Every spring, med spa phones start ringing with the same request: "Can I get my legs done before summer?" It's a great question to hear in January. By May, the honest answer is "partly."
Laser hair removal is a series, not an appointment. The clients who search for it in June are already behind, and the med spa that only advertises when the searches arrive is selling to people it can no longer fully help. This chapter is about reaching them earlier, with Demand Gen, and timing every treatment line to its own calendar.
Laser Searches Peak in June. The Clients Who Book Then Are Already Late.
We pulled US Google Trends data for 2022 through 2025 for the treatments on a typical med spa menu and averaged each month against its own year. For laser hair removal, June is the high point, at 109 on an index where an average month is 100. July is close behind. September and October are the low, at 90.
Now put that next to how the treatment actually works. The American Academy of Dermatology says "most patients need 2 to 6 laser treatments," and that most can have one "once every 4 to 6 weeks." It also tells patients not to tan beforehand.
Do the arithmetic backward. A six-session series has five gaps between treatments. At 4 to 6 weeks each, that's 20 to 30 weeks from the first session to the last. To finish in June, the first session lands somewhere between late November and early February. That start date is our math from the AAD's intervals, not a date the AAD publishes, but the math isn't subtle.
Compare that with the client who calls in June. She can start, but she'll finish sometime in the fall, and summer is an awkward season to be mid-series. The AAD tells laser patients to wear a broad-spectrum sunscreen of SPF 30 or higher every day and to stay out of the tanning bed. A June start isn't wrong. It just isn't the result she was searching for.
So the client you want is the one thinking about summer in November. She isn't searching yet. She's scrolling. That's the job for Demand Gen.
Every Treatment Line Runs on Its Own Calendar
Laser isn't the only treatment with a season, and the seasons don't line up. From the same US Google Trends data, averaged over 2022 to 2025:
- Lip filler peaks in December (114) and February (113). Interest has also risen every year in that stretch.
- CoolSculpting peaks in April (123), with the sharpest swing of anything we checked. Its overall search interest in 2025 was about half what it was in 2022.
- Weight loss injections run high from March through May.
- HydraFacial leans toward late winter, peaking in March.
- Botox barely moves. Its months stay within a few points of average all year.
One pattern holds across all seven: September and October are the quietest months of the year. That makes early fall the time to plan, not the time to panic about a slow calendar.
The practical move is a planning calendar with one row per treatment line: the month searches peak, how long the treatment takes, and the month the Demand Gen flight should start. Laser needs the longest lead because it's a series. Lip filler is usually a single visit, so a flight a few weeks ahead of the December peak can be enough. CoolSculpting's shrinking search interest is its own warning: a line people search for less every year deserves a smaller share of the budget, not a bigger push.
Search campaigns catch these peaks when they arrive. Demand Gen is how you get there first: laser in the winter, lip filler in the fall before the holidays, body contouring after New Year's.
Demand Gen Runs Where Clients Scroll: YouTube, Shorts, Discover and Gmail
Demand Gen is built for the client who hasn't typed anything yet. It runs image and video ads on YouTube, including Shorts, on the Discover feed on phones, in Gmail, and across the Google Display Network, which Google has moved inside Demand Gen. Maps is in testing.
Each campaign can be pointed at some of those places and kept off the rest. For a med spa, that control matters. A laser campaign built around a vertical video might run only on Shorts and YouTube, where a phone is already in someone's hand and the video fills the screen.
In our rollout, Demand Gen comes after Search and Performance Max, not before. It's the top of the funnel, and the top of the funnel is the most expensive place to learn. By the time it launches, Search has shown which treatment lines book and what a booking costs, and Demand Gen can be judged against real numbers instead of hope.
Injectables Lose Lookalikes. Google's Own Audiences Still Work.
Demand Gen's best-known feature is lookalike segments: audiences built to resemble a list of your existing clients. For injectables and anything that names a prescription drug, that feature is gone. As Chapter 9 explained, those ads fall into Google's sensitive categories, which rule out client lists, remarketing and lookalikes.
Google also warns that Demand Gen campaigns start with advertiser-built audiences by default, and may be restricted from serving when the product falls in a sensitive category. The way through is in Google's own help pages: eligible image and video ads will still serve on YouTube and Discover "provided that you use appropriate pre-defined Google audiences." In plain terms, use the audiences Google builds itself, its in-market and affinity segments, and leave the custom lists aside.
Laser hair removal and facials don't sit in the health category's injection wording, so those lines keep more of the toolkit. That's one more reason laser is a natural first Demand Gen line for a lot of med spas: it has the clearest season and the fewest restrictions. Google's teen limits still apply to every cosmetic line, on YouTube just as much as Search.
Demand Gen Needs a Daily Budget Worth Ten Bookings. Fund One Line, Not Four.
Here's the number that decides whether Demand Gen is right for you yet. Google's guidance: set the daily budget to 10 times the cost per booking you're aiming for, or more. Its own example: a $100 budget with a $10 target caps the campaign at 10 conversions a day.
Run that with med spa numbers. If a laser booking from Demand Gen is worth targeting at $50, Google's guidance puts the daily budget at $500. For a whole month, that's roughly $15,000 for one treatment line. Most single-location med spas can't do that for four lines at once, and shouldn't try.
So pick one line and one season. Laser from November through April is a flight with a clear start, a clear finish and a clear payoff in June. Lip filler ahead of the holidays is another. A thin year-round budget spread across the whole menu teaches Google nothing and reaches no one often enough to matter.
Google adds one more guide: a healthy Demand Gen campaign spends about 80% or less of its daily budget while hitting its target. If yours spends every dollar every day, it's squeezed, and Google says it will start buying cheaper, weaker placements to stretch the money.
Shorts Want Vertical Video of Your Laser Room, Not a Bikini Shot
Demand Gen lives or dies on creative. Nobody on YouTube Shorts asked to see your ad, so the first two seconds have to earn the next ten.
Film vertical video on a phone, in your own space. The laser device and the treatment room. The provider explaining how many sessions it takes and why winter is the time to start. A client, fully clothed, talking about not shaving before a beach trip. It doesn't need a production crew. It needs to look like your med spa and nobody else's.
Keep Chapter 10's image rules in mind. Google's nudity policy follows you onto YouTube, and a bikini-line close-up is exactly the kind of shot that gets restricted there. Legs, arms and an underarm reach work. A swimsuit photoshoot doesn't.
Give each channel what it expects: vertical video for Shorts, a horizontal version for regular YouTube, a few clean images for Discover and Gmail. Demand Gen can use them all in one campaign.
Judge the Winter Flight by June's Bookings, Not January's Clicks
The hardest part of Demand Gen is waiting. A laser flight in December won't show its best results in December. It shows up months later, as people who saw your videos search for you by name, book a consultation, and start a series that finishes in June.
So judge it on a longer clock. Compare this year's laser bookings in spring and early summer with last year's. Watch searches for your spa's name in the brand campaign from Chapter 2. Check how many Demand Gen conversions come from people who watched a video and booked days later, rather than clicking straight through.
And when the season ends, end the flight. A laser campaign still running in July is paying to reach people after their decision window closed. Pause it, keep the videos, and relaunch in the fall with whatever the spring bookings taught you.
Google also lists search lift and conversion lift studies for Demand Gen, which measure how much the campaign changed searches and bookings compared with people who didn't see it. If your account qualifies, they're the cleanest answer to "did this work?"
Next: Three Local Services Categories Cover Part of Your Menu
Demand Gen reaches people before they search. The last paid option in the rollout sits at the other end: Google's pay-per-lead ads at the very top of the results page. There's no Local Services category called "med spa," but three existing ones overlap parts of the menu. Chapter 12 covers which ones fit and whether they're worth it.
Want the whole sequence in one place? The Google Ads for Med Spas guide home has all fifteen chapters. Chapter 3 has the math for what a laser or filler client is worth, which is what sets your Demand Gen target.
In the med spa accounts we run under our Google Ads management, Demand Gen launches one treatment line at a time, a season ahead of its peak.
