Owners send me a cost per lead and ask if it is any good. I help businesses of a few kinds, and a lot of the accounts I read are dental practices and med spas. The honest answer is that a published median is a reference. It is not your city, and it is not a patient who showed up.

The figures below are US search campaigns, in US dollars. I work with Canadian practices too. I do not treat a US median as if it were Toronto or Calgary.

Dentistry, from two samples

WordStream and LocaliQ’s 2026 search benchmarks cover US campaigns on Google and Microsoft from April 2025 through March 2026. For Dentists and Dental Services they report about a $73 cost per lead, about $8 a click, a 5.66% click-through rate, and about an 11% conversion rate. Their 2025 edition, covering the year before, had dentistry closer to $84 a lead and $7.85 a click.

LocaliQ’s healthcare report, updated January 2026, looks at a different US sample, from October 2024 through September 2025. They label the figures averages. The footnote says they are medians. General dentistry there is about $85 a lead, about $7 a click, about a 5% click-through rate, and about an 8% conversion rate.

So if you have heard “$75 to $90 a lead,” that is a fair envelope around those two dental medians. It is not a target I would paste into an account. If your report says $90 and a colleague’s says $60, you may both be looking at real accounts. Cities do not share a median.

One mix-up is worth catching. A click-through rate around 5 or 6 percent is how often someone clicks the ad. The share of those clicks that become a lead is the conversion rate, closer to 8 percent in one of these sets and 11 percent in the other. If a report is grading you against 5 percent “conversions,” ask which number they mean.

Nearby categories, which are not your category

I do not have an optometry-only median I will put next to a neighborhood eye exam. Ophthalmology in the healthcare set was about $31 a lead. That is a surgical category.

Orthodontics in that same set was about $72 a lead. Oral surgery was about $55. Plastic and cosmetic surgery was about $103. None of those is an implant consult in your market, and none of them is a med spa. Beauty and personal care, in the broader 2026 industry set, was about $39 a lead. A Botox consult can advertise more like beauty or more like a clinical visit, depending on the offer, the city, and whether anyone calls back. I would rather read your shows than hand you a band from the wrong row.

There is a fuller dental walk-through in what US dental practices pay per new patient, and the med spa version in what med spas pay per consult.

The number the median cannot see

Cost per lead stops at the form or the call.

Here is an illustration. It is not a benchmark. Three thousand dollars in a month. Fifty leads. Sixty dollars a lead, which looks tidy next to either dental median. Twenty book. Fourteen show up. That is $214 per patient who actually arrived.

A $73 lead and a $214 patient are different decisions. I cannot tell you which problem you have until I see whether those fourteen were exams, implants, or something elective, and what happened between the lead and the chair. Sometimes the ads are expensive. Sometimes nobody called back. Sometimes the page promised a visit the front desk could not explain.

Search, and the answer a patient gets from an AI tool

You can show up in the map pack and still be missing when someone asks ChatGPT, or Google’s AI answer, who to see. Those tools repeat what is already public. Your website, your listing, your reviews. If the phone, the hours, or the treatments disagree, the answer gets muddy. Making those facts match, in plain language, is the work. There is no switch for it.

If you want these figures read against your own account, bring last quarter’s spend, leads, bookings, and shows to a consult. I will tell you whether you are near a number I recognize, and which line on the report I do not believe yet.