INTAKE METHODMeta ads for hormone & metabolic clinics
REQ 0001
ONE CLINIC PER METRO

For clinic owners

Her daughter's wedding is in eight months.
She's already dreading the photos.

That's your patient. Not "women 45–60 interested in wellness." A woman with a date on the calendar and a specific fear about it.

We've spent years on the phone with her. We know what she says, what she's scared of, and what she never says out loud. Now we write the ads that bring her to you.

Set your budget →

You pay Meta directly. We never touch your ad account balance.

Her chart

You've heard the first column across a desk. The second one she only says to herself. The third is why she isn't on your calendar.

What she saysWhat she's thinkingWhy she hasn't called you
“COVID happened and everything changed. I started working from home and it all just… changed.”I let myself go.She was 46 in 2020 and nobody has ever mentioned that to her. So she’s filed this under discipline, which means she’s shopping for a diet, not a doctor. You aren’t in the category she thinks she’s in.
“I lost the weight and the belly stayed. Nothing seems to work.”There’s something wrong with me.Nobody told her estrogen moved the fat. So she’s concluded she’s the broken variable, and your clinic reads as one more thing to fail at. She won’t risk it.
“Nine o’clock comes around, I haven’t really eaten all day, and I see the sweets and I can’t stop.”I have no willpower.She thinks the fix is trying harder. Nobody books an appointment to buy willpower, so she never gets as far as looking you up.
“My knees hurt when I walk.”I’m just getting old.Aging isn’t a condition to her, it’s a verdict. She isn’t shopping for a treatment because she doesn’t believe one exists. This one is walking past your building.
“I wear stretchy clothes so I don’t have to buy a bunch of new clothes.”I’ll get back into the old ones.She’s still in. The thin ones are hanging in her closet and she won’t donate them. She just hasn’t been shown a door that looks any different from the last five she walked through.

Every one of these women is inside your radius right now.

What she says

You've heard every one of these across a desk. So have we, a few hundred times, on the phone.

I used to be a runner.I get winded walking upstairs and I’m tired of feeling this way.My knees hurt when I walk now.I wear stretchy clothes so I don’t have to buy a bunch of new clothes.I just want to keep up with my kids.I booked a trip in a few months and I want to be able to enjoy it.My daughter’s getting married in June.I want to look good in photos.I’ve done Weight Watchers, keto, all of it. Nothing works.I was on Wegovy for eight months and I still have a belly.I don’t really eat all day and then at nine o’clock I can’t stop.My mom had diabetes and I just found out I’m pre-diabetic.I just want to feel like myself again.

Composites. No real patients, no real names.

Why we know her

We spent years on the phone with your patient before we ever ran an ad for a clinic.

Not a survey. Not a persona deck someone assembled in an afternoon. Hundreds of hours of real conversations with women in their fifties who were prediabetic, exhausted, and out of ideas, listening to them describe it in their own words, over and over, until the pattern was impossible to miss.

That's what's underneath every ad we write for you. Her language, not a copywriter's.

Included

The panel

Set your monthly ad budget. Everything below recalculates, including what we guarantee.

YOUR MARKET

Tampa–St. Pete, Orlando, Sarasota, Fort Myers, Melbourne, Daytona

MONTHLY AD BUDGET$5,000
$2,500$15,000

REFERENCE RANGE $2,700$6,500 · typical hormone & wellness practice

Estimated leads42–56at $89–118 per lead, August in your market
Provisional guarantee25 leadslocks in writing at day 28, off your post-learning data
If you book 40% of them16–22 consultsindustry average, not a promise. that part is your front desk.
Management fee$1,750/mostarts day 28
Setup$1,500today. covers 4 weeks of build + calibration
DUE TODAY$1,500covers 4 weeks: build + calibration
FROM DAY 28$1,750/mo+ $5,000 to Meta, paid by you

Nothing else is charged until day 28. Month to month after that. Cancel any time.

MethodWhy the ads work, how the number gets set, and the two things that will make it look wrong before it looks right

WHY THE ADS WORK

We don't start from a blank page. There's a shape we already know works on your patient, and it isn't a guess: it's the sequence that worked on the phone with her a few hundred times before we ever put it in a feed. She meets someone else and recognizes herself. She finds out the thing she's been quietly blaming herself for was never her fault. And then she's given somewhere to take that.

That's the control. It's where we start, not where we stop. Every other angle we run has to beat it on cost per lead, and the day one does, it becomes the control and the old one gets buried. We're not attached to being right. We're attached to your number.

What you're actually buying is that we begin from something that already works instead of spending your first two months finding out what your patient responds to. You've watched it work, incidentally. That's what the chart at the top of this page was doing to you.

It also survives Meta's review better than most, because it never tells her what she feels. That isn't luck. The hormone ads that get flagged are the ones that accuse.

HOW THE NUMBER GETS SET

  1. Days 1–7 We build. Account, campaigns, landing page, intake and follow-up, server-side tracking. Nothing is live, because building it properly takes a week.
  2. Days 8–14 Ads go live and this is your worst week. Meta's algorithm doesn't know your patient yet, so it guesses, and guessing is expensive. Leads come in and they cost more than they will later. This is normal. We do not touch anything.
  3. Days 15–28 Costs settle. This is your real data.
  4. Day 28 Your number locks in writing, calculated on days 15–28 only. We throw the first week out because using it would flatter us. Monthly starts. Clock starts.

Nobody knows what a hormone lead costs in your zip code until they've run one for a month. Anyone who guarantees a number before that is guessing with your money and hoping you don't do the math.

WHY WEEK ONE LOOKS BAD

Meta needs about 50 conversions a week before its algorithm stops guessing and starts predicting. Until it gets there your costs are volatile and high. This is the single most common reason clinic owners fire an agency in week two, and it is almost always the wrong decision: they quit right before it starts working, then blame the ads.

We're telling you now so that when week one looks ugly, you already know why, and you don't have to wonder whether you hired the wrong person.

Two things follow from it. We don't touch the account for the first two weeks. Every budget change, audience tweak, or new creative resets the algorithm to day one, and an agency that looks busy in week one is an agency starting over every Monday. And we don't bill you monthly until day 28, because charging a management fee to sit still would be theft.

And structure matters more than patience. At your budget, an account pointed straight at “bring me an inquiry” never sees 50 of those in a week either, so it sits stuck permanently. Not for two weeks. Forever. Most of the hormone accounts running on Meta right now are in exactly that state and their agencies either don't know or aren't saying. Getting around it is a structural problem with a structural answer, and it's most of what you're paying us for. It's also why we spend a week building before anything goes live.

YOUR WINDOW: AUGUST INTO SEPTEMBER

Your market has a season. Diet and weight searches spike every January, Weight Watchers sees roughly a 130% jump at New Year, and it stays strong through spring before sliding into the fall.

But demand is only half of it. Every weight and hormone advertiser in America knows about January, so they all arrive on the same day and bid the auction up. Your costs climb right alongside your demand and the two mostly cancel each other out. January, February and March land within about three points of each other. February and March edge it slightly, because the appetite is still there and a lot of January budgets are already spent. But three points is noise, not a plan. If you're deciding where to weight a fixed annual budget, lean a little toward February and March. We wouldn't hold back in January over it.

The gap actually worth planning around is later. In January the two forces at least fight each other. In November and December they don't: demand is at its floor while Q4 retail pushes Meta's costs about 15% up, so both point the same way. Those months run roughly 40% under February. That one isn't noise, and it isn't a reason to go dark either.

Your 30 days runs from August into September, so your number is priced across both, day by day. Not off whichever month you happened to sign in. That stretch runs below the yearly average. Which means a conservative number now, and a spring that beats it comfortably.

Every agency guarantees a number. None of them mention that February is worth nearly double December. Yours is written for the month you're actually in.

The guarantee

The number we lock at day 28, or we work free until you get it.

Qualified leads, in your hands the second they come in. We guarantee the thing we control end to end. We are not going to promise you booked patients and then spend month two arguing with you about whose fault it was.

It's a floor, not a forecast. At $5,000/mo in Tampa / Orlando / SW FL opening in August, the estimate is 4256 and today's provisional floor is 25. We guarantee the floor because we'd rather beat a number than explain one. If we only ever hit the floor, you should fire us.

It moves with your budget, your market, and your month, because pretending a lead costs the same in Naples and Ocala in January and October would be a lie and you'd find out in week three. Two settled weeks of your own data replaces the estimate with something we'll both sign.

The clock runs on days your ads are actually delivering. If Meta pauses them, the clock pauses too. More on that below.

Where it stops: we find your patients and we put them in front of you the second they raise a hand. Calling them back is yours. Booking them is yours. What happens in the room is yours. We won't pretend those are things we control, and we won't charge you as though they are. If you want us further down the funnel than this, that's a real conversation and a different invoice.

The part nobody tells you

Meta can turn hormone ads off. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't run them.

This category gets reviewed hard. Ads mentioning hormones, testosterone, or HRT draw automatic review, disapprovals, and sometimes account-level restrictions. It happens to good accounts run by competent people. It is the single reason most agencies in this niche push you toward SEO instead.

How we lower the odds

What happens if it happens anyway

We'd rather you hear this from us now than find out in week three. Every agency in this category knows it. We're just the ones telling you before you pay.

Where these numbers come from

Every estimate on this page is somebody else's research until day 28, when it becomes your account. Here's whose.

$200–$400 per patient, per monthPublished range for hormone therapy patients, from a BHRT training body. Promotional source, so treat it as a sanity check on your own number rather than gospel. You know what yours is worth. The point is that it recurs, which is the only reason any of this arithmetic works.
$2,700–$6,500 typical ad budgetPatientGain, 2020–2025, across anti-aging, wellness, hormone and IV practices. Average $3,900/mo.
50 events to exit learningMeta's own documented threshold: roughly 50 optimization events per ad set per rolling 7 days before delivery stabilizes. Below that, costs stay volatile. It's why your first two weeks look the way they do.
40% of leads bookLiine, analysis of 278,000 healthcare leads (2023). 39.9% of marketing-sourced leads ever book an appointment. Most owners guess much higher.
$54–$68 healthcare lead, MetaSuperAds, drawn from $3B of ad spend. Averaged $54 across the 13 months to June 2026, finishing near $68, up roughly 55% in a year.
$68–$150 hormone leadMedical Marketing Firm, reporting on hormone therapy campaigns. Their own case moved a practice from $290 to $68 through restructuring, which tells you the range is real.
January spikes, fall bottoms outPublished Google Trends research across six countries: weight-loss search peaks in spring, bottoms in autumn. Weight Watchers sees roughly 130% more dieters each New Year.
Q4 costs ~15% higherSuperAds CPM benchmarks. Holiday retail bids the auction up while your demand is at its floor.

What none of this is: hormone clinics, on Meta, in your metro. That study doesn't exist. These are the closest honest neighbours, which is exactly why we run your account for a month before we promise you anything.

Questions

Who pays for the ads?
You do, directly to Meta, on your own ad account, with your own card. We never touch your budget and we never mark it up. You keep the account and every lead in it if we part ways.
You've only talked about women. We treat men too.
We know, and most clinics do. He's mid-forties to sixty, same as her, usually divorced, used to play ball or lift or serve, and then twenty years of life happened to him. Almost none of what works on her works on him. He doesn't want the emotional angle and he'll smell it coming. He wants to hear that his number is 280 when it should be 600, and that it's fixable. Different copy, different register, same account, no extra charge. Most of this page is about her because she's the harder one to reach and she's usually where the growth is. If your men's side is the priority, say so on the call and we'll build it that way.
Should I be doing this at all yet?
Ask yourself a different question first. What did you spend on the buildout, the equipment, the signage, the branding? And what have you spent on filling it? Clinics in this category don't usually fail because the demand wasn't out there. They fail because every dollar went into things a patient sees after they've already walked in, and almost nothing went into the part that gets them to walk in. If that's you and you still have money to move, you don't have a budget problem. You have an order of operations problem, and it's the one we fix.
What if money is genuinely tight?
Then be honest with yourself, because our first four weeks don't come with a guarantee. Meta's algorithm needs roughly a month before your costs settle, so the leads you buy in week two are the most expensive ones you'll ever buy from us. That's survivable when you can absorb it and dangerous when you can't. The honest test isn't your revenue or how long you've been open. It's whether you can fund 90 days of this without flinching. If you can't, get to where you can and then call us. We'd rather have you next year than break you this one.
Is the math actually going to work?
Run it yourself, with your numbers rather than ours. At $5,000/mo in spend plus our fee you're around $6,750. At roughly $100 a lead that's 50 leads. Book 40% and that's 20 consults. Close half and that's 10 new patients. You know what one of them is worth to you monthly better than we do, but the published range is $200 to $400. Call it $300: that's $3,000 a month in new recurring revenue, from one month of spend. Do it again in month two and you're at $6,000. That's the entire argument, and it only works because what you treat is chronic. You're not selling an appointment. You're enrolling a patient who renews, and that's what makes a $600 acquisition cost reasonable instead of insane. Change any number in that chain to one you actually believe. If it stops clearing, don't do this.
Why is there a $2,500 minimum?
Because below it we can't build you an account that stabilizes. Meta wants roughly 50 conversions a week before it stops guessing, and at a thin budget you never get near that on any event worth optimizing for. There are ways to structure around that, which is most of what you're paying us for, but they need a floor to work from. Under $2,500 your cost per lead stays high and erratic, and you'd blame us. Correctly.
What's a realistic cost per lead?
Depends where you are, which is why the panel above asks. Roughly $60 to $80 in north and central Florida, $75 to $100 through Tampa and Orlando, $95 to $140 in South Florida, and every one of those moves with the month. Healthcare lead costs on Meta have climbed roughly 55% in the last year, so anyone quoting you $15 leads is quoting med spa Botox numbers. Impulse buys off a before-and-after photo. Hormone therapy is a considered purchase and it costs more to acquire. Treat all of it as an estimate until day 28, when it becomes your actual number.
Do I need LegitScript certification?
If you're advertising GLP-1s or compounded medications by name, yes. Meta requires it. If you're advertising HRT and general hormone optimization, usually not. We'll tell you which bucket you're in before you spend a dollar.
Is this HIPAA compliant?
No protected health information passes through the pixel. We track form submissions and bookings as events, and we target demographics and behaviors, never health conditions.
How long until I see leads?
Campaigns are live within 7 days of kickoff, and first leads usually land inside 10. Note those are leads, not the guarantee: your number doesn't lock until day 28, once we have settled data, and the 30-day clock starts then. So you are seeing results in week two and holding a guarantee in week four.
What if Meta disapproves my ads?
Expect some. It's a reviewed category and disapprovals are routine, not a crisis. We rewrite and resubmit, and that's included, not an extra. Account-level restriction is the rarer, uglier version: see the section above for exactly what we do and what you get back.
Why not just guarantee a number now?
Because we'd be making it up, and because the first two weeks of any Meta account are its worst. The algorithm is still guessing. Cost per lead also swings by metro and by month, so the same budget in Miami in December and Ocala in January are different businesses. A number promised on day one is a benchmark someone read on a blog. A month in, it's arithmetic off your own settled account. Only one of those is worth signing.
Who calls the leads?
You do. We get them to raise a hand and put them in front of you the same second they do. What happens next is the single biggest lever in this whole thing and it's yours, so here are the numbers: healthcare's average response to a new lead is 2 hours and 5 minutes, 27% of leads never get contacted at all, and the odds of qualifying one drop about 80% between the 5 and 10 minute marks. If your booking rate ever comes in under 40%, the problem is almost never the leads. It's the gap between her hitting submit and someone calling her. We'll show you exactly where yours sits.
Can you book them onto my calendar instead?
Sometimes, and it's a different conversation. Optimizing for a booked appointment instead of an inquiry means far fewer events for the algorithm to learn from, which means a higher cost per lead and a harder time getting your account stable at all. It's the right move for some clinics and the wrong one for most at this budget. Ask us on the call and we'll tell you honestly which one you are.
Should I spend the same every month?
No, and we'll say so even though our fee moves with your budget. Volume drops in November and December, most of your patients are telling themselves they'll deal with it after the new year, while Q4 ad costs hit their annual peak. You're paying the most per lead in the month you get the fewest.
So should I go dark in December?
No. Two reasons. The women who do raise their hand in December aren't shopping, they've already decided. They're putting themselves on the hook before the new year starts, which is a better patient than a lot of what January brings you. Fewer, not worse. Often better. And practically: an account that goes dark for a week loses everything the algorithm learned, so you'd be rebuilding from zero in January, in the most expensive auction of the year. Pull the budget back. Don't turn it off. Then load up in February and March. Same annual spend, meaningfully more patients. We'd rather bill you less in a bad month than burn your money proving we were busy.
Is the setup fee refundable?
It covers four weeks: the build in week one, then three weeks of live ads and calibration to set your number. Once that's delivered it isn't refundable but it's yours. The ad account, the leads, the creative, the landing page: all of it is yours and stays yours if we part ways. If we take your money and don't build it, you get it back. That's the only version of this that's fair to either of us.
Am I locked in?
Barely. $1,500 buys four weeks: the build, three weeks of live ads, and your number at the end. That's the entire commitment. At day 28 you're looking at real data from your own account and you decide whether to keep going. If you do, we ask for one month, because we can't hit a guarantee you cancel out of halfway through. After that it's month to month and you can walk whenever you like. There is no annual contract and we're not going to ask you for one.