Google Ads for healthcare providers, as you probably know, can be tremendously effective at growing a healthcare practice.
Honestly, you’re getting in front of patients right in the moment when they’re looking for exactly what it is that you do.
But with Google Ads, it’s really easy to burn piles of money if you don’t get your campaign right.
In this article, I’m going to share with you 12 tips that are going to help you to avoid burning mountains of cash as you’re trying to get Google Ads right for your medical practice.
My name is Frank, and I’ve been running healthcare PPC agency Sagapixel for 10+ years.
I’ve put together a full playlist on different aspects of digital marketing for healthcare.
I’m going to link to it in the description; you should definitely check it out.
1. Test Different Campaign Types
Tip number one: You want to test Smart campaigns, Performance Max, and Responsive Search Ads.
Google offers these three different types of campaigns, and the truth is we never know before we start them which is going to do the best.
We’ve taken the same exact campaign that we ran for a plastic surgeon in California and ran it for someone in Virginia, only to find that the Performance Max campaign was the one that drove all the leads, while in California, the Responsive Search Ad was actually the best-performing one.
The only way you’re going to know is if you’re running all three in tandem and you’re collecting your own data.
2. Leverage Audience Targeting
Tip number two: Make sure you’re using audience targeting.
This is becoming less of an issue, but I’ve seen over the years lots of Google Ads campaigns that are not leveraging any sort of audience information with their bidding.
Google is paying attention to what people are doing as they’re navigating the web as logged into Gmail accounts, and they collect information about their interests, what kind of websites they’re visiting, what they’re looking at, if they’re parents, and where they were.
As you observe these different demographics and these different audience segments, you’ll start to see that some of them are going to convert at a higher rate than others.
You should exclude the ones that are unprofitable and, frankly, bid more in the ones that are.
3. Bid on Demographics
Likewise, tip number three: Bid on demographics as well.
Inexplicably, I very rarely see bid adjustments based on age ranges.
There are going to be very few areas of healthcare where you’re serving absolutely everybody and everybody’s of equal value.
I recently visited the ophthalmologist, and I think that the next oldest person in that waiting room was about 25 years older than I am.
They should be excluding basically everyone under 35.
4. Optimize Geo-Targeting
Number four: Don’t set your geo-targeting as a radius.
Geo-target by city or, frankly, even by zip code.
This is going to give you more information about who’s converting and who’s not.
There are going to be neighborhoods where your leads are just more expensive; stop wasting money there.
5. Monitor Your Search Terms Report
Number five, maybe the most important of all of them: Watch your Search Terms report like a hawk.
Google does provide a report of the actual keywords that people searched before they clicked on your ad.
As you go through this, you’re going to see a lot of them that you don’t want to pay for.
You can add these as negative keywords, which will prevent your ads from showing for these searches in the future.
6. Use Time-Block Ad Scheduling
Number six: Set your ad schedule in 3-hour blocks.
Instead of running these from 9 to 5, you can set them in 3-hour blocks, which is going to afterwards allow you to add adjustments based on the times of day and the days of week when your campaign performs best and performs worse.
This will help you avoid burning cash.
7. Implement Call Tracking
Number seven: You should use some sort of call tracking, such as CallRail, to start.
It’s going to help you know what keywords are actually resulting in phone calls from patients that actually book versus just generating a phone call.
It’ll also provide a recording of the call so that you can get an idea of how your front desk is operating.
It’ll also help you to tie back some of the bad leads that you’re getting to keywords you’re bidding on in your account.
We’ve done this a ton of times where we found that we were bidding on a keyword that looked like it was generating leads, but they were actually terrible leads, and we needed to pause those keywords.
8. Prevent Spam with CleanTalk
Number eight: Install CleanTalk.
This is the best anti-spam plugin that I’ve come across up until now.
It’s incredibly inexpensive, and in addition to cutting down annoying spam, it’s also going to avoid sending conversion data back to Google Ads telling them that this is what your ideal customer profile looks like and this is who’s converting from your ads.
Sending bad data only results in more of your ads being delivered to bots, resulting in more spam.
9. Test Landing Pages vs. Your Website
Tip number nine: Test sending your Google Ads traffic to landing pages versus your website.
One inevitably will outperform the other.
If it turns out that your landing pages end up outperforming your actual website, it might mean that your website needs some work.
Because if your paid traffic is not converting on your website, what makes you think that your organic traffic is going to convert on your website?
10. Maximize Your Ad Score
Tip number 10: Work on maximizing your ad score.
The Quality Score of each one of the keywords that you’re bidding on and the ad score of your Responsive Search Ads are all going to drive the cost of your click.
Try to get those numbers as high as you possibly can.
11. Focus on Mobile Traffic
Tip number 11: Focus your ads on mobile.
Now, with Performance Max, Google’s going to deliver your ads to anybody that they want to deliver to, but with your Responsive Search Ads, you do have more control.
You’ll find that usually your mobile traffic is going to convert better than your desktop traffic.
The reason for this is that most of the bots out there are on desktop, and people that are on their cell phones are going to be more likely to convert after they’ve clicked on your ads.
On mobile, they’re going to have that tap-to-dial or, if you’re really smart, tap-to-book appointments.
12. Review Healthcare Advertising Policies
Tip number 12, possibly the most important of all of these: Give a thorough review of Google’s healthcare advertising policies.
It’s very easy to get an account banned.
There’s a three-strike policy, and it can be very frustrating to get an account set up in the first place for many areas of healthcare.
You don’t want to spin your wheels in the mud unnecessarily, so reviewing those policies ahead of time will save you a lot of headaches.
