2024 ANNUAL REPORT
2024 State of Rehab Marketing: PPC & SEO Benchmarks
Real PPC and SEO benchmark data from $7.5M in managed rehab ad spend and 65 SEO clients. See average cost per lead, cost per admit, organic traffic growth, and full-funnel conversion rates across treatment centers in 2024.
PPC BENCHMARKS
2024 Paid Media Performance: Full Funnel Data
Cleaned dataset — clients with 6 or more months of active PPC management, outliers excluded. Aggregated across SUD-focused treatment centers. All data anonymized.
SEO BENCHMARKS
2024 Organic Performance: Traffic, Keywords & Authority
Aggregated across 65 active SEO clients throughout 2024 — including SUD, mental health, and dual diagnosis facilities. Data sourced from Semrush, comparing performance at start of engagement versus end of 2024.
SEO results vary significantly based on domain age, existing authority, competitive market, and how long the engagement has been active. These aggregates include both newer domains with high growth rates and established domains with slower but more meaningful gains. Individual results will differ.
A NOTE ON TRANSPARENCY
Why We Publish the Real Numbers
Because the industry has a honesty problem — and facilities deserve better than a sales pitch dressed up as data.
Be Cautious of Benchmarks That Sound Too Good
Facilities shopping for marketing partners regularly hear claims like "we can get you admits for $2,000" or "our cost per VOB is a fraction of the industry average." These numbers aren't just optimistic — they're often fabricated. Agencies that lead with impossibly low benchmarks are either cherry-picking their best-case data, excluding major cost components from the calculation, or simply telling facilities what they want to hear to close a deal.
The reality is that treatment center marketing is expensive, competitive, and complex. A realistic cost per admit in 2024 — based on our cleaned dataset of SUD clients with six or more months of data — was $14,987. Facilities that plan budgets around $2,000 per admit are going to be disappointed, underfunded, and looking for a new agency within six months.
A Note on Variance in This Data
This report aggregates performance data across a mix of in-network and out-of-network facilities. Out-of-network programs typically see higher cost per admit due to a smaller pool of viable leads and a more selective verification process. In-network facilities often benefit from broader insurance acceptance and higher VOB conversion rates.
The PPC benchmarks in this report use our cleaned dataset — clients with six or more months of active management and outliers excluded — which we believe gives the most defensible view of what typical performance looks like. MH and dual diagnosis sample sizes were not large enough to publish as standalone benchmarks without risking misleading conclusions. We've noted this rather than obscure it.
We publish this data because we believe facilities make better decisions when they have accurate benchmarks. If an agency is quoting you numbers that look nothing like what you see here, ask them to show you the methodology behind their claims.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What the 2024 Data Actually Tells You
Five things every treatment center operator should understand before setting a marketing budget — across both paid and organic channels.
Paid and Organic Are Not Interchangeable
PPC delivers leads immediately but requires continuous spend to maintain volume. SEO compounds over time — the 69.8% average traffic growth in 2024 represents organic infrastructure that continues generating leads without ongoing ad spend. Facilities that invest in both channels consistently outperform those that rely on one alone. The question isn't which channel to choose — it's how to sequence them given your current census pressure and budget.
Most of Your PPC Budget Is Lost Before the VOB
Only 18.9% of paid leads completed a VOB in 2024 — meaning more than 8 in 10 leads never got verified. That's not purely a marketing problem. It's a combination of lead quality, speed-to-contact, and intake process. The facilities consistently outperforming this benchmark respond faster, qualify smarter, and make the next step easier for the lead to take. The cost of a lead isn't $409 — the real question is what's happening to the other 81%.
Traffic Value Is the SEO Metric That Actually Matters
The average client saw traffic value grow from $307K to $580K — an 89.2% increase. Traffic value translates organic rankings into what that same traffic would cost in paid media, which makes it the most useful SEO metric for treatment centers. A facility ranking for high-intent addiction treatment keywords is essentially generating paid-media-equivalent traffic without the ongoing spend. That's the compounding return that makes long-term SEO investment worth it.
The Viable VOB Stage Is Where Targeting Gets Tested
43.8% of completed VOBs came back viable in 2024. More than half of the leads that made it to verification didn't match the facility's payer mix or level of care. Tightening ad targeting to match your accepted insurance types and geographic service area has a compounding effect — it raises viable VOB rate, lowers cost per admit, and reduces the admissions team's time spent on leads that will never convert.
$14,987 Per Admit Is a Baseline — Not a Best Case
The cleaned 2024 average cost per admit was $14,987 across SUD-focused clients with six or more months of data. This excludes outliers and short-tenure clients that skew the number higher. The facilities in our client base that consistently operated below this benchmark shared common traits: tight payer mix targeting, fast lead response, structured admissions follow-up processes, and CRM systems that actually tracked where leads were dropping. Cost per admit is a systems problem as much as it is a marketing problem.
SEO Results Vary — But the Direction Is Consistent
Across 65 clients, the aggregate SEO numbers are strong. But the range within that data is wide — some clients saw 2,000%+ traffic growth, others saw flat or negative results due to domain age, competitive markets, or short engagement periods. What's consistent is the direction: facilities that committed to SEO for a full year with a structured content and link-building strategy saw meaningful compounding gains. The outliers on the low end were almost always newer domains or engagements that started too late in the year to show results.
HOW TO USE THIS DATA
Comparing Your Numbers to the 2024 Benchmark
These benchmarks are most useful when you treat them as a diagnostic tool — not a report card. Here's how to put them to work.
Pull your own PPC funnel data for 2024
You need the same five numbers: total ad spend, leads generated, VOBs completed, viable VOBs, and admits. If you don't have all five, start identifying the gaps now — most facilities track spend and leads reasonably well, but viable VOBs are rarely tracked separately from total VOBs. That distinction is the most revealing number in your entire funnel. Without it, you're optimizing blind at the most critical stage.
Calculate your SEO baseline
If you're running SEO, pull your organic traffic, total keywords ranking, and estimated traffic value from Semrush or Ahrefs. Compare your growth rate against the 69.8% traffic average and 47.9% keyword average. If you're significantly below, it's worth understanding why — newer domain, less competitive content investment, or a market that's harder to break into. Each has a different fix, and knowing which one applies to you is the first step toward closing the gap.
Identify where your paid funnel is breaking down
Divide each funnel stage by the one above it to get your conversion rates. Lead → VOB gaps are almost always a lead quality or speed-to-contact issue. VOB → Viable VOB gaps point to payer mix misalignment in your targeting. Viable VOB → Admit gaps are nearly always an admissions operations problem — undertrained staff, no structured follow-up cadence, or a CRM that isn't supporting the process. Knowing which stage is underperforming tells you exactly where to invest next.
Use cost per admit as your single north star metric
Cost per lead is easy to game and easy to report. Cost per admit is the only metric that accounts for everything between the click and the census — lead quality, VOB rate, payer mix, admissions conversion, and all the operational variables in between. It's harder to calculate and harder to optimize, which is exactly why most agencies don't report it. Build your marketing budget around a target cost per admit, work backwards to understand what funnel performance is required to hit it, and hold every channel accountable to that number.
Looking for the Most Recent Data?
Our 2025 State of Rehab Marketing report covers PPC performance benchmarked against $16.5M in managed ad spend — giving treatment center operators the most current view of what paid media actually costs and converts in behavioral health.
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