Paid Search for Cardiology: 3.6× Return Case Study

Colonial Heart had just come into the Aligned Cardio portfolio, and almost every new patient arrived through a referral from another practice. That is someone else's pipeline. If a referring group changed direction or slowed down, the schedule felt it, and nobody at Colonial had a lever to pull. They needed demand they actually owned, and they needed it working in weeks.

The leverage was not in the ad account. It was in where the traffic landed. Their site treated every visitor the same, so someone searching for one specific concern got a generic page and left. We rebuilt the site, kept tuning it, and gave each type of patient their own page that spoke to the exact thing they were searching for. Then we pointed paid search at those pages. Small change, most of the weight. Within a few weeks the phone was ringing consistently, every day. We also matched spend back to real patients in the clinic's own records, so what leadership saw was a person who walked in, not a form fill.

The fulcrum held, so we put weight behind it. • $8,040 in paid spend across the first 115 days • 35 patients matched back to clinic records, 17 of them brand new • $29,121 in attributed revenue, a 3.6× return • $473 to acquire a new patient, $230 across all matched patients • 86 patients served in January, 200 in July That last part is what actually matters. Finding the leverage point is the cheap half. The value comes from scaling into it once it holds, so we moved spend from a small test to a steady monthly program and took the same playbook to a second brand in the portfolio, where ads are now live against Colonial's own conversion rate as the benchmark. Two caveats worth saying out loud. Against a mature patient worth about $1,500, LTV to CAC lands between 3.2× and 6.5× depending on whether you count only brand new patients or every matched one. We do not print a single lifetime value number, because the practice is nine months old and anything further out would be a guess. And of the 35 matched patients, 17 were genuinely new. The other 18 were existing patients who called through an ad, which we count toward cost but would not sell as ads reviving lapsed patients.