In 2025, we see plenty of Therapists and therapy practices aiming to get Clients. There could be so many tactics for getting Leads. But, Google Ads for Therapists has been a consistent source of getting new clients and scaling their therapy practice.
In the United States alone, competition among therapy practices has increased over time. Along with SEO, Referrals, and platforms like Psychology Today, a lot of Therapy Practices also try their Luck with Google Ads. I said ‘Try their Luck’ because, in my experience, there is a lot of room for improvement not only in their Google Ads but also in their website and Landing Pages
So here, I tried to use my experience at Scaleket running Google Ads for Private therapy Practices to get them New Customers. In this guide, I covered everything in this ultimate guide that every therapist or therapy practice owner needs to run Google Ads and get new and consistent clients.
Google Ads Policies for Therapists: 5 Key Rules to Follow
Before you dive into Google Ads, it’s important to understand these 5 rules, so you can avoid Google Ads account suspensions and Ad disapprovals.
Therapists Are NOT Eligible for Local Services Ads (LSAs)
Mental health professionals, including therapists, are not currently eligible for Google’s Local Services Ads program. LSAs are available for select wellness services like acupuncture, personal training, weight loss centers, and yoga studios.
But that doesn’t mean Therapists or Mental health Professionals can’t run other Google Ads campaign types. They can not only run but can also get tremendous results.
No Misleading or Sensational Claims
Google prohibits ads that make exaggerated or misleading health claims, such as “Guaranteed anxiety cure” or “Instant depression relief.” Advertisers must use truthful, fact-based messaging in their Ads and Landing Pages.
Health & Medical Advertising Restrictions
Google imposes restrictions on healthcare-related advertising, including mental health services. Advertisers may need to meet additional requirements, and certain content may be limited based on local regulations.
Privacy & Data Collection Compliance
Advertisers must comply with all applicable laws and regulations regarding user privacy and data collection. This includes adhering to standards like HIPAA in the United States and ensuring that sensitive health information is handled appropriately.
Location & Licensing Requirements
Therapists must only advertise in regions where they are licensed to practice. Google’s policies require compliance with all local laws and regulations, which include proper licensing for healthcare providers.
Best Google Ads Campaign Type for Therapists.
With a lot of different options available on Google Ads (formerly Adwords), here are the Campaigns we recommend to get Leads for your Therapy Practice.
Google Search (Best for High Intent & Quick Results)
- Appear at the top of Google search results when potential clients search for therapy services.
- Use call extensions and Location extensions to make it easy for clients to contact you.
Performance Max (for cross-channel Ads and Retargeting)
- Reaches potential clients across Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Display.
- Best for broad audience targeting and retargeting website visitors.
- Works best when we provide it offline conversion data, which is the converted Leads
Demand Gen Campaigns ( For generating demand)
- Builds awareness and nurtures future clients with engaging visual ads across YouTube, Gmail, and Discover.
- Best to run after you capture significant demand on Google Search
Step-by-Step guide to set up Google Ads for Therapists in 2025 (Search Ads)
Being the Top Choice for your therapy practice Advertising, Google Search Ads have a lot of competition. And in the United States, we have seen high CPC for Search Ads. So, traffic is not cheap.
But, if your Ad is targeted right with the best practices I am going to discuss below, you will get great results and New Clients.
Campaign Objective
Choosing a campaign Objective is fairly simple. Since therapists want Leads, they would select ‘Leads’ as their business objective.
If that’s confusing for you, you can also choose “Create a Campaign without Goal Guidance”.
Campaign Type
Since You are making a campaign for high-intent text ads on Google Search for therapy service, select ‘Search’ here and click next.
Conversion Goals
Based on your Campaign Type and Objective for your therapy practice ads, Google would recommend Conversion Goals, which are the desired actions you want users to take on your website.
In case of Google Ads for therapists, we recommend having both ‘Phone Call’ and ‘Lead Form’ on your Landing Pages.
These are named ‘Phone Call Leads’ and ‘Submit Lead Forms’. You can choose both and click ‘Next’ if you have both options available on the Landing Page.
When to choose Phone Call Leads Only
If you just want to optimize your Ads for Phone calls or you do not have a proper follow-up process for Lead Forms, you can remove ‘Submit Lead Forms’
When to choose Submit Lead Forms Only
In case you just have a Form on your site and no Phone call button, you can choose to remove the Phone call lead from here.
Check our complete guide on Google Ads Conversion Tracking for Lead Generation.
Select Ways to Reach Your Goal
You’ll be asked to choose the important actions for your campaign. This is just an Optional step. You can choose to skip and continue.
Campaign Name
You’ll be asked to name your campaign here. Though you can give it any name of your choice but we prefer to name it in a way so we can identify the campaign. For example. Couples therapy – Leads – 1000$/D – Clicks
Bidding Strategy
This is by far the most important setting in your campaign. Here, you have some smart bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversions value, and Manual Strategies like Clicks and Impression share.
Let’s understand what each strategy means and find out which one would be best for your therapist’s Google Ads.
Maximize Clicks
- Focuses on getting the most clicks for your budget.
- Works best with exact match and phrase match keywords (broad match may waste ad spend).
- It can favor cheaper traffic at less competitive placements.
- Ideal for low-competition niches where fewer advertisers are bidding.
- Best for: Testing new campaigns, driving high traffic, and remarketing lists (RLSA).
- Limitations: Doesn’t optimize for conversions—manual monitoring is required.
Maximize clicks is a manual CPC is a good option to start, especially if your budget is Low. Here, you tell Google the maximum you can pay for a click, and Google places your Ads accordingly.
Pro Tip: Start with a Avg. CPC bid for your Manual CPC campaigns and adjust on basis of results.
Maximize Conversions
Optimizes for getting the most conversions within your daily budget.
Spends aggressively at first and optimizes over time.
Works well when you have a high volume of conversions (Google’s AI needs data to optimize).
Google ignores match types, and this is people-based targeting (even exact match keywords get close variants).
Best for: High-intent keywords, lead generation with sufficient search volume.
Limitations: Inefficient for low-volume campaigns or high-competition keywords.
Pro Tip: If your campaign has low conversion volume, consider Maximize Clicks or Manual CPC instead.
Maximize Conversions with Target CPA is a safer option, but it’s quite restrictive. It’s good if you have good historical conversion data. Google recommends having at least 30 Conversions in 30 days if you want to shift to Target CPA.
Impression Share
It lets you choose the share for the available searches you want to target. It works best when you exactly know your Top converting terms.
But, we don’t use it for our Clients since Google’s Keyword Matching is too broad.
For a brand campaign, it’s the best choice to make.
Which bidding strategy do we recommend for therapy practice ads?
A right Bid strategy would also depend on your Budget, Volume of Searches, and Targeted Location and a lot of other variables. But for lower budgets, we recommend starting with Maximize Clicks or Manual CPC to retain control.
Remember, there is no right or wrong bidding strategy. Something that worked for one business may or may not work for another. So, we recommend testing all these variables and deeply understanding business goals and competition before you decide to scale.
Pro Tip – Testing different bid strategies is great if you have enough budget
Portfolio Bidding Strategy
At the Account level, Google gives you can Option of choosing Shared budgets for your campaigns in Portfolio bidding. You can select this strategy after setting up your campaign, as this is not available at the campaign level.
Customer Acquisition
This Option allows you to exclude existing Clients of your therapy business. But, it requires you to give Google a list of 1000 Customers.
We recommend leaving this option at the start.
Networks
By default, Google selects Search Partners site (Like YouTube, Amazon) and Display Network and recommends choosing it.
But, in our experience, we noticed a lot of Low-Quality traffic. So, we recommend unchecking both of these.
Locations
Selecting the right Location is the foundation of your campaign’s success. Choose the areas close to you. You can either select cities or do radius targeting.
A little Option below Locations chooses ‘Presence or Interest’ by default. This Option means People who are typing for your services with the targeted city name would be shown ads, no matter if they are inside those targeted Locations or not.
For Example, if you are advertising for the keyword “Couples therapy New Jersey” and the Target Location is New Jersey. Selecting ‘Presence or Interest’ will let a person from New York see your Ad if he/she search your target keyword.
Our Recommendation.
We highly recommend choosing ‘Presence:People in or regularly in your Targeted Location‘
Languages
Language targeting allows you to restrict where your ads can appear based on the user’s language settings and the language of the site. Ads can be shown to people who understand any, but not necessarily all, of the languages you select.
Audience Segments
These are the Two Available options in Audience Targeting
- Targeting – Let you narrow down your target audience further based on Demographics, Affinity, In-market, and your Custom Audiences
- Observation – Don’t narrow the reach of your campaign, with the option to adjust the bids on the selected segments
- We recommend keeping it default (Observation) in most cases.
Automatically Created Assets
Enabling it gives google AI the choice of selecting Ad assets from your website. For better targeting, we recommend turning it ‘Off’.
More Settings
- Choose the date when you want to start running your ads
- Ad Schedule – You can schedule your Ads for just office hours here.
- Brands – Target or Exclude Competitors services
Keywords
- Select high-intent keywords (2+ words)
- Keywords like ‘Couples therapy New Jersey’ or ‘Couples therapy near me’ do very well for Therapists
- Use Google Keyword Planner to research your Keywords.
If not sure which keywords to target for your therapy practice campaign, here is our Complete Keyword research guide.
You can choose to segment your Keywords by Ad groups. For example, separate ad groups for ‘Couples therapy’ and ‘teen therapy’ keywords.
This would help having specialized Ad copy and Landing Pages for those keyword themes.
Ads
Headlines
- Use your Top Keywords in headlines
- Add benefit-oriented headlines
- Try to use all available headlines
Description
- Reinforce the headline’s message for description and make sure the combinations look great.
- Use the Keywords to create a sense of relevance
- Try to use all 4 headlines
Extensions
Use extensions like Callouts, sitelinks, Structured snippets, and Phone call extensions to improve click-through rates and performance
Location Extension
If you have an Office or a particular location in your Google My Business, this would let you show your ads on Google Maps.
- Connect your Google My Business to Google Ads
- Add Location extension in Assets at the account level
Google Ads for therapists – Optimization Tips
After setting up your Ad campaigns, it’s important to optimize your campaigns frequently. Here are the Top 5 Optimizations we prefer to boost Leads for your Therapy Practice.
- Optimize Landing Pages based on User behavior. At Scaleket, we use Microsoft Clarity for our Clients and regularly check the recordings and User behaviours to optimize further.
Pro Tip – Identify Top Competitors in Google Ads Auction Insights and check their Landing Page. Provide better offer and better user experience for visitors on your site
- Keyword Optimization is one of the most important optimizations in your Google Ads for Therapists. Check your Search terms report frequently to identify terms that are top-performing and add them as Keywords. Also, update your negative keyword lists to improve traffic quality.
- Optimizing your Ads for Top performing Location helps to improve Leads inside Google Ads. Identify the Top-performing locations inside the User Location report.
- Offline conversions import is what I would recommend every Lead Generation’s Google Ads account to do. It means informing Google Ads about the converted leads and optimizing the algorithm for more quality leads. It not only removes spam leads but also improves the profitability of your campaigns.
- Ad copy is used to convince people to click on your Ads. But we can also use it to filter low-quality traffic. For example, managing ads for a therapy practice at Scaleket, we noticed a high percentage of Leads don’t convert as people prefer Insurance. So, we pinned our Ad descriptions saying “Private pay and out of Network Only”. This helped us filter out traffic even before they click on our Ads.
Here’s our detailed guide on optimizing Google Ads for conversion in 2025. Check this to optimize your Ad performance for therapy practice.
Conclusion
Google Ads for Therapists has been a consistent source of Leads. Setting up your Ad campaigns in the way we mentioned above is the first step is very important. But, following up on your leads as early as possible is also an important factor to get new clients for your therapy practice. So, make sure your Sales team is doing a good job as well.
If you need any kind of help setting up your Ad campaigns or you need advice to figure out is running Google Ads is a good option for you or not, reach out to us at Scaleket and schedule a Free Session with our Google Ads strategist.