Med spa PPC: the complete DIY playbook

Med spa PPC sits at the intersection of three things that make paid media hard: high-LTV treatments that justify aggressive bids, hyper-local search intent that rewards a real Google Business Profile, and Google's restrictive healthcare and beauty ad policies that will disapprove creative that would fly in any other vertical. Copy a Shopify beauty brand's playbook and you will get suspended by week two.

The approach that works is boring on purpose: organize campaigns by treatment line rather than by keyword grab-bag, keep ad copy inside Google's policies for cosmetic procedures and injectables, build landing pages that lead with credentials and pricing transparency, and give people a booking system that lets them reserve a consultation slot on their phone in under sixty seconds. Everything below is the order to do it in.

Build one campaign per treatment line, not one campaign for the whole spa. Give each campaign its own daily budget, its own bidding strategy, its own ad copy, and its own landing page. That is the only way to see which services are profitable and which are just eating budget.

Inside each campaign, separate branded queries from non-branded, split general terms from high-intent modifiers like "near me" and "price", and always exclude the shopping-around junk (free, cheap, DIY, at-home) that burns dental and med spa budgets more than any other vertical. Let Search Ads carry the core spend. Add Performance Max only once conversion volume is high enough to feed the algorithm real data. Do not run PMax on a starving campaign.

For a local practice, tight geo-targeting by zip plus Google Business Profile call extensions consistently outperforms broad DMA-level targeting. If you are still deciding what to spend, the mechanics are broken down in our guide to how Google Ads pricing works, and the ongoing account routine is covered in PPC optimization.

Your homepage is not a landing page. A med spa landing page has one treatment offer, one primary action (book a consultation), no top navigation, and copy written for the exact search that sent the visitor there. Someone searching "lip filler near me" needs a lip filler page, not a homepage that also mentions weight loss and IV drips.

The pattern that consistently wins:

• Headline that names the treatment and the city.
• Transparent starting price above the fold (yes, really, hiding it kills conversion).
• Real photo of the injector or provider with credentials (MD, PA, RN).
• Compliant before/after gallery with proper disclaimers.
• Instant-book calendar (Vagaro, Boulevard, Mindbody, or a native scheduler) so the visitor can pick a slot without a phone call.
• Reviews block pulled from Google Business Profile, not stock quotes.
• Sticky call button and sticky "Book now" on mobile, because the large majority of med spa traffic is mobile.

How you build it matters less than how easily you can change it. If you plan to test headlines, offers and price framing every couple of weeks, a dedicated builder pays for itself: Unbounce gives you conversion-oriented templates and built-in A/B testing without touching your main site. If you are going to publish one page and never look at it again, that subscription is overkill and a plain page on your existing site is fine.

Either way, start from a layout that already follows the rules above rather than an empty canvas. Our free bundle includes a ready-made med spa consult template you can copy the structure from: grab the free landing page templates. If you want the reasoning behind each section, read the PPC landing page guide and landing page design. To see what people actually do on the page once it is live, the free and paid options are compared in CRO tools, and if you are testing hard, Unbounce keeps the variants in one place.

Google Ads captures the person searching "botox near me" today. Meta creates the person who searches "botox near me" next month. Med spa is one of the few verticals where Instagram in particular is nearly a native fit: it is visual, aspirational, and local businesses that show real work and real staff consistently outperform brands that run stock images.

The pattern that works: educational Reels and short-form video from the actual providers, before/after content that respects platform policies, targeted lookalikes off your existing patient list, and instant-form lead ads for lower-consideration services like Hydrafacial and IV drips. Send that traffic somewhere purpose-built rather than to your homepage, and if you are generating demand locally, the wider playbook is in local lead generation. It is also worth checking whether your category qualifies for Local Services Ads, Google's pay per lead placement above the text ads.

Single-location, one metro: plan for $2,500 to $7,000 per month in media. Below $2,000 in a competitive market, you cannot gather enough conversions to optimize and the algorithm never leaves the learning phase.

Multi-location or major metro (NYC, LA, Miami, Dallas): $8,000 to $20,000+ per month in media is normal. Higher CPCs and higher LTVs justify the spend, and larger accounts unlock Performance Max and YouTube prospecting.

New med spa launching: $1,500 to $3,000 per month for the first 90 days on Google Business Profile ads and tightly targeted Search only, until the practice has enough reviews to compete on organic and LSA. Do not stack Meta on top until Google is producing.

Ask three questions on the sales call. First: "Show me a med spa account you currently manage and walk me through the campaign structure." If the answer is vague or the structure is one campaign with fifty ad groups, walk away. Second: "How do you handle Google's healthcare policy restrictions on injectable and weight-loss creative?" A real answer names specific policies and shows you approved ad copy. A bad answer is "we will figure it out." Third: "What is the shortest contract you offer?" Any agency that requires a 12-month lock-in for a channel with a 60-day feedback loop is protecting themselves, not you.

Two more things to insist on before you sign. You should own the Google Ads and Meta accounts, not the agency, so the campaign history stays with you if the relationship ends. And you should get direct login access to those accounts plus whatever call tracking is running, so reporting is something you can verify rather than something you receive as a slide.