Guide
What private patients cost on Google Ads
Eleven searches, their monthly volume and what one click costs. Every figure dated and sourced.
The short answer: between £4.30 and £14.72 for a single click, before anyone books anything. Here is the data, dated and sourced, so you can decide what to do with it.
What does a click cost in private medicine?
| Search | Searches a month | Cost per click | High top-of-page bid |
|---|---|---|---|
| hair transplant uk | 6,600 | £14.72 | £14.06 |
| breast augmentation uk | 2,900 | £6.33 | £6.12 |
| tummy tuck uk | 1,900 | £4.30 | £4.66 |
| breast augmentation london | 1,300 | £7.72 | £8.43 |
| breast reduction london | 320 | £6.84 | £6.75 |
| private orthopaedic surgeon | 260 | £5.78 | £5.67 |
| orthopaedic surgeon london | 210 | £5.30 | £5.35 |
| private knee surgery | 210 | £6.39 | £7.15 |
| cosmetic surgery uk | 170 | £7.18 | £6.78 |
| bariatric surgery london | 50 | £4.76 | £3.94 |
| cosmetic surgery essex | 40 | £5.66 | £7.26 |
DataforSEO Google Ads data, United Kingdom, English, pulled 10 September 2026. Several London-suffixed procedure terms returned no measurable data at all and are omitted rather than estimated.
What do the numbers mean in practice?
A click is not a patient. On a good private medical landing page a small single-digit percentage of clicks become an enquiry, and a fraction of those become a booking. So at £6.39 a click on "private knee surgery", a hundred clicks costs £639 and might produce a couple of enquiries.
That can still be worth it. What it is not is a foundation. The moment you stop paying, the traffic stops that day, and you own nothing you did not own before.
How does a page compare with an advert over time?
A page that answers the question properly keeps producing enquiries after it is paid for. It also gets cited by AI assistants, which do not have an auction. Our own research found that only two of the eleven UK agencies ChatGPT names for private surgeons also appear in Google’s top ten, which suggests that visibility in AI answers is a genuinely separate race and one with fewer bidders.
ChatGPT with web search, 10 September 2026.
What we are not saying
We are not saying stop running ads. Plenty of practices should run them, particularly for a procedure with a short decision window. We do not manage ads and have nothing to sell you there, which is precisely why this page has numbers in it rather than a recommendation.
How are these figures kept honest?
These figures change constantly, which is why every one of them carries a date. We review them every six months. A figure labelled September 2026 still sitting on this page in 2028 would have stopped being a dated estimate and started being a stale claim.
Common questions
Where does this data come from?
DataforSEO Google Ads data for the United Kingdom, pulled on 10 September 2026. The export is kept on file and any figure without a source should be reported to us so we can remove it.
Why are some London terms missing?
Because they returned no measurable data. We report that as absent rather than filling the gap with an estimate.
Do you manage Google Ads?
No. We sell websites, a care plan and one monthly search and AI visibility service. That is the whole list.
Want the checklist as a document?
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We do a compliance read of every published claim as part of the build.