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Psychology · google ads

Most psychology practices do not need more leads. They need different ones.

With psychology at roughly 35 per cent of the national workforce target and the average client using only half their Medicare entitlement, the constraint is clinician hours. An agency selling you volume is selling you something you cannot use.

The premise most agencies get wrong

Yield per clinical hour, not cost per lead.

The National Mental Health Workforce Strategy puts the overall shortfall at 32 per cent against the 2019 planning target, growing to 42 per cent by 2030, with psychologists specifically at 35 per cent of target. AIHW data shows around 36,900 employed psychologists, roughly half in private practice, and a steep drop by remoteness from 130 per 100,000 in major cities to 28 in very remote areas.

In that market, an enquiry is not automatically valuable. A full practice that buys more enquiries pays for clicks, occupies reception staff, and disappoints people it cannot see. What has value is fit, funding mix, and filling specific gaps: a particular clinician's Thursday afternoons, a new service line, a second location, or the client types where you have capacity.

So the objective we set is yield per clinical hour. That is a different account from one built to minimise cost per lead, and in our experience it is the one that actually helps a psychology practice.

What clicks actually cost

Australian psychology keyword costs.

From Medical Marketing Group's Australian benchmarks, Q3 2026, in Australian dollars. These are Google's bid estimates rather than realised spend.

therapist near me
$9.94
counselling
$9.00
adhd assessment
$7.17
Mid-pack, not the premium term people assume
psychology near me
$5.50
psychologist bulk billing near me
$4.61
anxiety treatment
$3.21
depression treatment
$1.93

Source: Medical Marketing Group Australian healthcare benchmarks, Q3 2026. Separately, Medico Digital's analysis of more than $11 million in Australian healthcare spend puts mental health at a $2.04 average cost per click and a $43.48 cost per acquisition, the cheapest of the ten specialties they track.

Where the value actually is

Four campaigns worth running in a capacity constrained practice.

Clients who already have a plan
Someone searching with a mental health treatment plan in hand has already passed the GP gate and the 17 to 22 day wait. They are dramatically closer to booking than someone starting the journey, and the search language is different enough to target separately.
Assessment work
ADHD and autism assessment sit largely outside Medicare, are substantially private pay, and carry waits measured in months. Notably the cost per click is mid-pack rather than premium, which makes this a margin and volume opportunity rather than an expensive one.
Full fee and non-Medicare funded work
Couples therapy has no Better Access rebate at all and is therefore full fee by construction. Extras funded clients skip the GP step entirely. For a practice with limited hours, an hour of this work is worth materially more than a bulk billed hour.
Specific clinicians and specific gaps
Not the practice in general. The clinician with availability, the modality you want more of, the location that is quieter. This is where advertising earns its place in a market this short, and it needs the practice to tell us what the gaps actually are.
Our position on crisis keywords
We negative them out for practices with a waitlist, and we want to be precise about the basis for that. Google publishes no policy specific to advertising against suicide or crisis related searches, so this is our position rather than a platform rule. The reasoning is straightforward: a practice that cannot see somebody for six weeks cannot help a person in acute distress, and taking that click removes them from a service that can. We pair it with a visible Lifeline reference on every landing page, and we do not use urgency or scarcity language anywhere near distress adjacent terms.
Straight answers

Questions clinic owners actually ask

Should a psychology practice with a waitlist run Google Ads at all?
Sometimes not, and we would rather say that in the first conversation than take the budget. With psychology at around 35 per cent of the national workforce target, a genuinely full practice gains nothing from more enquiries and loses staff time answering them. Where advertising does earn its place is in changing the mix rather than the volume: attracting the funding types and presenting problems where you have capacity, filling a specific clinician's gaps, or supporting a new service line. That is a real engagement and it is not the one most agencies sell.
Why does psychology have such a low cost per click?
Australian data puts mental health at the cheapest cost per click of the ten healthcare specialties in one $11 million dataset, at $2.04 with a $43.48 cost per acquisition, and keyword level data shows depression treatment at $1.93 and anxiety treatment at $3.21. The likely reason is that much of the volume is informational rather than commercial, since somebody researching symptoms is not yet choosing a provider. That makes the cheap terms deceptive: they are cheap because they convert poorly, and the terms that indicate someone is ready to book cost considerably more.
Is ADHD assessment an expensive keyword to bid on?
Less than most people assume, which was a genuine surprise in our research. Australian data puts adhd assessment at $7.17, which is mid-pack and cheaper than both therapist near me at $9.94 and counselling at $9.00. Since ADHD assessment is largely outside Medicare, is substantially private pay at $500 to $700 or more, and carries waits of six to 18 months, that combination of moderate click cost and high ticket value makes it one of the better opportunities in the vertical rather than one of the more expensive ones.
Can a psychology practice use remarketing?
No. Google classifies Health as a sensitive interest category and its documentation explicitly names counselling services for mental health issues including depression, anxiety and addiction. Advertisers in those categories cannot use advertiser-curated audiences, which rules out remarketing lists and Customer Match uploads. Predefined Google audiences such as in-market and affinity segments remain available, because the sensitive signals are excluded from them. This is one of the clearest cases where a tactic that is standard in other verticals is simply unavailable here.
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