How a New York plastic surgery practice nearly doubled its surgeries by getting fewer, better leads.
This New York City practice's previous agency ran Google Ads for one thing: as many leads as possible. It worked on paper, with around 170 leads a month at about $43 each. In the consultation room it didn't. The surgeon was spending his days with price shoppers and quote seekers, and only 20 to 30% of consults became surgeries. We rebuilt the program around motivated patients: tightly focused procedure campaigns, and landing pages that let his results do the qualifying. We accepted a higher cost per lead on purpose. Consults booked rose about 20%, the consult-to-surgery rate climbed to about 50%, and surgeries nearly doubled.
20–30% → ~50%
Consult-to-Surgery Rate
Practice-reported
~2×
Surgeries
Practice-reported
+20%
Consults Booked / Month
Practice-reported
$72
Cost Per Lead
Intentionally up from $43
Snapshot
Client snapshot.
- Location
- New York City (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, Westchester, Northern New Jersey)
- Practice type
- Plastic surgery practice
- Core procedures
- Face and neck lift, rhinoplasty, breast surgery, liposuction, gender-affirming top surgery
- Channel
- Google Ads (search + Performance Max)
- Engagement
- Account takeover from a volume-focused agency, late 2025
- Ad spend
- ~$7,300 → ~$7,900 / month
The Problem
Plenty of leads. Not enough surgeries.
The practice's previous agency measured success by lead count, and by that measure it delivered. Through most of 2025 the account produced around 170 leads a month at roughly $43 each.
The problem showed up in the consultation room. A large share of those leads were price shoppers and people collecting quotes, with no real intent to book surgery. The surgeon's calendar was full, but only 20 to 30% of his consultations turned into procedures. The rest was time spent on patients who were never going to move forward.
Cheap leads were costing the practice money. In a New York market where a surgeon's consult slots are the scarcest resource in the practice, every unqualified consult took a slot a motivated patient could have had.
From the Field
“Cost per lead is the easiest number in healthcare marketing to game and the least useful one to chase. This surgeon didn't need more leads. He needed the right people in his chair. We chose to pay a little more for each lead so he could stop spending his week on quotes that were never going to book.”
Mike Funkhouser
Founder, Practice Growth Co
Audit Findings
How a high-volume account filled the calendar with the wrong patients.
Optimized for volume, not intent
The account was built to maximize lead count, so it rewarded the cheapest, least-qualified inquiries, including the price shoppers the practice least wanted.
Top-of-funnel traffic treated like buyers
Broad, research-stage searches were bought the same way as high-intent procedure searches. Early browsers and serious patients all flowed into the same consult calendar.
Landing pages that didn't qualify
The pages invited everyone to request a quote. Nothing on them helped a motivated patient see why this surgeon was worth choosing, or helped a price shopper self-select out.
The Rebuild
Buy intent, show the results, let the page do the qualifying.
Hyper-focused procedure campaigns
Each core procedure runs as its own campaign: face and neck lift, rhinoplasty, breast, liposuction, and gender-affirming top surgery. Targeting is tightened to the New York metro, and copy is built for patients who have already decided on surgery and are choosing a surgeon.
Landing pages that lead with the surgeon's results
Beautifully designed procedure landing pages put his before-and-after results front and center. Motivated patients see exactly why to choose him, and price shoppers see this isn't a discount practice.
A deliberately higher, still scalable, cost per lead
We accepted a higher cost per lead as the price of better patients, while keeping it at a level the practice could keep scaling. The goal was cost per surgery, not cost per lead.
Results
Fewer leads. More consults. Nearly twice the surgeries.
~50%
Consult-to-Surgery Rate
Up from 20–30%
~2×
Surgeries
Revenue grew with it
+20%
Consults Booked / Month
Practice-reported
110
Leads / Month
Down from ~170, by design
See how these numbers compare with the other plastic surgery accounts in The Plastic Surgery Ad Spend Report 2026. For the market itself, see plastic surgery marketing in New York.
Why This Matters
“On a spreadsheet, going from $43 to $72 per lead looks like we made things worse. In the practice, it meant more booked consults, a close rate that roughly doubled, and a surgeon spending his time with patients who were ready to move forward. That's the number that pays the bills.”
Mike Funkhouser
Founder, Practice Growth Co
What Carries Over
Lessons for practices drowning in unqualified consults.
Judge marketing by surgeries, not leads
Lead count and cost per lead are easy to improve and easy to mislead with. Consults booked and consult-to-surgery rate tell you whether the marketing is working.
A higher cost per lead can be the better deal
Paying about 70% more per lead nearly doubled surgeries. The cost that matters is what it takes to fill the operating calendar.
Let your results do the qualifying
A landing page built around the surgeon's own results attracts patients who want that surgeon, and quietly turns away people who only want the lowest quote.
If your consult calendar is full of price shoppers
Let's fill it with patients who book.
If your practice has plenty of leads but too few of them become surgeries, the fix is usually upstream in who your ads attract. Book a strategy call and we'll show you how we'd rebuild for quality.
Continue exploring
Related work and reading.
Services
Related services
Specialties
Related specialties
Combos
Specialty + service pages
Case Studies
Outcomes from similar engagements
How a Salt Lake City plastic surgeon went from 1 or 2 surgeries a month to 7 or 8 on the same ad budget by focusing on the surgery he loves.
This Salt Lake City surgeon was marketing himself as someone who does everything: faces, noses, ears, eyelids, breasts, bodies. What he actually wanted was a practice built around body contouring. We rebuilt his website, landing pages, story, and search presence around that focus. On the same monthly budget of about $5,000, the account went from 15 to 25 leads and 1 or 2 surgeries a month to 75 leads in January 2026 at about $60 each, and 7 to 8 surgeries a month. More leads, and far better ones.
How a premium Tampa plastic surgery practice cut its cost per lead in half by marketing like the specialists they are.
Two highly trained Tampa plastic surgeons were charging premium prices while their marketing talked about deals. The mismatch cost them twice: fewer leads, and consultations with patients shopping on price. We rebuilt their story and landing pages around their training, experience, and results. On the same budget of about $5,000 a month, cost per lead fell from $67 to $32, monthly leads roughly doubled to about 155, and the practice reported noticeably better consultations.
An Atlanta plastic surgery practice generated 514 leads in 90 days at a $49 blended CPL.
Practice Growth Co inherited a structurally reasonable Google Ads + Meta Ads account where every procedure pointed to the same generic landing page. We rebuilt the landing-page layer procedure by procedure (breast augmentation, facelift, rhinoplasty, liposuction), then turned Meta into a procedure-matched retargeting system that answers each visitor with the offer for the procedure they actually researched. Over March 1 – May 31, 2026, the practice produced 514 combined leads on roughly $25,000 in spend at a $49 blended CPL, with May alone delivering 244 leads (+85% MoM) and a Meta CPL drop from $17.46 to $7.55 (−57%) on 4× the lead volume.