Budget is an output, not an input
What should we spend is the wrong first question, because the answer depends entirely on numbers that are yours: what an admission is worth, how many empty beds you are funding, and how well your admissions team converts. Two centers in the same city can justify budgets that differ tenfold and both be right. So we refuse to hand out a monthly figure, and you should distrust anyone who does. What we can hand you is the calculation, and it takes about twenty minutes with your own data in front of you.
Gather three numbers first
- Average admission value. Average net revenue per admission episode, weighted by your payer mix. Your billing data has this.
- Open capacity. How many additional admissions per month you can actually serve. Marketing past capacity buys busy signals and resentment.
- Funnel rates. From your own history: what share of qualified calls become admissions (call-to-admit rate), and what share of ad clicks become calls or forms. If you cannot answer these, instrument first: call tracking plus CRM stages, as covered in calculating cost per admission.
The backward calculation
Work from admissions to dollars, in four steps:
- Admissions needed: how many admissions per month you want from paid search, bounded by open capacity.
- Calls needed: admissions needed divided by your call-to-admit rate.
- Clicks needed: calls needed divided by your click-to-call rate.
- Budget: clicks needed multiplied by your market's cost per click, pulled from your own account history or from Google's Keyword Planner for your exact geography and keywords, never from a national average.
Then run the sanity check that protects you: budget divided by admissions needed equals your projected cost per admission. Compare that to your average admission value. If the projected cost per admission is a small fraction of admission value, you have room to be aggressive. If it is uncomfortably close, fix the funnel before scaling the spend.
Expectations for the first ninety days
Budget-setting is iterative. The first month of a new account is data acquisition: real search terms, real costs per click, real click-to-call rates. Judge the math, not the mood, and re-run the calculation monthly with actuals replacing estimates. Two failure patterns show up constantly: judging the channel before a full admissions cycle has played out, and buying more calls than the admissions team can answer, which quietly torches the call-to-admit rate. If calls are ringing out, fix missed-call leakage and speed to lead before adding a dollar of budget. The broader channel strategy lives in our Google Ads guide for rehabs.
Raise, hold, or cut: the decision rules
Once live, one metric governs the dial: cost per admission by channel against your target.
- Raise when cost per admission is comfortably under target, capacity is open, and call answer rates are holding.
- Hold when cost per admission sits at target but the funnel shows strain. Fix conversion before spending more.
- Cut or restructure when cost per admission runs persistently over target after the funnel is fixed. The problem is usually keywords, geography, or landing pages, not the budget number.
If you want a second set of eyes on your math before you commit, send us your three numbers.