Advertising on Recovery.com: An Agency Playbook

1. Should my client advertise on Recovery.com?
2. When to sell Recovery.com
3. How do I sell Recovery.com?
4.  How do I grow the account?
5. How do I re-pitch a churned client?
6. Common objections
7. How do I launch successfully?
8. Attribution and conversion tracking
9. Admissions best practices

There are three ways your agency can bring business to Recovery.com, and this playbook is organized around all three:

1. Land — pitching a client on Recovery.com for the first time
2. Expand — growing an account that's already advertising
3. Relaunch — re-pitching a client who advertised before and churned

Each motion has its own signals, its own pitch, and its own math. Start by qualifying the client, then use the trigger table to spot which conversation to have and when.

Should my client advertise on Recovery.com?

Clients with one or more of the following characteristics tend to succeed on the Recovery.com platform:

• They offer a residential level of care
• They accept in-network commercial insurance
• They already spend around $50k+ per month on Google Ads
• They have great photos of their facility and clear specializations
• They have multiple facilities and are willing to advertise all of them to find the best performance

When to sell Recovery.com

You're in your clients' ad accounts, CRMs, and status calls every week — which means you'll see these signals before anyone else does. When one or more shows up, that's the moment to start the conversation.

How do I sell Recovery.com?

Anchor the pitch on the three benefits from Should I Advertise On Recovery.com:

1. High quality results from individuals and professional referrers. Recovery.com reaches people actively choosing a treatment center, plus therapists, case managers, and interventionists guiding placement decisions. The result is less lead volume but higher intent, which means more admissions per lead and a lower CPA.

2. Recovery.com shows up where people actually search. The platform ranks in traditional Google results and AI-generated answers for high-intent treatment queries, combining the immediate visibility of paid ads, the durable assets of SEO, and the trust of professional referrals in one channel.

3. Expert support and perks. Advertisers get a professionally written and curated profile, best practices for attribution and admissions, third-party alumni testimonial videos, podcast guest opportunities, and LegitScript certification, typically valued between $3,000 and $6,000.

Use the attached slide deck and talking points when presenting Recovery.com.

Key definitions

Two terms carry the rest of this doc:

Cost Per Result (CPR). A phone call, form submission, VOB, chat inquiry, or website click is a result. Results are weighted:

• Call = 100% of a result
• Form fill or VOB = 50% of a result
• Click to website = 10% of a result

For example, if a center got one call, one form submission, and five clicks to their website, that adds up as 1.0 + 0.5 + (5 × 0.1) = 2.0 results.

Cost Per Admit (CPA). Total spend divided by clients who actually admit. The 15% of reimbursement benchmark used throughout this doc applies to CPA, not CPR.

How do I grow the account?

Clients typically want to grow their Recovery.com spend for one of two reasons:

1. They're admitting clients at or below their sustainable CPA threshold.
2. They get higher quality inquiries than they do from other digital channels, which relieves pressure on often overburdened admissions teams and lowers their blended CPA.

When one of those conditions is true, grow the account in this order:

1. Raise the budget incrementally. Increase spend 20 to 30% at a time and confirm CPR and lead quality hold before the next increase.
2. Expand to additional locations. If the client operates multiple facilities, launch profiles for the locations with the strongest payer mix and photos first. Launching all locations as advertisers allows us to optimize delivery towards those seeing the best performance.
3. Add levels of care. A center running residential ads can add detox or PHP profiles to capture people at different points in their treatment search.
4. Reinvest savings from other channels. If Recovery.com inquiries convert better than Google Ads inquiries, shift budget from the underperforming channel rather than asking for net new spend.

How do I re-pitch a churned client?

A client who left Recovery.com a year ago quit a different product than the one that exists today. The re-pitch isn't "want to try again?" — it's "here's what's changed since you ran, and here's why the thing that didn't work then would work now."

What's new since they left

• CPR bidding. Advertisers now set a target Cost Per Result and pay for weighted, meaningful actions — calls, forms, VOBs, chats, and website clicks — rather than visibility. The center controls the bid and can adjust it anytime.
• Service area targeting. Centers can now target the geographic areas they actually draw admissions from, not just where their facility sits — a fit for centers whose census comes from out of market.
• Insurance screeners. Before a call connects, the caller is asked what insurance they carry. If the center accepts it, the call pushes through; if not, the caller is redirected to centers that do. Lead quality complaints from a previous run are often solved by this alone.
• More traffic. Recovery.com's visibility in organic search and AI-generated answers has grown since most churned advertisers left, meaning more high-intent searchers on the platform than during their first run. [Insert current traffic stat / YoY growth figure here.]
• Self-serve portal and credit-backs. Advertisers manage budgets and bids directly, can pause anytime, and Performance Managers review and credit back spend on junk calls like robocalls and repeats.

Match the fix to why they left

Before the conversation, diagnose the first run. Most churn traces to one of three causes, and each has a specific answer now:

If attribution was incomplete the first time — no DNI, untracked VOBs, website clicks invisible in the CRM — say so plainly: the campaign was almost certainly under-reported. Set up full tracking before relaunch so round two gets measured fairly.

Common objections

Objections usually surface during the pitch, so handle them here. These are suggested responses you can use verbatim or adapt.

"How can I ensure that calls are quality and not spam?"

You can't guarantee that every call from any advertising platform will be a qualified admission opportunity, but Recovery.com is designed to prioritize higher-intent engagement rather than raw traffic volume. People are typically using the platform to actively compare treatment options based on things like level of care, clinical needs, location, and insurance, which helps create better alignment before they contact a center. Recovery.com's CPR model also optimizes around meaningful actions such as calls and other engagement signals rather than simply generating profile views.

From an agency perspective, we would also look beyond just call volume. We'd monitor which inquiries are actually qualified, how they convert to admissions, payer and clinical fit, and your intake team's answer rate and follow-up. If we're seeing volume but poor quality, the recommended approach is to review targeting, profile messaging, insurance/payment information, service-line fit, and intake performance.

Recovery.com uses insurance screeners that populate before someone calls. When someone presses the call button, they're asked what kind of insurance they have. If it's one the center accepts, the call pushes through. If it's not, they're redirected to a page with centers that accept their insurance.

Recovery.com also measures calls of 2 minutes or longer as a signal of quality on platform, and agencies should track the same benchmark on their end. And unlike other ad platforms, if problems like robocalls or repeat calls come up, the advertiser's Performance Manager will review the profile and, when appropriate, credit back advertising dollars.

"Am I locked into a contract?"

You're not locked in. There are no contracts and no cancellation fees, and each center has a self-service portal to manage budget and bids, so advertisers can pause their ads at any time. We recommend a 90-day run because that's how long it takes to stabilize cost per result and get an accurate view of advertiser performance.

"I notice certain local centers are not showing up in search results. How can I be sure my listings are showing up in the right place?"

The important distinction is between eligibility and position. Recovery.com first determines whether a center is relevant to a person's search based on factors such as location, conditions treated, insurance accepted, services offered, and level of care. Your bid doesn't make your center eligible for a search it doesn't match, it influences where you tend to appear among the centers that are eligible.

As your agency, we'd first make sure each center's profile information is complete and accurate — particularly location, levels of care, conditions, services, and insurance — so Recovery.com has the right information to match the center to relevant searches. Then we'd look at key metrics like impressions and clicks to understand whether the issue is eligibility or simply visibility within an eligible market.

Recovery.com has analyzed millions of sessions and spoken with hundreds of people looking for treatment. What we've found is that, especially for residential and detox care, most people are willing to travel beyond their immediate area to find the right provider.

Because of that, our default search isn't simply sorted by distance. We weigh hundreds of factors, including location, specialties, reviews, photos, and how well a center matches what the user is looking for. Users can still adjust the radius or sort by distance if they prefer.

We also see that people typically explore multiple centers, so small differences in ranking often have less impact than you might expect.

How do I launch successfully?

For Recovery.com to dial in results for a profile, the center needs two things: a starting budget large enough to generate around 50 results per month, and a recommended run of 90 days on the platform.

For example, at a $300 CPR, generating 50 results in one month requires a starting budget of about $15,000.

Agencies can use this calculator to set a starting budget based on cost per result, monthly admit goals, and average conversion rates.

If a treatment center feels the estimated cost per admit is too high, use the acquisition cost calculator based on the center's average reimbursement per client. The goal is a CPA at around 15% of average reimbursement per client.

Attribution and conversion tracking

Clear, tested attribution for phone calls (via CTM) and form submissions must be set up before launch. Recovery.com manages all calls, form submissions, and VOBs on platform, but if someone clicks through to a center's website from their Recovery.com profile, the agency must ensure that dynamic number insertion (DNI), verification of benefits (VOB) submissions, and chat inquiries are marked as conversions in the center's CRM, call tracking software, and/or Google Analytics.

This matters more than it looks. Website clicks are included as partial results, so if the center's site isn't tracking Recovery.com traffic, they're missing conversions that come from their Recovery.com campaign.

Test the full path before spending a dollar. Call the tracking number, submit a test form, and confirm both show up correctly in the CRM with Recovery.com as the source.

Admissions best practices

Advertising only works as well as the admissions team answering the phone. Agencies should confirm that treatment centers are following these best practices:

• Maintain a call answer rate of 85% or higher
• Respond to form submissions and VOBs within 5 minutes
• Score leads in the CRM or CTM using a clear framework built on:
• Payment eligibility: the person can pay for treatment or has insurance the center accepts
• Clinical fit: the center can treat the person's condition at their level of acuity
• Demographic fit: age, gender, location, and similar factors
• Use a proven call flow script (example)

For the complete picture, here are the seven things the best behavioral health admissions teams do.