It depends heavily on the procedure and the channel, but the honest answer is: whatever benchmark you were using two or three years ago is probably out of date. Cost per lead for cataract and refractive surgery leads has risen sharply since 2021, and the trend line hasn’t flattened — it’s accelerated as more practices in a given market get acquired and folded into centralized, well-funded marketing operations.

Google search campaigns for high-intent terms still tend to produce the highest-quality leads, but they’re also the most expensive, since they’re competing directly against every other practice — independent or PE-backed — bidding on the same in-market intent. Facebook and other social platforms can be cheaper per lead in theory, but that gap is closing fast as more well-capitalized groups shift budget into upper-funnel social targeting.

The number that actually matters isn’t a generic industry benchmark — it’s your own cost per lead trend over time, measured against your patient lifetime value. A rising CPL isn’t necessarily a crisis on its own. A rising CPL combined with a flat or declining consultation-to-surgery conversion rate is a much bigger problem, because it means you’re paying more for leads that are converting worse.

If you don’t currently track CPL by channel and by procedure, that’s usually the first gap to close — not because the number itself will fix anything, but because you can’t tell whether your strategy is working or just expensive without it.

Beyond that, the more durable fix isn’t finding a cheaper way to bid in the same auction everyone else is in. It’s reducing how much of your pipeline depends on that auction at all — by building channels where you’re not competing dollar-for-dollar against a centralized budget with no ceiling.