UK Healthcare Paid Search Benchmarks
Most healthcare organisations still don't know what good looks like when it comes to paid media performance. This year's benchmarks, built from £5.5M+ in real UK healthcare ad spend, provide the clarity your leadership needs.
Last year we released our 2024 paid media benchmarks for healthcare, and it ended up becoming one of the most viewed pieces of content on our website.
We think that there are two reasons that they resonated so well:
- Other paid benchmarks are irrelevant for marketing to patients. There are too many regulations, and patient journeys differ significantly from those in other industries, making such comparisons less useful.
- No one else has the breadth and depth of access to paid media performance data that we have. Over a decade in and growing, our ability to anonymise and aggregate paid performance data in healthcare is unmatched.
So we have decided to publish our benchmarks annually, based purely on the performance data we see as the UK’s leading healthcare performance marketing agency. This is the 2025 update – same philosophy, bigger dataset, clearer story.
2025 Paid Media Benchmarks by Specialty
Performance at typical spending levels, ranked by total spend.
| # | Specialty | CTR | CPC | CVR | CPA | Spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Orthopaedics | 6.37% | £1.48 | 4.72% | £31.32 | £664K |
| 2 | General Practice | 7.80% | £1.73 | 7.21% | £24.04 | £513K |
| 3 | Gynaecology | 6.60% | £2.26 | 7.57% | £29.79 | £406K |
| 4 | Cosmetic | 5.95% | £1.68 | 3.68% | £45.66 | £305K |
| 5 | Fertility | 6.78% | £2.63 | 5.76% | £45.72 | £205K |
| 6 | Mental Health | 6.28% | £1.02 | 4.69% | £21.74 | £199K |
| 7 | Urology | 7.30% | £1.29 | 6.68% | £19.25 | £89K |
| 8 | ENT | 6.00% | £1.53 | 8.44% | £18.08 | £40K |
| 9 | Diagnostic Services | 5.71% | £1.88 | 3.25% | £57.93 | £39K |
| 10 | Dermatology | 7.04% | £1.52 | 5.71% | £26.65 | £36K |
Ranked by Year 2 spend. Multidiscipline specialties excluded from analysis.
What We Analysed
Data Included
- £5.5m+ in ad spend
- 433 Google Ads Search campaigns
- 12-month window: Dec 2024 to Nov 2025
- UK-focused, direct-to-patient only
What We Excluded
- Brand and competitor campaigns
- B2B activity and online pharmacy/e-commerce
- Very low-volume campaigns (low spend, clicks or conversions)
- Extreme outliers that would distort averages
When you see a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) here, it's grounded in real, direct-to-patient campaigns in the NHS and private healthcare space. Most benchmarks categorise everything from beauty products to insurance as "health" — these don't.
Headline Paid Media Benchmarks for Healthcare in 2025
For planning, we treat the most recent 12 months (Dec 2024 – Nov 2025) as the live benchmark period. Here’s what a well-run healthcare search account at a sensible scale looks like across our dataset:
Based on 220 campaigns · Total spend: £2,030,638
Year-over-Year Change
| Metric | Year 1 | Year 2 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| CTR | 9.70% | 6.55% | −32.5% |
| CPC | £1.69 | £1.86 | +10.1% |
| CVR | 5.39% | 4.89% | −9.3% |
| CPA | £42.18 | £47.91 | +13.6% |
If your performance is in this ballpark across your core service lines, you're broadly where the market is for campaigns with healthy budgets and decent optimisation.
Economies of Scale: The Real Story
Headline numbers don’t tell the full story.
Because the overall benchmarks above are weighted, they are based on campaigns that are running at scale, with significant budgets and structure behind them. But if we zoom in and treat every individual campaign equally, a very different picture appears:
- A “typical” direct-to-patient search campaign now converts at around 4.9%
- The average CPA for those individual campaigns is closer to £48
Small, fragmented setups are paying roughly double the price per enquiry compared with organisations that treat search as a core, scaled acquisition engine. That gap has widened since last year.
Why does scale matter?
- With increased spend comes more data and better campaign optimisation
- Those providers are more likely to have spent time on their patient journeys, improving their conversion rates
- With scale you typically see better attribution systems
Fragmented, underfunded campaigns are paying roughly double the price per enquiry of strong accounts that are properly set up and resourced.
This is the key takeaway from the 2025 data.
The accounts that grow fastest are the ones that really understand the lifetime value and cross-sell potential of a patient. They're not fixated on getting the cheapest possible enquiry. They know what a typical patient is worth over two or three years, so they're comfortable pushing CPAs up to the point where they can dominate their category and still make the numbers work.
What Were the Biggest Changes in 2025?
Comparing the last two years across hundreds of campaigns, three things stand out:
- Clicks are harder to win. Average Click Through Rate (CTR) has dropped by around a quarter to a third. There's more competition and more clutter on the results page.
- Clicks are slightly more expensive. Cost per Click (CPC) has nudged up. The increase looks small in percentage terms but hurts when paired with weaker CTR.
- The gap between small and scaled accounts has grown. For "typical" campaigns, Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is up by ~14% year-on-year. For well-structured accounts at scale, CPA has stayed essentially flat.
If your board is asking why you can't achieve last year's cost per lead with this year's budget and structure, you have a clear, data-backed answer: the market has moved, and the only place that's holding the line is at scale.
How Different Specialties Are Performing
A single “healthcare CPA” number doesn’t tell us much. A £23 enquiry in one speciality is fantastic; in another, it’s unrealistic.
Below are 2025 benchmarks by speciality for campaigns run at meaningful scale:
| # | Specialty | CTR | CPC | CVR | CPA | Spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Orthopaedics | 6.37% | £1.48 | 4.72% | £31.32 | £664K |
| 2 | General Practice | 7.80% | £1.73 | 7.21% | £24.04 | £513K |
| 3 | Gynaecology | 6.60% | £2.26 | 7.57% | £29.79 | £406K |
| 4 | Cosmetic | 5.95% | £1.68 | 3.68% | £45.66 | £305K |
| 5 | Fertility | 6.78% | £2.63 | 5.76% | £45.72 | £205K |
| 6 | Mental Health | 6.28% | £1.02 | 4.69% | £21.74 | £199K |
| 7 | Urology | 7.30% | £1.29 | 6.68% | £19.25 | £89K |
| 8 | ENT | 6.00% | £1.53 | 8.44% | £18.08 | £40K |
| 9 | Diagnostic Services | 5.71% | £1.88 | 3.25% | £57.93 | £39K |
| 10 | Dermatology | 7.04% | £1.52 | 5.71% | £26.65 | £36K |
High-Efficiency Specialties
Typical CPA ~£18–£22These areas combine relatively efficient click costs with clear, symptom-driven intent and straightforward pathways:
If you operate in these spaces and your CPAs are consistently above £30–£35, there is usually room to improve targeting, structure, or conversion.
Strong But More Competitive Specialties
Typical CPA ~£24–£32Here the intent is still fairly clear, but there’s more provider choice and more research behaviour:
For these lines, a CPA in the high twenties/low thirties is normal. If someone is promising £10–15 CPAs here at scale, they're either talking about a tiny pilot, using a very loose definition of "lead", or both.
High-Intensity, High-Cost Specialties
Typical CPA ~£45–£60+These are the sectors where many internal stakeholders panic when they see the numbers – and where benchmark data is most useful for resetting expectations.
If you're working in these spaces, chasing a £20 cost per enquiry is not realistic because you're paying to influence complex, high-stakes, and often multi-stage decisions. The right question is whether the unit economics make sense given treatment profit margins.
Year-on-Year Pressure by Specialty
At an individual campaign level (the way most reporting happens internally), many specialties have seen CPA rise sharply in the past year:
| Specialty | CPA Change YoY |
|---|---|
| Urology | +3x (more than 200%) |
| Fertility | +60–70% |
| General Surgery | +60–70% |
| Dermatology | +60–70% |
| Mental Health | +~40% |
| Ophthalmology | Flat / slightly down |
This matters when you're showing performance back to a board or leadership group. A 20–40% year-on-year increase in CPA doesn't automatically mean the channel is failing; in many cases, you're tracking broader market pressure.
How to Use These Benchmarks
- Set expectations by specialty. Map each key service line (e.g. ENT, fertility, orthopaedics) to the relevant band above. Mark where your current CPA sits vs that band. Decide whether the problem is channel strategy or business model.
- Consolidate spend to unlock scale. The clearest signal in the data is the scale effect. To get closer to £23 and away from £48-style CPAs: don't budget across dozens of micro-campaigns. Group by clear themes — specialty, intent, or geography. Ensure each campaign has enough volume to exit "learning" phase.
- Shift focus from clicks to conversion. With CTR down and CPC up, clicks are more of a vanity metric than ever. Tighten keyword-to-landing-page relevance. Shorten enquiry forms, especially on mobile. Every 1–2pp gain in CVR has a material impact on CPA.
- Tie search performance back to patient access. Rising CPAs and falling CTRs signal it's getting harder for patients to navigate the noise. The organisations that invest in better digital journeys — and structure their media properly — will be the ones patients can actually reach.
A fertility CPA of £60 might be completely acceptable when average treatment value and utilisation are factored in. The mistake is judging that against an ENT CPA of £18 and concluding something is "broken".
Deep Dive: Consolidating Spend
In practice, that often means saying no to internal requests for ever more granular structures that look neat in a spreadsheet but destroy efficiency in the real world.
Deep Dive: Conversion Focus
The levers that still consistently move CPA is conversion rate:
- Tighten the link between keyword, ad text, and landing page
- Shorten and simplify enquiry forms, especially on mobile
- Test additional value adds (e.g. finance options, free eligibility checks, call back scheduling) rather than assuming patients will call you from generic information
- Make sure response times and follow-up processes match the promise on the page; search will surface failures here quickly
Deep Dive: Patient Access
All of this isn’t just about cheaper leads. If you’re serious about patient-centred care:
- Patients need to find the right service quickly when they’re searching
- They need clear, trustworthy information once they land
- They need frictionless ways to take the next step – book, enquire, or get triaged
For larger hospital groups, this also means fixing the leakage between marketing and booking. If enquiries are handed off loosely to consultants and never tracked, you're effectively paying to fill independent private lists, not your own service lines. An end-to-end pathway — ideally with online booking or at least centralised triage — is the only way to be confident that the leads you're paying for actually turn into patients in your system.
How We Built These Benchmarks
Methodology
- Pulled performance data from 433 Google Ads Search campaigns across UK-focused healthcare providers, covering December 2024 – November 2025
- Removed brand/competitor campaigns, B2B, online pharmacy, and ultra-low-volume campaigns
- Cleaned the data for extreme outliers so that a handful of unusual campaigns couldn't skew the numbers
- Two analytical views:
- Simple campaign averages (each campaign counts once) — this is where the "typical" £48 CPA comes from
- Spend-weighted performance (bigger campaigns influence averages more) — this is where the £22.76 CPA benchmark comes from
In the article above, we’ve used the spend-weighted view as the main benchmark set because it reflects what happens when you run search as a scalable channel. We’ve used the campaign-average view to illustrate how much more you pay if you stay stuck in fragmented, low-scale setups.
This Will Stay an Annual Series
This is our second year publishing these healthcare-specific search benchmarks, and we’ll keep doing it.
The questions don’t change:
- “Is our CPA good for our speciality?”
- “Are we ahead of or behind the market?”
- “What would it take to improve?”
What does change is the gap between organisations that treat search as a strategic channel – with proper structure, scale, and patient-centred journeys – and those that don’t.
Healthcare paid media benchmarks are a great place to start when trying to answer the question, "What does good look like?" However, for every CPA, CTR and CVR, there are a hundred other factors that influence each provider's return on ad spend – from seasonality and landing page quality to brand equity and geographic location.
If you would value some bespoke feedback and analysis on your existing paid performance activity, get in touch with an expert at Medico Digital, the UK's leading healthcare marketing agency. We would be happy to help.