therapists — $50K/mo
This is where it gets fun — and where most centers leave money on the table.
- List every healthcare provider in your catchment area. That’s your database.
- Send pamphlets, one-pagers, promo material. Walk in and hand deliver, or mail it.
- Pitch outcomes. “Our 90-day completion rate is X%.” That’s what providers actually care about.
One therapist relationship can be worth 50+ admissions a year. There is no paid channel with that kind of leverage per touch.
The next frontier: predicted revenue bidding
Something we’re considering building:
- Every patient has a different insurance policy.
- They all pay different rates per center.
- Build a model that predicts what each policy pays.
- Feed that signal back into the ad platform.
- Now we can optimize ads for predicted revenue per admission, not just volume.
That moves rehab marketing from “cost per admission” to “margin per admission” — which is the metric that actually matters.
The cheatsheet
- $825K Google — majority of ROI, geo-segmented, trained on VOB
- $50K Bing — same playbook, cheaper clicks, older audience
- $50K Meta — retargeting + lookalikes, alumni testimonials outperform everything
- $25K SEO — local organic, 6-12 month payoff
- $50K ABM — walk into hospitals and therapists with outcome data
If you’re marketing a rehab center right now, Google is where the money is — but the ABM play is the unlock most centers never build.