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. For the channel sequence inside that Google budget, use our Google Ads for healthcare scaling plan across Search, Performance Max, and Demand Gen.
- 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.