Brand
Your facility name and its misspellings. This protects you from competitors bidding on your name and produces the cheapest admits in the account, so it gets funded first, always.
How We Work
Most agencies hide their playbook. Here is ours.
By the Clicktuitive team·Last updated August 20, 2026
We run Google Ads for behavioral health providers and measure ourselves against one number: cost per admit. This page walks through the exact process we run on every account, so you know precisely what you are paying for before we ever talk.
Clicks don't fill beds. Admits do.
A treatment center's ad account can look healthy on paper while the census stays flat. Costs per click fall, click-through rates rise, the monthly report shows hundreds of conversions, and none of it moves a single bed. That happens because most agencies optimize for what Google shows them. We optimize for what your admissions team confirms: verified benefits, scheduled arrivals, and completed admissions. Every decision described below exists to connect ad spend to admits. And behind every admit is a person in crisis and a family making one of the hardest calls of their lives. We build campaigns with that reality in mind, not in spite of it.
Why we build one campaign per level of care
Detox, residential, PHP, IOP, and MAT are different products. They carry different search intent, different payer economics, and different admit values, so we never let them share a campaign or a budget. Here is what a typical Clicktuitive account structure looks like.
Detox, non-brand
The highest urgency intent in the vertical, searches like "detox near me" and "medical detox for alcohol". Tight geography, aggressive bids, and 24/7 call routing are non-negotiable here.
Residential, non-brand
Split by payer intent wherever volume allows, because payer-qualified long-tail terms convert at a fraction of the cost of broad terms.
PHP and IOP, non-brand
Constrained to a realistic commute radius, because day treatment intent is local intent. These searchers need care that fits around work and family, so ads speak to schedules, insurance, and location instead of urgency. Costs per click run lower than residential, but admit values are smaller too, which makes payer-qualified terms and strict geographic exclusions the difference between profit and waste.
The return search
Families research for days before they call, and Google prohibits remarketing and customer-list targeting for addiction treatment because it's a sensitive health category. Most agencies won't tell you that. We wouldn't chase vulnerable people around the internet even if it were allowed, so we win the moment they search again with full brand coverage, deep keyword depth, and ad assets that answer the questions families actually ask.
Broad terms like "drug rehab" can cost $50 to $150 or more per click in competitive markets, while payer-qualified long-tail terms often cost a tenth of that. Structure is how you buy admits instead of clicks.
How we decide where your ads run
Before we spend a dollar, we ask your admissions team two questions. Where do your admits actually come from, and what is your realistic admitting footprint: local, regional, or national? A residential program that regularly admits patients who choose to travel for care advertises very differently than an IOP with a 40 minute commute ceiling. We build geographic targets from your admit history rather than a radius tool, and we exclude the areas that generate calls your team can never convert. And one line we never go near: nothing in our targeting or ad copy ever offers or implies paid travel or any other patient inducement. That violates patient brokering laws and LegitScript standards, and it is exactly the behavior that got this industry locked out of Google in the first place.
A ringing phone is not a KPI
Every account runs dynamic call tracking with per-campaign, per-ad-group, and per-keyword attribution. We can deploy the platform or work within the call tracking stack you already have. Then we go a step further and classify the calls themselves. Wrong numbers, solicitations, and calls with no path to admission get excluded from optimization. Calls that reach a verification of benefits get flagged as qualified. Google's bidding algorithms then learn from qualified calls only, which means the machine gets steadily smarter about finding the callers your program can actually help. To be clear, classification is about what the algorithm learns from, never about how a caller gets treated. Every person who reaches your line deserves a real conversation, and nothing we do changes that.
How we represent your brand, and how we protect your data
Your ads are often the first contact a family ever has with your facility, so we hold them to a clinical standard, not just an advertising one. That means stigma-free language, no fear-based creative, no exaggerated claims about outcomes, and full compliance with Google's addiction services policies in every ad we write. It also means privacy-conscious measurement. No patient-identifying information ever flows into Google or any ad platform from our work. Qualified outcomes reach Google's bidding system through click-level conversion imports, never through uploads of personal information. Attribution runs on campaign data and de-identified outcomes, which keeps your compliance officer comfortable and your census pipeline intact.
How we tie ad spend to actual admissions
Clicks and calls are half the story. Each month we reconcile campaign data against your real admissions to see which campaigns produced verifications of benefits, which of those became admits, and what each admit cost. That number, cost per admit by campaign, drives every budget decision we make. It is also the only honest way to know whether your marketing is working. If your current agency cannot tell you your cost per admit by campaign, they do not know whether it is working either. And because admissions data is protected health information, this reconciliation happens under a business associate agreement, and we only ever handle the minimum needed to tie an admit back to a campaign.
What the first 90 days look like
- Week 1
Forensics and tracking
Full account audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, call tracking deployed, campaign parameter capture live, and a baseline cost per admit established from your historical data.
- Weeks 2 through 4
Rebuild
New campaign architecture by level of care, negative keyword walls against job seekers, free-treatment intent, non-admitting geographies, and information-only searches, ad copy rewritten to comply with Google's addiction services policies, and landing pages aligned to intent.
- Months 2 and 3
Optimization to admits
Bidding shifts from proxy conversions to qualified calls and verifications of benefits. Budgets rebalance monthly toward the campaigns producing the cheapest admits. Reporting becomes a dashboard you can read in 90 seconds instead of a 40 page PDF.
After 90 days you will know your cost per admit by level of care. Most operators have never seen that number.
What we won't do
- We won't run your ads without LegitScript certification in place.
- We won't buy leads or work alongside lead generators.
- We won't hold your ad account hostage, because you own it, always.
- We won't report clicks as results.
- And we won't take your money if we don't believe we can move your census.
See what this looks like on your account
The Free Account Scan is a recorded teardown of your actual Google Ads account. You'll see where spend is leaking, what your tracking is missing, and what your cost per admit likely is. No sales call required to get it.
Ready to forecast your census?
Let's build a marketing engine measured in admissions — with attribution your whole leadership team can trust.