LASIK and refractive surgery marketing

Candidacy comes before price

Not everyone who wants LASIK can have it. The FDA’s own list of reasons it may not be for someone includes a glasses or contact lens prescription that changed in the past year, and it says “no lasers are approved for LASIK on persons under the age of 18” (FDA, When is LASIK not for me?, checked 3 November 2026). So the first thing anyone books is an exam, and the campaigns are aimed at adults and built to sell it: what the exam measures, how long it takes, what it costs, and what happens when the answer is a different procedure or not yet. Every booking lands on your real exam calendar, and the people told they aren’t candidates are counted too, so a campaign that brings in the wrong eyes shows up as one.

The per-eye price has to be the price they pay

LASIK is often quoted per eye, and the fee moves with the prescription and the procedure, which is what makes a low “from” price tempting in LASIK advertising. Since 28 October 2025 Google has enforced a dishonest pricing policy under which advertisers “must clearly and conspicuously disclose the payment model or full expense that a user will bear”, and a low price advertised with no genuine intent to sell at it counts as bait-and-switch (Google, checked 3 November 2026). So the price in the ad is one your patients actually pay, it says whether it is per eye or for both, and the page behind it says what the fee includes, from the exam to the follow-up visits.

“20/20” is a result claim

The people reading your ads have often read the FDA’s LASIK pages first, and those pages tell them they “may still need glasses or contact lenses after surgery” and to be cautious about “slick” advertising and deals that sound “too good to be true” (FDA, checked 3 November 2026). An ad that promises perfect vision reads as exactly the ad they were warned about. We write about the exam, the surgeon and the procedure, and outcomes stay in the consult, where the surgeon can talk about them against the patient’s own eyes and risks.

The optometrist is part of the path

Refractive practices often share care with local optometrists, who refer the patient, see them before surgery and handle the checks afterwards. That makes the optometrist a referral channel with its own path to the exam calendar, and the campaigns run beside it rather than around it. The page tells someone who found you through an ad whether their visits after surgery can be with their own optometrist, and a referring office can book a candidacy exam for its patient without a phone chain. Every exam is reported by where it came from, an ad, an optometrist or a returning patient, so the referral channel is counted on its own instead of being credited to an ad.

FSA and HSA money has a calendar

Laser eye surgery is on the IRS’s list of medical expenses (Publication 502 names “laser eye surgery or radial keratotomy”), so patients can generally pay for it from an FSA or an HSA, and the two run on different clocks. HSA amounts that remain at the end of the year “are generally carried over to the next year”, while FSAs “are generally ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ plans”. Any extra time is up to the employer’s plan, which can offer a grace period after the plan year or a limited carryover, but not both (Publication 969; both 2025 editions, checked 3 November 2026). So the pages explain how FSA and HSA payment works at your practice, and the booking asks whether a patient is working to a plan-year deadline, so the follow-up can schedule around it.

The candidacy exam that never gets booked

It is eleven at night. Someone who has worn contacts since high school takes the self-test on your site, gets “you may be a candidate”, and is told to call the office in the morning. In the morning they are at work, the result went nowhere, and the next eye surgery ad they see is another practice’s. Even when they do call, the exam can’t be next week. The FDA tells contact lens wearers to stop wearing soft lenses for 2 weeks before the first evaluation, toric soft or rigid gas permeable lenses for at least 3 weeks and hard lenses for at least 4, because lenses change the shape of the cornea and the measurements can come out wrong (FDA, checked 3 November 2026). Weeks in glasses they would rather not wear is a long time for an intention to last.

So the self-test ends in a booking, not a phone number: an exam slot picked on your real calendar that night, with the instructions for their kind of lens sent with the date and a reminder on the day the lenses should come out. The practice keeps in touch through the weeks in glasses, at the number and email the patient agreed to be contacted on, with what the exam measures, how long it takes and who they will see. Self-tests, exams booked and exams held are reported side by side, so you can see the step where people drop away.

The December rush that lands in January

In early December, someone checks their FSA balance and finds money they will lose when the plan year ends. They fill in your form on a Sunday. By the time anyone rings back, their exam has to wait two weeks for their lenses, the laser days before the holidays are full, and the front desk says to call again in January. In January they have a new plan year, a new FSA election and no particular reason to remember you. If they search again, they start from the top of the results, and your ad pays a second time for someone you already had.

So the deadline is planned for, not discovered. From November the pages say how late in the year an exam and a surgery can still be fitted in, and patients working to a deadline are offered the first slots. If their employer’s plan has a grace period, there may still be time after the new year, so the follow-up asks them to check with their benefits office and books the January exam in December instead of leaving a reminder to call. Every inquiry from the season is followed up until it ends in a booked exam or a clear no.

Where the rest of it leaks

Nothing here is judged on clicks: the LASIK ads we run are counted on candidacy exams held and surgeries scheduled, because ophthalmology digital marketing that reports only form fills can look busy while the laser days stay open. The self-test, the exam booking and the price explanation all live on the page, so website and booking pages for a refractive practice put the self-test in front of a booking on your real calendar. Between the exam and the surgery date, patient follow-up keeps each candidate moving while they weigh the price and the timing. LASIK SEO is mostly the questions people ask before they call, about cost, candidacy, recovery and payment, and local SEO builds the pages and the map listing that answer them; some of those questions now go to an AI assistant first, which is what AI visibility covers. The full eight, and how they hand off to each other, are laid out under what we do. Most LASIK patients have the surgery once, so the number that matters is the cost of each surgery scheduled rather than each self-test, and the patient acquisition cost calculator works that out from your spend and your surgery count. All of it maps onto the seven leaks we look for in week one.