What can we afford to pay for an enquiry?

The client

The Therapy Lounge is a London hypnotherapy and emotional coaching practice. Sessions run online by video, so clients can be anywhere, and a session is worth about £300 an hour. The practice lives on a steady flow of new enquiries.

The brief

They wanted paid ads that brought in enquiries worth paying for. The catch is the category. Google and Meta both restrict ads for mental health and addiction, so much of the work is writing ads and pages that stay inside the rules.

What we built

• Google Search by treatment. Separate campaigns for addiction and dependency, phobias, stopping smoking and, for a while, childhood trauma. In summer 2025 we capped the generic and vaping campaigns at 20% of spend, paused vaping after it produced no conversions, and moved budget towards the addiction and trauma work.
• Ads and pages written to the health policies. Google rejected 23 of the 46 keywords on the childhood trauma campaign under its health policy, so we kept what was approved. Addiction ads often ran as Eligible (limited), so we did not appeal them and risk wider disapprovals. They send people to separate landing pages on their own subdomain, written in "dependency" wording. That's why the ads kept running.
• Meta retargeting. From August 2025, with 7-day and 180-day audiences built from site behaviour, until the client paused the creative in January 2026.
• Tracking that prices an enquiry. Enhanced conversions, a BigQuery table of leads for offline conversion matching, a Looker Studio report, and a user-ID journey tool that shows how each enquiry moved through the site before it converted.

What happened

• GA4 tracked 316 enquiries through the practice's enquiry form between April 2025 and October 2026. 161 came from Google Ads, at about £60 an enquiry.
• Visits roughly tripled year on year: about 920 a month in 2025 against about 300 in 2024 (GA4).
• October 2025 was the practice's best month on record for enquiries: 6.6x return on ad spend and £253 per booked client, when the practice's lead sheet was matched to ad clicks. The six-month summary to March 2026 came out at 8.4x.

We're not only making more money but were also learning a huge amount about our audience and their activity online. Would highly recommend for lead gen businesses!

Steve Burns, Founder and Therapist, The Therapy Lounge

How the work fits together

Every enquiry was priced: the practice could see what an enquiry cost and what it was worth, from the ad click to the booked client, so spend went where it paid. The work also included the hypnotherapy treatment pages on Webflow, alongside the tracking and journey tool.

Why it worked

• Ads that stayed inside the policies, so they kept running in a category where they're easily switched off.
• A price for every enquiry, from the form and the practice's own lead sheet, so spend followed what brought in clients.
• A client who could see the numbers. The reporting was built for Steve to read, not for us to explain.

Want to see where your own numbers sit? Try the spend check.