Census you can actually forecast. An empty seat in a cohort costs you for the whole cycle. The fix isn't more leads — it's inquiries matched to level of care, and an admissions process that answers fast.
Book a 30-minute callMarketing an IOP or PHP program starts before the first ad, with the advertising category you land in: Google requires third-party certification (LegitScript) for US addiction-treatment services, and mental health programs sit under separate rules. Then it is plain description — hours, days, who it suits — and contact paced to your start dates. Fill The Lobby settles the category in week one, an audit rather than a pitch.
In behavioral health the program that calls back first usually admits. Minutes matter more than budget. Every inquiry answered on arrival, day or night.
IOP, PHP and outpatient attract different searches and different clinical fits. Sorting that at the inquiry stage saves your admissions team the calls that were never going to convert.
Therapists, primary care, EAPs, discharge planners. Paid search fills the gaps between them — it doesn't replace them, and we don't pretend it does.
Most inquiries don't admit on the first contact. A structured sequence over the following days, so the ones who hesitate aren't quietly lost.
No outcome claims, no success rates, no testimonials. Reviewed against your state's advertising rules before it runs.
Every empty seat is a cost you carry for the whole cohort.
Inquiries, admissions and cost per admission, visible weekly. BAA signed before any data moves.
We built and run our own clinical platforms — 200+ clinicians, patients in 20+ countries — and we spend our own money on these exact ads every day. Fill The Lobby is that engine, pointed at your practice.
In IOP and PHP the inquiry usually comes from someone else — a mother, a spouse, an HR contact, a discharge planner at a hospital. They are asking on behalf of a person who may not have agreed to any of it yet. Copy written to the patient reads wrong to them, and an intake script written for the patient asks questions they cannot answer.
So the ads speak to the caller as well as to the person who would attend, and the follow-up goes to whoever actually made contact — on a schedule built for a decision more than one person has to make. An inquiry that says not yet is not the same thing as a no, and the sequence is built so it isn't filed as one.
Cohort programs have start dates, and the wait is where admissions leak. Someone says yes on a Thursday for a cycle that begins on the 14th, then spends eleven days deciding again — no contact, no name to call, and a family talking themselves back out of it. The ad did its job. The gap undid it.
So the sequence is keyed to your start dates rather than to the day the inquiry arrived, so the wait has contact in it instead of silence. The same calendar works in reverse: a cohort that is nearly full and one that opens in three weeks do not warrant the same spend, and we pace against your intake calendar instead of a flat monthly number.
All of it sits downstream of the ads, and the ads get reported on cost per admission rather than cost per click, because one of those numbers is easy to inflate and the other is not. paid ads for medical practices An inquiry that rings out at 8pm on a Friday is a cohort seat you paid to create and then left in a voicemail box, which is why missed call recovery sits inside the system rather than beside it, aimed at the window where that person is still looking rather than at Monday morning. Admissions rarely close on the first contact, so patient follow-up carries the days between the inquiry and the start date instead of leaving them to whoever happens to remember. The full eight, and how they hand off to each other, are laid out under what we do. Retention in a program is attendance across the weeks and a clean step-down to the next level of care, so count missed program days as well as intake calls; the patient retention calculator works with either. All of it maps onto the seven leaks we look for in week one.
Searches like “iop los angeles” that name a city add up to the most in California, Texas and Arizona. “Iop los angeles” gets about 600 a month at around $8 a click (Ahrefs, US, September 2026), and most admissions searches never name a city at all. Our state pages list the searches and click costs for every city where they can be measured, so you can see the demand before you choose where to advertise.
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Reviewed September 2026.