Google Ads for Group Practices: One Campaign or Multiple?
As a group practice grows, managing Google Ads for therapists becomes far more complex than it was for a solo practitioner. Once you have multiple clinicians offering varied specialties and operating across separate physical locations, a single, general advertising approach rarely works. Practice owners frequently ask whether they can run all their advertising under one campaign or whether they need to build several distinct campaigns.
The short answer: yes, you need multiple Google Ads campaigns if you have multiple physical locations or if you offer drastically different clinical services, such as combining general talk therapy with psychological assessments.
Understanding how to structure your Google Ads account properly is what separates a high-performing lead-generation system from one that wastes money on mismatched search traffic and inaccurate targeting.
Understanding Google Ads Account Hierarchy for Group Practices
To understand why multiple campaigns are often necessary, it helps to know how a Google Ads account is structured. The platform operates on a three-tier hierarchy:
Account Level: Holds your billing information, primary user access, and overall administrative settings.
Campaign Level: Where you set your daily budget, geographic location targeting, language, and bid strategy.
Ad Group Level: Nested inside each campaign, ad groups contain tightly themed keywords, ad copy, and specific landing page destinations.
Because settings like geographic location targeting and daily budget are controlled strictly at the campaign level, any business requirement that demands separate locations or separate budgets requires separate campaigns.
When You Should Use Multiple Campaigns
While it might seem easier to lump all your services into one campaign, there are clear scenarios where splitting them into separate campaigns is necessary for your ads to work properly.
You Have Multiple Physical Locations
If your practice operates offices in two different cities or states, you must run a separate campaign for each location.
Since location targeting happens at the campaign level, running a single campaign for multiple offices creates real problems. A potential client in one city might see an ad for the office across town, or your daily budget might get consumed almost entirely by one location, leaving your other office with no leads at all. For a closer look at how targeting shifts by market, see our guide on how location changes Google Ads results across different cities.
Creating a separate campaign for each location lets you control your budget per office. You can allocate more spend to a new location that needs clients while keeping a smaller budget on an established office that's nearly full, customize the geographic radius around each site, and write ad copy specific to the local community.
You’re Advertising Drastically Different Services
If your practice offers, for example, both standard psychotherapy and specialized psychological assessments or testing, these services should never share a single campaign.
Psychotherapy operates on a completely different business model than psychological testing. Someone looking for couples counseling is searching for a recurring relationship solution; someone searching for an adult ADHD evaluation is looking for a specialized diagnostic service.
Assessment keywords also carry a much higher cost per click, since testing services command higher overall fees. If testing and talk therapy share a single budget, testing keywords can easily swallow your entire daily spend. Structuring keyword targeting and search themes by specialty keeps each service funded appropriately. This principle holds for any two services that are notably distinct from one another, separating them into distinct campaigns ensures each gets the budget it needs without starving the other of leads.
You Want To Advertise Telehealth Options
If your practice offers telehealth alongside in-person care, you need a separate campaign to manage geographic boundaries effectively.
Your in-person campaign should tightly target a local radius around your physical clinic. Your telehealth campaign, on the other hand, needs to target a much larger geographic area; potentially your entire state or neighboring states where your clinicians are licensed. Keeping these separate ensures you aren't paying for in-person clicks from searchers hours away who won't drive to your office, while still letting your telehealth ads reach a broader audience.
When a Single Campaign Can Work
There are scenarios where a group practice can successfully run a single campaign. If your practice operates out of one physical location, serves one local geographic area, and offers closely related talk therapy services, a single campaign works well.
For example, if you offer individual anxiety therapy, depression counseling, and grief support out of one office, you can organize these into separate ad groups inside a single campaign; one ad group for anxiety keywords, one for depression keywords, and one for grief support keywords.
Because all these services share the same location targeting and similar costs per click, housing them inside one campaign lets Google's algorithm allocate your daily budget flexibly to whichever service sees the highest search demand that week. Just make sure the landing pages behind each ad group are built to convert, since even a well-structured campaign underperforms if the website experience doesn't match the ad.
Frequently Asked Questions
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It depends on your structure, not a fixed number. As a rule of thumb, run one campaign per physical location, plus a separate campaign for any service that has a meaningfully different cost-per-click or search intent (such as testing versus talk therapy), plus a separate campaign for telehealth if you offer it.
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Not effectively. Because daily budgets are set at the campaign level, one shared budget across locations means Google's spend can drift disproportionately toward whichever office generates more competition or traffic that day, leaving other locations under-served.
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It takes more setup time up front, but it typically improves return on ad spend, since each campaign's budget, targeting, and ad copy can be tuned to the audience it's actually reaching instead of being diluted across mismatched searches.
If you're expanding your group practice, opening a new office, or introducing new clinical services like testing, reach out to RevKey. We specialize in structuring and optimizing complex Google Ads accounts for growing therapy practices, ensuring your ad spend delivers maximum return across every location and specialty. Contact us today to review your account structure and prepare your practice for scalable growth.
Related Reading
• Advantages of Using Google Ads
• How Location Changes Google Ads for Therapists in LA, Texas, NYC, and Chicago
• How to Attract Your Ideal Clients Using Google Ads Targeting
• Why Your Therapy Website Matters Just as Much as Your Google Ads
Sam D’Andrea, Google Ads Account Manager
Sam D’Andrea is a digital marketing strategist at RevKey, specializing in Google Ads, paid media optimization, and data-driven growth strategies. With hands-on experience managing and testing evolving campaign types. Sam focuses on helping businesses generate higher-quality leads through smart automation, strong audience signals, and accurate conversion tracking. At RevKey, Sam works closely with clients to translate Google’s constant platform changes into clear, effective advertising strategies that drive real results.
