The State of PPC: Benchmarks & Insights for Beauty School Marketing

Here’s your transcript broken up into titled sections for clarity and flow. Each title reflects the primary theme or focus of the portion that follows:

Welcome and Introduction

Chris:
For beauty school marketing. David Steiner, take it away.

David:
Thank you very much, Chris. Yeah, thanks for the intro. As everybody knows, this is the fifth annual, this is my fifth time speaking, so it’s kind of fun to be back and see a lot of these same names, a lot of the fun giveaways and additional speakers and new topics. So yeah, I’m glad everyone’s here…

About the Presenter and Context

Quick little bit about myself… I’m the director of the PPC team at Oozle Media. I’ve been doing Google Ads for a while. The information I’ve got today is based on over $2.5 million in ad spend over the course of 2024.

Clarifying Conversion Tracking

Before we dive into benchmarks, I want to clarify what we’re talking about when we say “conversions.” Specifically, I’ll be referring to pixel fires—conversions the ad platform recognizes.

Benchmark Data Overview

Now let’s look at the actual data. Based on over $2.5 million in ad spend, 9.2 million impressions, and nearly 800,000 clicks.

• Search campaigns have the most conversions.
• Performance Max shows a slightly cheaper cost per conversion, but comes with caveats.
• Display is good for visibility, but not the volume or quality of leads like Search.

Performance Max Campaigns: Pros and Cons

Performance Max might look promising due to cheaper leads, but it isn’t intended to replace Search. It works better when there’s a tangible dollar value like in e-commerce…

Display and Video Campaigns

Display campaigns can deliver cheap impressions and help build brand recognition, but shouldn’t replace search.
Demand Gen and Video campaigns are upper funnel—their goal is awareness, not conversions.

Search Campaign Benchmarks by Program

I also broke down metrics for Search campaigns by program.

• Cosmetology and Aesthetics bring the most conversions.
• Brand campaigns are highly effective, with cheap CPLs and strong CTRs…

Why Brand Campaigns Matter

Running ads on your own brand name serves as a protective and strategic move:

• Defends against competitors bidding on your brand
• Increases visibility—especially on mobile
• Enhances brand authority

Program Investment vs. Lead Cost

There’s a correlation between program cost and cost per lead.

• Longer, more expensive programs (like cosmetology) have higher CPLs.
• Shorter, more affordable programs (like lashes) tend to have lower CPLs.

Interpreting the Box & Whisker Plots

I included visual benchmarks using box and whisker plots to show the range of normal CPLs.

• For Aesthetics, CPLs typically range from $40 to $110.
• For Cosmetology, $50 to $115 is common.

Why Your Results Might Differ

So what if your results don’t match these benchmarks? It comes down to variables—some you control, others you don’t.

Uncontrollable Variables

These include:

• Location
• Programs Offered
• Market Demand
• Local Competition

These factors affect performance but are typically fixed in the short term.

Controllable Variables: Budget

Your budget has a huge impact.

• A small budget can lead to low CPLs but also low volume.
• A large budget might lead to higher CPLs due to diminishing returns.
  Find your sweet spot.

Controllable Variables: Bid Strategies

Your bidding strategy matters.

• Maximize conversions, clicks, value, or set manual bids—each has different outcomes depending on your goals.

Controllable Variables: Keyword Strategy

A solid keyword list is crucial.

• Too narrow? Low volume.
• Too broad? High cost, low relevance.
• Continuously refine for balance.

Controllable Variables: Ad Assets

Make your ads compelling with assets:

• Sitelinks
• Images
• Phone numbers
• Location info
• Structured snippets
  These help you take up more space on the page and boost authority.

Controllable Variables: Conversion Tracking

How you define a conversion is often the biggest differentiator in results.

• Best practice: track when someone lands on a thank-you page
• Track unique leads, not every form submission
• Call tracking should filter for admissions-related calls, not guest services

Why Call Tracking Matters

If your school gets relevant calls, tracking them properly can improve performance and give Google better signals.

• Use third-party tools or time thresholds
• Only include calls related to enrollments

Landing Pages Matter Too

Where you send your traffic makes a big difference. (Note: The transcript cuts off here, but likely David continues to emphasize the importance of landing page quality.)

View Transcript: 

Chris:
For beauty school marketing. David Steiner, take it away. Thank you very much, Chris. Yeah, thanks for the intro. As everybody knows, this is the fifth annual, this is my fifth time speaking, so it’s kind of fun to be back and see a lot of these same names, a lot of the fun giveaways and additional speakers and new topics. So yeah, I’m glad everyone’s here. Thanks for being here. Thanks for joining and paying attention. So yeah, I’ve got, let me share my screen here. Sorry right there, some good information I think I hope for you all today. Quick little bit about myself, sort of, Chris already did this, but my name’s Dave, as was mentioned. I’m the director of the PPC team at Uzel Media. I’ve been doing Google ads for a while. Uel has been doing it even longer than I have in the beauty school space and we consider ourselves to be a bit of a leader in that industry, right in that space.

(00:59):
So what we often do is try to find basically benchmarks that sort of paint the picture of the landscape of what digital marketing is like. So I put together that data again this year. I did a similar presentation I think two years ago, but this is updated benchmarks. The information that I’ve got today is based on over two and a half million dollars in ad spend over the course of 2024, and hopefully it can give you an idea of what to expect if you’re running ads already or if you plan to run ads soon. And if you are maybe running ads already, it can give you an idea of maybe where you stack up or if there is room to improve perhaps. That being said, there’s a lot of nuances and variables in there that we’ll go through. And then after we talk about these benchmarks, what I’d like to do is maybe give you some ideas of things that you can look at to perhaps bring that more in line with what we are seeing in these benchmarks if you’re not there already.

(01:59):
But first, a quick clarification, this can get a little bit nuanced and this clarification is kind of mostly for anyone who’s already an Oodle client. What I’m going to be talking about today are pixel fires, what we refer to as pixel fires on the ad platform, right? That’s what the ad platform can recognize and count as a conversion. And so the cost per lead is then calculated by the platform, by taking the ad budget, dividing it by the number of conversions it got and giving you a cost per lead. The reason I want to make this clarification is because Zel Media often reports that differently. So if you’re an Zel client, you’ll get a report that has not just the number of pixel fires, but they go through and will de-duplicate and scrub that list, make sure every name has an email and a phone number some way to contact them and a URL parameter that attributes that lead specifically to paid ads.

(02:59):
So what naturally will happen is that that number will be a little bit lower on those reports, maybe a little underreported, it’s just reported differently. But then in addition to that, they’ll also add in management fee. So in this example, if you had the $2,500 ad budget and 40 conversions on the platform, but 28 that were deduplicated and everything in the report, you’re also getting the $500 management fee for that ad spend. So they’re taking $3,000 dividing that by 28 and getting an overall cost per lead of $107, which is different than the original 62 and a half with the original numbers. And the reason I say that is because again, if there are ULE clients listening to this, their numbers are going to look a little bit different on the ULE reports than they do on the platform. So all that is to say, if I haven’t confused everyone already, I’m not doing it the ule way right now. I’m sticking to just the platform data. The reason is because most other agencies and all of the platforms themselves and most of the dashboards that agencies will provide just do the platform data. So in order to stick to sort of apples to apples comparisons, we’re looking at just platform data, which is just your ad spend on the platform and just the conversions that the platform can count. So hopefully with that out of the way, we can now look at some of these benchmarks.

(04:27):
So as I mentioned, this is from over two and a half million dollars in spend over the year. That’s over 9.2 million impressions and almost 800,000 clicks. So we feel pretty confident in this data. You’ll notice a couple of things right off the bat. By the way, if you want to take a screenshot of this, go ahead, save it for yourself. You’ll notice that search has by far the most conversions. That’s because that’s kind of where the bread and butter is of Google ads. That’s the most predictable and reliable inventory type that we run. So most of our conversions come from that type. We’ve got a great click-through rate of over 11% and a good conversion rate of almost 7% and a roughly $56 cost per lead on that platform. On that type. You might notice that performance max just above it has a slightly cheaper cost per conversion.

(05:21):
So one might ask themselves, well, why don’t we need to run everything on performance Max, right? If it’s getting cheaper leads, let’s put all of our money in there and we’ll get more leads. However, that is not something I would advise. Google has always introduced or talked about Performance Max as an addition or a supplement to your search campaigns. It’s never been intended to replace them. So we have run Performance Max pretty sparingly and rather specifically for our clients in our couple of years now that it’s been out that we’ve tested it, we’ve found that it works the best for something that has an actual value attached to it. So an e-commerce product, if you’re selling some product performance, max can optimize towards a dollar value, but if Performance Max is trying to chase leads, what it can’t tell is the difference between a good leader or a bad lead or a qualified lead or not.

(06:12):
So performance Max is a little bit more challenging for lead generation. Like I said, we run it pretty specifically. We’ve figured out there are some pretty heavy guardrails you can put on it to keep it in line and in the places we are running it, we do so because it has shown to be successful. Anyway, that’s just a little spiel about Performance Max. You might also think well look at display above that has a really low cost per lead. Why don’t we do that again? Display is not intended and never will replace search in terms of volume. The goal of display is to get a lot of views as cheaply as possible on your brand name so that people in your area know who you are. If you get conversions out of that, that’s great. They can be cheap. Again, we run display kind of sparingly.

(06:57):
Most of our schools have limited budgets and their budget is more efficient or effective in a search campaign. So anyway, with that sort of explanation, we’re not going to talk about demand gen or video right now. Those are what we call upper funnel campaigns. The goal is not to get conversions. So that’s why those look especially high, particularly video. Okay, so search we talked about within search there is a lot of variability. It depends on what programs you might be advertising. So what I did also was break out these same metrics but for search specifically by program. So that’s what this is here. Again, take a screenshot if you want to keep this. You’ll notice again a couple of things right off the bat. Cosmetology and aesthetics are what most of our schools advertise, so we get the most of our conversions for cosmetology. That’s what most schools focus on because it brings the most revenue and it’s the flagship course there or program aesthetics is second to that. We do run a lot of aesthetics campaigns and get good results for our clients.

(08:08):
The other one that you might notice is a brand campaign. That is something that we almost always recommend to our clients that they run for a couple of reasons. The first is it’s a pretty cheap insurance policy against competition. So while you or your school may not be doing this, other competitors might be bidding on your brand name as a keyword. If they do that and someone searches for your school with the intention of going to your school’s website, someone else’s ad may pop up and it won’t say your school, right? It’ll say theirs, but it means that that gives that potential student an opportunity to click on them and go to their website. But you’ll see that brand has a really low cost per click or really high click through rate and a pretty cheap cost per conversion because if you run your own brand name as a keyword, it just ensures that you’re going to win that auction.

(08:57):
Your competition won’t be siphoning potential students from you and it keeps them seeing your name. The other reason people often ask, well, if I get good organic results from my brand already, why should I run an ad campaign around it? The reason is because that gives you just more opportunities to show up for anyone who’s searching your name. So someone searches your name and they might see your brand at the top as an ad and then just below your organic listing, and that takes up a lot of real estate on the search results page, especially if someone’s on mobile, which like 85 to 90, 90% of the time they are. That means that any competition that may be trying to show up is going to be that much further down the page. They see you twice that lends itself to brand authority. So anyway, there’s a plug for brand campaigns.

(09:44):
We highly recommend running them when you can. A couple other things to mention here is that I’ve found a pretty direct correlation with the investment from a student to get into a program and the cost that it requires to get them to be a lead. So I’ll explain that hopefully a little bit better if a student has to invest a lot of time and money. So for example, cosmetology is typically the longest course and the most expensive for a student. It’s going to cost the school more to get that student to sign up or to become a lead in order to sign up. On the flip side, if you have something like lashes, which is typically a shorter program and less of a financial investment, it’s easier to convince or to get potential students to become leads in that case. So your lashes campaigns are going to get a better cost per conversion than your cosmetology campaigns might, and that’s okay because the return on a cosmetology student is higher than that on a lash student.

(10:43):
So just something to keep in mind. The other thing that I included here was this box and whisker plot off to the side. The reason I did that is to show sort of the range of what might be a normal average or a good cost per lead for you and your program. So the table only shows one number. That’s like the mean, the average, but the shaded area of that box is I think 50% of all of our schools fall within that region. So for aesthetics, that goes from somewhere around $40 up to maybe 110, which is all a completely fine place to be in terms of a cost per lead for an aesthetics campaign. If that’s not exactly what the mean looks like, that’s totally fine. We’re going to talk about some of the reasons there is some variability there. So again, cosmetology is the example below that.

(11:34):
Somewhere between like 50 bucks and maybe 115 or so is totally normal, a good average for a cost per lead. Okay, great. So those are the benchmarks. You may be wondering, why don’t I look like this? Why do my results not look the same? As mentioned, there are a lot of variables. I’ve broken them into two categories, those that you can control and those that you can’t, but both are important to know about because they both have an impact on what your results look like. And so as long as you can account for those, you can feel like you’re doing a good job or if you’re in a good place. So first the group of things you can’t really control as much. Your location, the programs you offer, the competition and the general market, right? In theory, yes, you could move your location, you could offer different programs, but then you wouldn’t be who you are.

(12:25):
So that’s fine. But those are kind of longer term changes potentially, and we’re going to just say that those are the variables that are static. You also can’t control if a school pops up down the road and starts trying to take students from your potential pool or if your market has something that’s more popular this year than it was last year. We’ve kind of always seen this fluctuation between cosmetology and aesthetics being different in demand throughout time. But that’s just again, something that you can’t control, something that you can consider and take account for, but is going to impact the results that you see for the various campaigns that you’re earning. Now, the group of things that you can control, so we’ll go through these kind of one by one and I’ll give you hopefully a bit of an explanation how they might work. First is your budget, right?

(13:18):
If you have a really tiny budget, you may be getting some really cheap costs per lead because Google is going to use your budget to the best of its ability. And if all you can afford is the cheapest ones, it’ll get you the cheapest ones. However, that’s not going to be representative of what you could be getting if you had a bigger budget. On the flip side, if you’re spending way too much and there’s a finite number of people who are going to enroll or become a lead, your cost per lead is going to look really high. So I recommend varying your budget a little bit to find that on that curve of diminishing returns, where that sweet spot is for you, where you’re willing to pay that amount for a student and it’s getting you the best volume that it can. Bid strategies are another area that you have control over. Within the platform itself. On Google, you’ve got, you can maximize, or sorry, optimize for all types of things. You can maximize your clicks, you can maximize the volume of conversions, the value of conversions. You can optimize towards the number of conversions at a certain price, or you can do all of that manually. They’re all valid options, but they can get you different results depending on what your goals are and what you’re trying to accomplish. A keyword list is another variable that I think is perhaps the most important.

(14:43):
Again, I’ll give you sort of two extreme cases of examples, but let’s say you’ve got a really narrow keyword list that’s super relevant and really tight, and on those keywords, you get conversions most of the time and they cost you almost nothing. But again, that’s not going to get you very far. You’re not going to get as many leads as you could if you had a better list. On the other hand, if you’re bidding for a ton of really broad, generic and irrelevant terms, you’re going to be spending a lot of money on click traffic. That doesn’t result in a lead. So finding the sweet spot of a keyword list that is robust and still relevant is kind of the always moving and shifting target that we’re aiming towards. Keyword lists are, or the optimizations that we make around keywords is something that we do monthly.

(15:30):
We are frequently in there and just updating and creaking and changing based on the data, the keyword lists that we’re looking at. So that’s always something that I would recommend. This next one, I wrote optimizations. I think I meant to write assets. So within your ads are a bunch of different little fields or assets that you can add to them, things that you can sort of flesh your ad out with to make it more attractive and take up more space on the page. Their site links, there are images, their phone numbers, location extensions, callouts have something called a structured snippet. If you offer multiple courses, you can list them. All these are ways to sort of build your ad out into something that looks more authoritative and again, takes up more space on that search results page. The last thing, I have this one here in red because this one is going to be perhaps the biggest thing that was going to make your results look different than perhaps what we’ve got here is how you track and how you define a conversion.

(16:32):
So what we typically do is track when someone lands on a thank you page after filling out the form, and we track that as a unique event. So if they do it twice, it’s still only one lead, right? Because it’s the same person. Even if they filled out two different forms, there’s still only one lead. There are multiple ways to track that. You could do every lead, you could do clicks on the button, you could do page views, you could do all kinds of other things. But aligning that conversion metric and how it’s counted to the most relevant and actionable event for you is what’s going to get you the furthest that helps you optimize towards that. I put under here calls as a sub sort of note, because we know that a lot of schools receive calls for people looking for guest services and in your ad budget, that’s not necessarily something that you want to be spending towards or generating that kind of traffic.

(17:30):
If it is, great, you can bust that out into its own campaign, but typically if we’re talking about admissions, we want the calls that are focused on talking to an admissions rep about scheduling a tour, questions about tuition, start dates, things like that. There are ways, typically they involve a third party software that can track your listen in on them and tag those that are relevant to admissions and count those as relevant conversions. There are other ways to do it, whether that’s a percentage or a time threshold on how long a call is or something like that. There are various ways to track calls as conversions, but if you do get relevant calls, I do recommend adding them to your conversions as the platform will count them. That does help increase the number of conversions that you get and the number of conversion, what Google can optimize on.

(18:27):
So yeah, the one other last thing here is where you send your traffic, it does make a big difference. So we highly recommend sending your traffic to a landing page, which we define as something that has basically one or maybe two calls to action. Two things that the user can do when they’re on that page. So if you send them to something like this, it’s like there’s a phone number, super obvious, and then there’s a form right down below where they can fill it out and ask for more information. They become a lead. The converse to this would be like if you send them to your homepage, there’s potentially a bunch of information there, but there’s a lot of other things to click on, things to read, pages to explore, and someone might get sort of distracted and lost in the details before they ever fill out a form and then go somewhere else, forget to do it or something.

(19:22):
So you can really improve the rate that you convert your click traffic. If you send them to a landing page like this, they help reduce friction and improve your results. So that was a lot of information and I forgot to start my timer, so I dunno how close I am, but if you want to talk about any more of that, this is my email address. I’d be happy to go into more depth on any of these topics. Reach out to me, we’ll set up a call and we can chat about it. Additionally, we do offer ad account audits. So if you’re running your own ad campaigns or if an agency is running it for you and you want a second pair of eyes, we’ll be happy to take a look at it and offer recommendations on what we think could improve your results and your performance. So yeah, with that, Chris, I’ll turn it back over to you.