At first glance, paid search for EHR vendors looks like a marketer’s dream. Three dollars for a click. A few hundred clicks, and you’ve got a database full of prospects. Do the math, and it seems like SQLs and meetings should be flowing at a bargain.
But anyone who has managed real-world campaigns knows the dream doesn’t survive first contact with reality. The ad platforms happily take your spend, but the economics of turning those clicks into confirmed sales meetings are far harsher than the dashboards suggest.
Why the numbers lie
The surface math goes like this:
$3 per click
1,000 clicks = $3,000
60+ raw leads generated
2–3 meetings come out the other end
On paper, a meeting for $1,500 doesn’t sound bad. But those figures hide a more uncomfortable truth: the funnel isn’t a straight line, it’s a series of sieves. At each stage - lead qualification, sales follow-up, meeting coordination, volume drains away. And every leak in the funnel magnifies the cost of what’s left.
This is why EHR marketing managers look at reports showing “66 leads this month,” but their sales teams only see two meetings. The money didn’t disappear. It evaporated in the gaps between funnel stages.
The workload you don’t see in the CPC
Those “$3 clicks” also carry baggage. Campaigns don’t run themselves.
Every week, someone has to tune bids, refresh ad copy, and make sure landing pages haven’t stopped converting. Every month, someone has to review performance, analyze competitors, and reallocate budget. Most teams using Google Ads spend at least 20–40 hours a month on these activities, which translates into $2,000–$4,000 of staff time that never shows up in your cost-per-lead reports.
And then there’s the tech stack: automation platforms, CRM integrations, attribution software. Together, they typically cost another $1,000–$3,000 per month just to keep the machinery running.
What looked like a $1,500 meeting now quietly edges toward $2,500 before you’ve even factored in sales time.
Healthcare makes the problem worse
Paid search is volatile in every industry, but healthcare adds its own twist:
Seasonality: Flu season, vacation season, even insurance cycles - all shift when practices will engage
Competition: Dozens of vendors bidding on the same EHR keywords push CPCs up in sudden spikes
Budget cycles: Practices don’t evaluate technology evenly throughout the year, leaving campaigns underperforming in off-cycles
A campaign that looks good in January may be underwater by March - not because you ran it badly, but because the buying environment shifted.
The funnel fragility problem
The real killer is how fragile the funnel is. Every stage introduces failure points:
A weak landing page depresses conversions across the board
Loose lead scoring floods sales with noise, wasting their time
Sales development bottlenecks leave qualified leads waiting too long
Scheduling friction kills momentum even after sales says, “This is a good one.”
The problem isn’t one leak. It’s that each leak compounds the next. By the time you’ve patched one hole, two more have opened downstream.
Why smart vendors diversify
None of this means paid ads are useless. It means they’re structurally expensive and inherently volatile. That’s why the savviest EHR vendors don’t bet the farm on PPC ads alone. They diversify.
Some layer in professional meeting coordination, turning interest into guaranteed conversations. Others lean into account-based marketing that targets fewer practices but with higher impact. Still others build referral networks or invest in AI search content strategies that reduce the marginal cost per meeting once established.
The common theme: they treat paid ads as one input, not the foundation.
The bottom line
Paid ads promise scale but hide fragility. They make leads look cheap, but make SQLs and meetings expensive. And they create the illusion of predictability in a market - healthcare - where predictability is the one thing you’ll never get from an ad platform.
That doesn’t make Google Ads “bad.” It makes it a tool with sharp edges. Smart EHR marketers use it carefully, with realistic expectations, and always with a backup plan.
Because at the end of the day, sales teams don’t want clicks or leads. They want conversations with practices. And those conversations cost more - and take more work - than a CPC report will ever admit.
