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Quarterly research

The Cost of
a Patient

What it costs to reach one prospective elective-procedure patient through search advertising, measured against U.S. consumer prices. Published four times a year.

Get your copy — free21 pages · No cost
Current edition
Second Quarter 2026
Published
Four times a year
Cover of The Cost of a Patient, Second Quarter 2026 editionDownload the PDFQ2 2026

About the report

What this is, and why it exists

What it measures

The price of a single click on a search advertisement, across a fixed basket of elective procedure terms, tracked monthly since 2021 and indexed so that change — not level — is what you read.

Who it is for

Practice owners and administrators who are asked to set an advertising budget and have nothing to set it against. No prior knowledge of advertising is assumed anywhere in the report.

Why we publish it

We build the measurement systems that produce these numbers for individual practices. The same instrumentation answers the broader question, so we publish the answer — including the findings that do not favor advertising.

How it is produced

The method is fixed before the data is collected and published in full inside the report. No individual advertiser, practice or account is identified, and no patient information is used at any stage.

Inside the Q2 2026 edition

What this edition found

Advertising cost rose 2.6 times faster than consumer prices over five years. Medical weight loss led at +192.1%; vision correction fell 28.3%.

  • A five-year index of elective advertising cost against consumer prices and medical care services inflation
  • Seven procedure categories broken out separately, from cosmetic surgery to vision correction
  • Modeled auction prices tested against money advertisers actually spent, with a non-elective control group
  • Cost per click by procedure and by state, with the range across markets
  • The full basket, the method, and six stated limits on what the figures can support

A look inside

Four of the figures you will find in it

Line chart indexing elective advertising cost against consumer prices and medical care services from August 2021 to June 2026. Advertising reaches 157 while consumer prices reach 122.
The headline series. Everything rebased so August 2021 equals 100. The distance between the lines at the right-hand edge is the whole finding.
Table of seven procedure categories with five-year change, from medical weight loss at plus 192.1 percent to vision correction at minus 28.3 percent.
Seven categories, separately. Two of them got cheaper. The average hides both ends.
Map of the United States as tiles, each state shaded by its average cost per click across the elective basket, ranging from $14.04 to $21.91.
Every state priced. All fifty plus the District of Columbia, shaded by what a click actually costs there.
Table of seventeen procedures with the typical state cost per click, the range across states, and how many times more a click costs in an expensive state than a cheap one.
Seventeen procedures, priced individually.A semaglutide click runs about $34 in the typical state. An Emsculpt click runs about $4.50 — and varies nine-fold depending on where you are.This is the table most practice owners turn to first. It is the one that tells you whether the number you are paying is normal.

All of it, free, in one 21-page PDF.

Every figure above, the full method, and the six limits we put on our own numbers.

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Cadence

Published four times a year

Each edition covers one quarter and is released in the quarter after it, because the underlying price data for a month does not settle until two to four weeks after that month ends. Every edition re-measures the full basket, extends the series, and reports what changed. Where a method improves, the change is described rather than applied silently, and prior figures are restated so the series stays comparable.

Q1
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Q2
This edition
Q3
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Q4
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  • Second Quarter 2026Current21 pages · 2026-09-25

    Advertising cost rose 2.6 times faster than consumer prices over five years. Medical weight loss led at +192.1%; vision correction fell 28.3%.

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