Ask a plastic surgery practice what a Google Ads click is worth and you usually get one of two answers. Either "whatever the click costs," or a shrug.
Both answers leave money on the table. A click is not worth its price. It is worth whatever happens after it: whether the person requests a consult, whether they show up, and whether they book surgery. The last of those steps, the share of consults that turn into surgery, moves the value of a click more than anything else in the account. It is also the number most practices have never written down.
This chapter works through the math from the click to the surgery, with Dallas numbers where they exist and clearly labeled examples where they don't. By the end you should know the most your practice can afford to pay for a click, and which number to work on to afford more.
A Click Is Worth Whatever Happens After It
For a plastic surgery practice, every paid click has to travel the same road before it becomes revenue:
- A click on your ad.
- A consult request, by form, call or text, counted the way Chapter 1 set up.
- A consult that actually happens, in person or virtual.
- A surgery booked, usually with a deposit.
- What the practice keeps from that surgery, after the surgery center, anesthesia and staff.
Here is that road with example numbers. They are illustrations, not benchmarks; replace every one with your own:
- Click. $12 per click.
- Consult request. 1 in 20 clicks, so $240 per request.
- Consult held. 7 in 10 requests show up, so about $343 per consult.
- Surgery booked. 1 in 4 consults, so about $1,371 per surgery patient.
If this example practice can afford to spend $1,500 to win a surgery patient, a $12 click works, with a little room to spare. If it can only afford $1,000, the same click loses money on every patient, and no amount of keyword work will fix that.
Three Published Prices for a Tummy Tuck, and None of Them Is Yours
The last line of that table, what a surgery patient is worth, is where practices most often reach for the wrong number. Search for what a tummy tuck costs and you will find three respectable figures that disagree:
- The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reports a 2024 surgeon's fee range of $8,000 to $13,500 for a tummy tuck. ASPS notes that the fee "does not include anesthesia, operating room facilities or other related expenses."
- CareCredit, the medical financing company, reports a 2026 national average cost of $8,777 for a standard tummy tuck, from a survey it commissioned.
- RealSelf, the review site, shows an average of $12,626 in Dallas-Fort Worth, based on what patients report paying, which usually includes everything.
None of them is wrong, and none of them belongs in your math. The number that does is what your practice keeps from a tummy tuck after the surgery center, anesthesia, supplies and staff time. A practice with its own accredited operating room keeps a different share than one that rents time at a surgery center. Only your books know the answer.
The Consult-to-Surgery Rate Is the Number Most Practices Guess
Of all the numbers on the road from click to surgery, one does the most work: the share of consults that turn into booked surgery.
We looked for a public benchmark. The plastic surgery societies publish procedure counts and fees, and the review and financing companies publish costs, but we could not find a trustworthy published figure for how many consults become surgeries. That is not surprising. It depends on the surgeon, the procedure, the price, the patient and the consult itself.
So it has to come from your own records. Count the consults held over the last six to twelve months and the surgeries booked from them, and do it by procedure, because a breast augmentation consult and a facelift consult rarely convert at the same rate. If your practice management software tracks both, this takes an afternoon. If it doesn't, start tracking it now. Every decision in the chapters that follow leans on it.
Move the Surgery Rate and the Click Price Follows
Here is why that one number matters so much. Keep the example practice exactly as it was, able to spend $1,500 per surgery patient, with 1 in 20 clicks requesting a consult and 7 in 10 showing up. Now change only the share of consults that book surgery:
- At 1 in 5 consults booking, the most a click can be worth is about $10.50.
- At 1 in 4, about $13.
- At 1 in 3, about $17.50.
- At 1 in 2, about $26.
Nothing about the ads changed. The practice did not raise its bids or rewrite a single headline. It simply got better at turning consults into surgeries, and in doing so earned the right to pay more for every click. In Dallas, where Keyword Planner showed top-of-page bids for "mommy makeover dallas" reaching about $19, that is the difference between sitting out the auction and winning it.
What Patients Say Decides the Consult
If the surgery rate is won or lost in the consult, the best evidence of what wins it is what patients say afterward. We read reviews of Dallas-Fort Worth plastic surgeons on RealSelf and on the practices' own sites. The same themes came up again and again:
- Being heard. "I never felt rushed or unheard during consultation," one tummy tuck patient wrote.
- Not being sold. One practice's reviewer praised it for being the opposite of "a 30 minute in & out consultation, which often feels like a sales pitch."
- Fast replies. Patients singled out practices that "respond via text amazingly fast."
- Honest prices. "NO unexpected charges," wrote another.
- Shopping around. "I had 4 separate consultations," a rhinoplasty patient said. Your consult is being compared with others.
None of this is a Google Ads setting, and all of it changes what Google Ads can afford. A consult that leaves the patient feeling heard, followed up the same day and quoted clearly is a consult more likely to book. Speed matters before the consult, too. A request answered in minutes is more likely to become a consult at all than one answered the next afternoon.
Consult Fees, Deposits and Financing Change Who Shows Up
Three policies sit between a consult request and a surgery, and Dallas practices handle them very differently.
Consult fees. Several practices we looked at offer free consultations. Others charge. Dr. Rod Rohrich, for example, lists a $250 consultation fee, applied toward the procedure if the patient schedules. A fee usually means fewer consults, and often more serious ones. Free consults usually mean more requests, and a lower share that book. Neither is right for every practice, but whichever you choose changes the example numbers above, so measure it.
Deposits. Some practices take a deposit to hold a surgery date, and at least one Dallas practice lets patients place a deposit and finance the rest. For measurement, a paid deposit is the clearest signal that a consult turned into a patient, and when the patient books soon after the consult, it lands within Google's 90-day window. That is why Chapter 1 recommended sending it to Google Ads.
Financing. CareCredit was named on most of the practice sites we checked, alongside PatientFi, Cherry and Alphaeon. One Southlake practice advertises breast augmentation financing "starting from $130/month." For a patient comparing surgeons, a monthly number can make a quote feel possible. Whether it raises your surgery rate is, again, something your records will tell you.
Different Procedures, Different Ceilings
Running this math once, for the practice as a whole, hides the most useful thing it can tell you: some procedures can afford far more per click than others.
Compare two of the most searched procedures in Dallas. RealSelf's patient-reported averages put a mommy makeover at $17,891 and a breast augmentation at $6,895 in Dallas-Fort Worth. Keyword Planner showed top-of-page bid ranges up to about $19 for "mommy makeover dallas" and about $12 for "breast augmentation dallas."
Suppose, as an example, the practice can afford to spend $3,500 to win a mommy makeover patient and $1,200 to win a breast augmentation patient, with the same click, request, show and booking rates as before. The mommy makeover click can be worth about $31. The breast augmentation click, about $10.50. The same account, the same week, the same bidding approach, and one procedure can comfortably top the auction while the other barely breaks even.
That is why budgets and bids belong to procedure families, not to "plastic surgery" as a whole. Chapter 7 builds bidding on exactly this.
A Patient Is Worth More Than One Surgery
The first surgery is rarely the whole relationship. Patients come back for a second procedure, send friends, and leave the reviews that the next patient reads before booking. Every one of those adds to what a new patient is worth, and a practice that ignores them will underbid for patients who would have paid for themselves several times over.
The discipline is to count only what your records show. If your practice can see that a meaningful share of surgery patients return within a few years, or that referrals from past patients make up a steady part of new consults, add that value to the math. If you can't see it yet, leave it out and let the first surgery carry the decision. Non-surgical treatments that bring patients back every few months belong to the med spa side of the practice, and Chapter 15 covers how to keep that math separate.
Next: Google Judges Your Procedure Page Before You Pay for a Click
Every number in this chapter assumes the click lands somewhere that turns interest into a consult request. That somewhere is the procedure page, and Google grades it before it decides where your ad appears and what the click costs. Chapter 4 is about that page.
The full list of chapters is on the Google Ads for Plastic Surgeons home page.
This is the math we run before we set a single bid on a plastic surgery account, procedure by procedure, and it is where our Google Ads management starts. If you are running your own account, start by pulling last year's consults and surgeries by procedure. That one spreadsheet will tell you more about your ceiling than any keyword tool.
