How much do Facebook and Google ads costfor a clinic in Malaysia?

Google Ads cost whatever the auction decides, and Facebook ads work the same way, so neither platform has a price list you can look up. Within a budget you set, each click on Google or each thousand views on Meta is priced against other advertisers. What a clinic should plan around isn’t the price of a click. It’s the cost of a new patient who attends and pays.

This guide explains how the auction works, shows what Malaysian advertisers bid on related search terms, answers “how much do 1,000 Facebook ads cost” plainly, and gives you a table to turn a click price into a patient price. For the full picture of measuring ads by patients, start with performance marketing for clinics.

How is the price of a Google ad decided?

Google runs an auction each time someone searches. According to Google’s help page, your ad’s position depends on your bid, the quality of your ad and landing page, the extra information in your ad (such as a phone number), the context of the search, and how strong the competing ads are. The bid is the most you’re willing to pay for a click. Google also says that what you actually pay is often less than that maximum, and that highly relevant keywords can win a higher position at a lower price.

Two consequences for a clinic. A page that matches what the patient searched for lowers your cost. And your cost per click isn’t a number you set; it’s a number you earn.

Average cost per click, as Google defines it, is the total cost of your clicks divided by the number of clicks. You set a daily budget and Google spends up to it. A RM100 daily budget doesn’t guarantee a number of clicks.

How is the price of a Facebook or Instagram ad decided?

Meta also runs an auction. Its own page says the winner isn’t picked on the highest bid alone: Meta weighs the bid together with estimated action rates (how likely the person is to take the action you want) and ad quality. An ad people respond to can win against a bigger bid.

Meta reports a number called CPM, short for cost per 1,000 impressions. An impression is one showing of your ad on a screen. Meta’s help page defines CPM as the cost per 1,000 impressions. Worked out, that is your spend divided by impressions, times 1,000.

What do advertisers bid in Malaysia?

The only Malaysian price data that Google publishes openly is the bid estimate in Keyword Planner. We pulled it in October 2026 for Malaysia, in English. It’s an estimate of what advertisers have bid for a spot at the top of the first results page. Google defines the low figure as roughly the 20th percentile of those bids and the high as roughly the 80th.

That is not a price list. It’s not what your clinic will pay per click, and it’s certainly not what you’ll pay per enquiry or per patient. Keyword Planner returned no bid estimate for most patient-facing treatment searches. These are the related terms that did return one:

Source: Google Ads Keyword Planner, Malaysia, October 2026. Bids are in RM. These are terms people type when shopping for marketing help, so read them as a sense of how competitive the market is, not as a clinic quote. Treat the spread as the point: the same word can be cheap or expensive depending on who is competing. Your own account, after a few weeks, gives a better number than any table.

How much do 1,000 Facebook ads cost?

You don’t buy 1,000 ads. The question usually means CPM, the cost of 1,000 impressions. In plain terms: how much does it cost to put your ad in front of 1,000 screens.

The arithmetic is simple. Suppose, for illustration only, your CPM is RM20. Then 1,000 impressions cost RM20, and a RM3,000 month buys about 150,000 impressions. We aren’t quoting a Malaysian CPM because we couldn’t verify one from a primary source. Your Ads Manager shows your real CPM, and it moves with your audience, your creative and the season.

What CPM can’t tell you is whether anyone booked. A low CPM with an offer nobody wants costs more per patient than a high CPM with an offer people act on. Impressions are a cost input, not a result.

From click price to patient price

Here is the number to compute. This is an illustrative example: a clinic spends on Google search, and the same chain applies to Meta with a different starting figure. Assume 40% of enquiries book, 80% of bookings attend and 90% of attendees pay. That gives an enquiry-to-patient rate of 28.8%.

Cost per new patient is the cost per click divided by the share of clicks that become enquiries, divided again by 0.288. The table shows cost per new patient in RM.

Read down the 5% column, then across the RM3 row. Cutting cost per click from RM5 to RM3 saves RM139 per patient. Lifting the page from 3% to 8% at RM3 saves RM217. A better booking page often does more than a cheaper bid, and you control it. The same logic applies after the enquiry: a faster reply or a better follow-up changes the 40% and the 80%. See lead response time and no-shows.

What else adds to the cost?

The platform bill is only one line. A fair budget also includes:

• Whoever manages the account. Agencies and freelancers charge in different ways: a flat monthly fee, a percentage of ad spend, a fee per result, or a project fee. Ask which, and what is included.
• Creative. Photos, video and copy that stay inside Malaysian healthcare advertising rules.
• A landing page or booking flow that turns clicks into enquiries.
• Tracking. If you can’t see which enquiries became patients, you can’t read any cost.

Our guide on the clinic marketing budget shows how to set the ad line from a patient target, and patient acquisition cost shows how to calculate each rung of the ladder. HPA’s marketing system page describes how the ads and tracking are built.

What should your monthly ad report show?

Ask for these, whoever runs your ads:

1. Spend by platform.
2. Enquiries, with how many were real conversations.
3. Booked and attended appointments from those enquiries.
4. New paying patients and their revenue, from your clinic’s records.
5. Cost per enquiry, per booked appointment and per new patient.

If a report stops at clicks, impressions or the platform’s own conversions, you have the cost of attention, not the cost of a patient.