Google Ads first. Search captures patients who are already looking for a treatment and converts at a much higher rate. Add Meta once search is capped in your market, to reach people who have not started looking yet. Most med spas that run Meta first burn budget on leads that never book.
Intent. A person searching 'Botox near me' or 'laser hair removal cost' has decided to do something and is choosing where. A person scrolling Instagram has not. Search leads book at several times the rate of social leads in nearly every med spa account we have run, and they book sooner. Until a med spa is showing for every high-intent search in its service area, Meta money is being spent reaching people who are, on average, months away from a decision.
Once search is capped, meaning you are already showing for the searches that matter and adding budget no longer adds volume. At that point the only way to grow is to reach people before they search, and Meta is the best tool for that. Meta also works for specific jobs: filling a new device's schedule, promoting a seasonal offer, retargeting people who visited your Botox page but did not book, and reaching an existing patient list with a new service like GLP-1 weight loss.
If any of this sounds like your practice, start by checking whether AI search can see your site.
Three predictable things. Lead volume looks great and bookings do not follow, because Meta lead forms are easy to submit and easy to ignore. The front desk spends hours chasing people who do not pick up, and starts to distrust marketing altogether. And the spa concludes that 'ads do not work,' when the real problem was sequencing. We see this most often in med spas that were sold a Meta-only package because it is cheap to run and the lead counts make good reports.
Early on, nearly all of it goes to Google Search, with a small remarketing layer on Meta so people who visited the site keep seeing the spa. Once search is saturated, Meta grows into a real prospecting budget, often a third or more of total spend, with creative built around specific treatments rather than a generic 'book a consult' message. The ratio depends on the market: a med spa in a dense metro saturates search later than one in a suburb.
Meta restricts before-and-after imagery, anything that implies a negative self-perception, and ads for certain treatments. Weight loss and GLP-1 offers have their own rules. None of this stops a med spa from advertising, but it does mean creative has to be built by someone who has read the policy, otherwise campaigns get rejected or accounts get restricted, usually at the worst moment.
Track booked appointments, not form fills, and attribute them by channel with call tracking and a CRM that records source. Then compare cost per booked consult, show rate and treatment value by channel. In most med spa accounts Google wins on cost per booked patient and Meta wins on reach and new-patient discovery. Both have a job. The mistake is giving Meta the job that search should be doing.
Uday Rajaram is the founder of Medical Marketing Firm. He has spent 22 years in digital marketing, starting as a developer in New York, and has run Google Ads, SEO, and AI search programs for more than 100 medical and cosmetic practices. He is the author of Earned Traffic.
Every guide on this site is written or reviewed by him. The numbers come from our own client accounts and published case studies, never estimates. How we source and update our content · udayrajaram.com
Want me to look at your site the way I looked at this data? Check my site