Facebook Ads · Dermatology Practices
Meta creates demand that search later harvests. For most operators the blended cost per booked appointment is best when both run together — and aesthetics is a restricted category on Meta, so the compliance work is part of the job, not an afterthought.
Dermatology Practices specifically
The method below is the same whichever industry you are in. These are the parts that are not — and they are usually what decides whether the programme works.
Social works for elective procedures where the patient can be persuaded to want something. It does not work for psoriasis, and attempting it invites both poor performance and Meta's health-claim enforcement. We keep medical dermatology out of paid social deliberately.
Dermatology before/after imagery is simultaneously the most persuasive creative available and the most restricted — by Meta's policies and by state medical boards that differ from each other. Creative is written and cropped to both from the start.
Laser resurfacing has real search volume; many adjacent cosmetic procedures have almost none because patients do not know they exist. Social is where that demand is made, and it arrives later as a branded search you already own.
The method
Meta is where a patient first sees a treatment, a result, or a practice they had not considered. It is a consideration channel, and judging it on last-click return will lead you to switch it off just as it starts working. The tell is a rise in branded search after Meta spend increases — that is Meta working, attributed to Google.
Targeting has largely commoditised; creative has not. Before-and-after where regulations permit, practitioner-led video, and offers built around the treatments that actually carry margin. In this category the practitioner on camera reliably outperforms the polished brand asset, which is inconvenient and consistently true.
Advertising rules for aesthetic and health services differ by market and are tightening. Meta enforces its own health and personal-attribute policies on top of that, and repeated violations put the whole ad account at risk. We build to the rules rather than around them — one complaint costs more than the campaign returns.
Platform-reported return will overstate Meta and last-click will understate it. We report blended cost per booked appointment across all channels as the primary number, with platform figures as secondary, and run holdout tests by market where volume supports it. Neither number is the truth on its own.
Category specifics
The method does not change between industries. The questions your patients actually ask, the sources the engines trust, and the rules you have to advertise inside all do.
Prompts we run for this category
Rules this category advertises inside
Citation layer
Each engine resolves a local recommendation through a different set of sources. These are the ones that decide whether a dermatology practice gets named — and most of them are not your website.
Scope
Specifics rather than adjectives — and an equally specific list of what it does not cover, because unclear scope is the most common cause of a bad first quarter.
Included
Not included
What to expect, when
3 questions
Blended cost per booked appointment across all channels, plus holdout tests by market where volume supports it. We report the blended number as the primary metric and platform-reported return as secondary.
We brief and direct it. Practitioner-led video shot on a phone in your own practice consistently outperforms studio production in this category, so the constraint is usually your team's time rather than budget.
It depends on your market. Several US states restrict it, and Australia and the UK have their own rules. We check before anything runs, because getting this wrong risks the ad account and, in some markets, the licence.
Before any retainer, we run fifty prompts across four engines and show you exactly where you stand against the operators being named instead.
Request your audit