Dermatology
Book more cosmetic patients without thinning the medical schedule.
A dermatology practice sells two different things. Medical dermatology fills the calendar and an insurer pays for it. Cosmetic dermatology is chosen, paid for directly, and priced by the practice rather than by a payer.
Dermatology marketing usually runs both out of one budget and reports them in one number. That number is the average of two prices, and it describes neither.
So the practice quietly grows the half it could already fill, and the half it wanted stays where it was.
Dermatology marketing treats two businesses as one budget.
The two buyers do not search alike. Someone whose skin has been wrong for two weeks types the problem and takes the first appointment available within a few miles of home or work. Someone weighing a cosmetic treatment reads for weeks, works through several practices’ before-and-after pages, and finds out what it costs before anyone picks up a phone.
One is a same-week decision. The other is a considered purchase that happens to be sold by a physician. A website organized around the physicians and their credentials answers neither of them, which is how most practice sites are organized.
Underneath the search problem sits a geography problem. Dermatology demand concentrates, and it concentrates tightly. In one Manhattan account we saw a single ZIP code produce 499 of the 628 leads. A practice reading that report at city level would have called it a citywide campaign and kept paying for the rest of the map.
The fix is a reporting decision before it is a media decision. Paid search priced per service line. Local search at neighborhood scale. And measurement that reaches the booking. Doing all of it once is normal. Doing it separately for a practice that is really two practices is the part that gets skipped, because it doubles the reporting and nobody is paid extra for it.
What we do
Five things, and the first one is arithmetic.
Split the account by service line before touching a bid
Medical and cosmetic get their own campaigns, their own landing pages and their own cost per lead. Then the report can say which of the two businesses the budget bought. In the accounts we run, that separation is built before anything is bid, because a single blended figure is the number that talks a practice into doubling spend on the half it could already fill.
Pages that answer the money question, not the medical one
What a cosmetic appointment costs. Whether insurance touches it. How soon someone can be seen, and what happens once they book. Anything that belongs to a physician's judgment goes to your physicians, and we do not draft it for them to approve.
The Spanish half of your market, if your market has one
A translated page is not a Spanish page, and a bilingual patient can tell straight away. Ad groups, landing pages and a front desk that can answer in the language the search was typed in. In the account below, that segment turned out to be the cheapest attention in the media.
Local search at neighborhood scale
The Google profile, the reviews and the map results for the few miles a practice is actually chosen from.
Tracking that gets from the click to the booked appointment
This is the piece most dermatology accounts skip. A call resolves to the campaign that rang the phone, a form to the page it was filled on, and the booking back to both of those. Until that exists, a cost per lead is a media number, and nobody in the building can tell you what a patient cost.
What happened in one Manhattan dermatology account.
From 15 February to 20 May 2026 we ran paid search for a Manhattan dermatology practice. We do not use client names, so that description is as far as it goes. The figures under it are unrounded.
$19.80 → $10.86
- Leads produced
- 628 on $6,495
- Blended cost per lead
- $10.34
- Spanish ad group click-through
- 9.2% vs 4.3%
March was the best month of the three: 248 leads at $7.85 each. April went the other way: 27% more per lead than March, on spend that had not moved, with part of the distance won back in May. That is why the figure at the top of this section is the period and not a month.
The result worth the meeting was not the headline. The Spanish-language ad group returned a 9.2% click-through rate against 4.3% for its English equivalent, at a lower cost per lead, and by the end of the period it carried the second-largest spend in the account. Nothing about that practice changed except the language the ad was written in. The audience nobody was serving was the one searching in Spanish.
Said plainly: these are leads, not booked patients. That practice has no lead-to-client tracking connected, so $10.34 measures media efficiency and not what a patient costs to acquire. We will not let it be read as the second thing. We measured the lead because the lead is where this account’s measurement stopped.
Connecting that tracking is the defined next step in the account, and it is the first thing we would do for a practice arriving with the same gap. Three months, one channel, one practice. A result, not a pattern.
The longer version of the same argument, in a vertical where we have a two-year arc instead of three months, is on the urgent care marketing page. The slower half of the work, and how organic search compounds, is scoped on its own.
How we start
Two analyses, then one budget.
Every engagement opens with a free analysis, and for a dermatology practice we run it twice: once for the medical side, once for the cosmetic side. Where you appear today for the searches each half depends on. Who is holding those results. What your Google profile is missing against the practices outranking it. What your current account pays for a lead, per service line, where that can be worked out at all. It arrives in writing and it is yours whether or not you hire us. It is run by the people who would do the work.
If you do hire us, month one is structure and measurement. We separate the two service lines in the ad account and on the site, make a booking traceable back to the page and the campaign behind it, and settle which searches in which neighborhoods are worth paying for. Only then does the budget move. Move it before the account can report per service line and the practice ends the quarter holding the same question it started with, having paid for the privilege.
If you want to do the arithmetic before that conversation, the ROI calculator works backwards from a patient-volume goal to the spend it implies.
Questions
What dermatologists ask us first.
- Should medical and cosmetic dermatology live on separate websites?
- Usually not. Two domains split the authority the practice has already earned and double the work of maintaining either. What the two sides need is separate sections, separate landing pages and separate reporting inside one site, so a cosmetic search lands somewhere written for a cosmetic buyer. Separate sites earn their keep only when the two businesses have different names and different front desks.
- What should a dermatology lead cost us?
- Your market sets it, along with your service mix and the share of nearby search you hold already, so read any published figure as a reference point rather than a target. In the Manhattan account we ran, three months of paid search from February to May 2026 returned 628 leads on $6,495 of spend, a blended $10.34 each. Those are leads. Nobody in that account can yet tell you what a patient cost.
- Is advertising in Spanish worth it for a practice like ours?
- Only if your market has that audience and your front desk can answer in the same language. Where both are true it is often the cheapest attention in the account. In the practice above, the Spanish ad group returned a 9.2% click-through rate against 4.3% for the English equivalent, at a lower cost per lead, and it carried the second-largest spend of any group.
- How do we grow the cosmetic side without thinning the medical schedule?
- Buy them separately. Medical demand largely arrives on its own through search and referral, so it needs visibility more than it needs budget. Cosmetic demand is created and then compared, so it needs pages that answer price and process, and a budget carrying its own cost per lead. Run both as one line item and the cheaper half quietly absorbs the money.
- How long before organic search brings us patients?
- Longer than anyone selling it will say. Paid search can be producing leads inside a month once the tracking exists. Organic moves in quarters and compounds over years: for a multi-location urgent care group we run, organic became the largest patient channel over twenty-six months and 88 pieces of content. One dermatology practice in one city is a smaller job, and still not a one-quarter job.
Tell us which half you want fuller.
Send us the two sides of the practice as they stand today: what you spend, what you count as a lead, and which side you want fuller a year from now. What comes back is where you rank for the searches each half depends on, who is beating you inside your own few miles, and what changing that would cost. Read it first. No contract enters the conversation until after you have.