Patients are more selective than ever when it comes to choosing their healthcare providers. The internet is the first place someone goes when researching a potential provider. Potential patients no longer settle for the closest healthcare services in their location.
Instead, they are now taking the time to evaluate medical professionals based on the level of care and convenience that meets their needs and expectations.
Paid advertising can help you get started on your online marketing journey.
Lead Generation For Medical Professionals
You went to medical school to help people, not to become a Google Ads Expert.
Using paid advertising, your medical service will be able to target your audience through demographics and analytics and show your ad to them from the moment they begin their search for an doctor or medical professional.
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What Is PPC Marketing?
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the fastest and easiest ways to attract new patients.
When you use PPC, you bid for a space on search engine results pages (SERPs), putting your medical practice in front of any users searching for healthcare services.
The contents of your ad must be engaging enough for users to click on it.
Ads have a higher chance users will click on them because they are generally at the top of the results page.
The good news is that you only pay for each click on your ad, so you don’t have to pay unless your ad is clicked on by potential patients.
Why PPC Is A Must For Medical Practices
In the healthcare field, perhaps more than any other industry, people tend to look for information and react quickly. PPC puts your ads in front of those potential patients who are already researching their symptoms and concerns, and more likely to be searching for a healthcare provider at the same time.
While search engine optimization (SEO) is necessary as a long-term strategy for your office, it takes a long time for your hard work to be fruitful. That’s why many new medical offices choose to invest in both PPC and SEO simultaneously when they start out. PPC advertising allows for immediate lead generation. It also creates brand familiarity with those who search the keywords you’ve chosen to track.
PPC also allows for very intentional targeting. You can target incredibly specific groups, areas, and search terms down to the letter. By targeting specifics, you net a higher return on investment while spending less time worrying about attracting the wrong demographic.
You want to take advantage of these opportunities. With PPC, your medical practice will already be there for users to click on and schedule an appointment.
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Benefits Of Healthcare PPC
While every healthcare practice should use search engine optimization (SEO) as part of their marketing strategy, SEO is a long-term strategy. It can take longer for you to see results from your SEO efforts. This is why it can help to supplement your SEO strategy with PPC marketing.
Generate Instant Leads: SEO works as a long-term strategy and can often take several months or more to pay off, leaving a gap in your marketing strategy where do not have any tangible results. PPC can help manage that gap. While you work on developing your SEO strategy, healthcare PPC attracts potential patients to your website and services.
Because paid ad campaigns require only basic setup on your part to begin running, including the approval process by the ad platform, there is a much shorter time to wait for results to come in. As long as your bid for an ad placement is high enough, you can start appearing on SERPs very quickly. With proper keyword research, and on-going optimization, these ads will continue to bring in more clicks as long as they are running.
Build Brand Awareness and Recognition: Healthcare ads also serve as a highly effective methods of branding your medical practice. You can introduce your services and practice to potential patients who fall into your ideal target audience. Using display ads, you can keep your business at the forefront of your patients’ minds.
Target Specific Audiences: One major benefit to advertising is that it can be tailored to target a specific demographic. You can craft your ads to specifically target those who would be most likely to look for and benefit from your services. This ensures that only those truly interested in your services will contact you and become patients.
Promote Key Products or Services: If you are looking to increase your customer base for a particular product or service you offer as part of your medical practice, targeted ad campaigns can help. You can use PPC marketing to promote these services and net more business.
Boost Site Traffic: When compared to SEO, PPC offers instant benefits and results. With paid advertising, you can generate large amounts of high-quality, relevant traffic to your healthcare website. Online advertising is fast, effective, and allows for narrow targeting, which allows for these quick results. This holds especially true for healthcare practices who are looking for new patients.
Easily Track Results: Something you shouldn’t overlook is the wealth of data PPC marketing brings you. Most ad platforms allow you to view and monitor impressions, clicks, and traffic to your medical website. These platforms also allow you to track patient conversions, helping you refine your paid marketing strategy. Data can show what ads are working and which ones need more refinement or aren’t reaching their target audience. It can even show you what your target audience is searching for.
An added benefit is that PPC’s quick turnaround allows you to test different keywords and ad options to see what works for your business. You can then adjust those features to improve your ads.
PPC Takes Time to Learn
PPC has an incredibly high return on investment (ROI), but that’s only if you manage it properly.
Learning the ins and outs of what you’re supposed to do takes time and testing.
How much time do you have to start learning PPC? Do you know how to setup landing pages and configure and measure conversion tracking?
Consider how much you’re willing to spend each month on these advertisements before starting the testing phase, and build in a budget for learning with during your first couple of months.
PPC has an incredibly high return on investment (ROI), but that’s only if you manage it properly. Learning the ins and outs of what you’re supposed to do takes time and testing. Consider how much you’re willing to spend each month on these advertisements before starting the testing phase.
Each keyword your ad goes on costs a different amount. High budgets can place their ads on high-traffic search terms, while lower budgets should search for more niche keywords to fill.
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Google Ads For Healthcare
Most healthcare PPC campaigns focus on Google Ads. Google’s ad platform has the widest reach when compared to other paid advertising platforms, making it the number one choice among most industries.
Google also has a great selection of tools that help you target keywords and set bids, so you have complete control over your ad campaign’s budget.
When setting up your ad campaign on the Google Ads platform, you can specify how and where you want your ads to show up. You also choose where to redirect users who click on your ad, whether that’s your website or a targeted landing page with a specific call to action.
Microsoft Ads For Medical Professionals
Microsoft Advertising, previously called Bing Ads, works similarly to Google’s ad platform. Although it is not as popular as Google, Bing still handles around 900 million to 1 billion searches a month, meaning you shouldn’t ignore it.
There tends to be less competition on Microsoft Advertising, typically offering a lower cost per click and a good opportunity to be competitive at a lower cost.
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Keyword Optimization For Your PPC Campaigns
PPC advertising requires constant optimization in order to benefit your medical practice. A major aspect of this is keyword research and testing.
Each search term has key words that search engines use to connect the searcher with the correct articles. Picking the right keywords for your medical office’s PPC campaign determine the amount of ROI.
To pick the right keywords, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. For a locally based PPC campaign, target words specific to your nearby geographic area.
Targeting local keywords means you’re only competing with medical offices near to you as opposed to globally.
The description of your ad is also something you need to carefully craft with keywords and key phrases. Making your ad copy as informative to the algorithm as possible will inform where on the top of the first page of search engines your ad will appear and how much each click will cost you.
Keeping track of your position and how well your competitors are performing are also incredibly important. A keyword already dominated by another practice will make your ads cost you a lot more. To mitigate this, bid on long-tail keywords. Bidding on these keywords has a lower cost and allows you to reach a client-base that is much more targeted.
There are many other key factors you should consider when creating your PPC ad campaigns, such as budgets, match types, landing pages, mobile specific ads, search intent, retargeting and more.
Location Targeting For Healthcare Paid Ads
Your keyword strategy requires you to decide which geo-graphical areas your ads should show.
Most doctors offices and healthcare providers only need to run ads in small number of locations.
Don’t wast time and money running ads in areas that are too far to drive for your patients.
Google or Microsoft’s PPC advertising tool offers tools for defining that geo specific areas you want to target. Keeping a close eye on the locations your ad is being shown is key to PPC.
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PPC Budget For Medical Providers
In order to determine a budget for a PPC campaign you first need to identify what keywords you are targeting. After the keyword research phase, you should have a set of keywords that will target the audience you want to reach. Once you have this information you need to set a daily or monthly ad budget for your campaign.
When starting a campaign, go through a trial and testing phase. Start small and see how each keyword you’ve marked is performing after the first month.
Tracking this will inform whether you want to increase monthly ad budget or go back to the researching phase.
Underperforming keywords should be nixed and re-optimized.
Medical Website Landing Pages
Generally, landing pages should be short and concise, with minimal text, and a strong call-to-action with some engaging visual elements. Healthcare is one industry where this does not hold true. In fact, more information is the best strategy.
People want a lot of information before making a decision that may affect their health. Healthcare landing pages should have plenty of content that is well thought out and structured in a way that aids the user and guides them to make an informed decision.
The basic idea behind this “more is more” approach is that a visitor is visiting your landing page to find the answer to their health questions. If they cannot find the answer to their question, they are more likely to leave.
Do not fill your landing page with walls of text, however. Though your landing pages should be informative, you should balance out text with videos and images, filling out a page for the sake of length without relevant content is just as bad as not having content at all. It is important to include headings and bullet points to make the content easily digestible.
Another factor to keep in mind is that your ad leads to the specific landing page or service it is advertising. Potential patients do not want to click on an ad for back pain only to be taken for a landing page for foot or ankle pain. Your landing page information should be relevant to the ad and vice versa.
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PPC Match Types
There are three different match-types: broad, exact, and phrase.
Because of the price that some medical keywords can cost, search engines use match types to know when exactly you want your ad shown.
The specifics of the three match types are outlined below.
Broad Match: This match type uses close variations of the keyword you chose as well as related searches and other relevant variations to decide where your ad goes. This type of match does require the exact keyword does not need to be used to display your ads.
Exact Match: Your ad will only be displayed on search terms that match with your keywords exactly, or very close variations with the same meaning.
Phrase Match: your ad will be shown on close matches or variations with a few additional words after or before the key phrase.
Search Intent
Search Intent is critical to an Ad campaign.
You need to understand what is meant by a given search query. This can help your medical practice target the most relevant keywords to reach your target audience.
It can even help you develop relevant landing pages.
As you develop and refine your healthcare PPC campaign, check the search results for different keywords.
Your ads should match and cater to the intent of your potential patients. If there are any keywords that are underperforming, you can pause those keywords to save yourself money and effort.
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Ad Extensions For Healthcare Campaigns
The best way to make your Google Ads stand out is by using Ad extensions.
They are extra pieces of information that appear below your actual Ad giving you more real estate.
By using Ad Extensions you can push your competitors ads and organic links further down the page.
Extensions can help your PPC ads perform better and drive more patients to your practice.
There are quite a few different types of ad extensions that can be employed, but they each serve a similar function: give those viewing your ads more options as to where to click and better grab their attention.
Each of these extensions can lead to a different landing page. Use them to link to a contact us page, an about us page, a list of the skilled doctors you have on staff, address, phone number or any other option that could fit into your practice’s brand.
Mobile Advertising
When designing your mobile advertising strategy, you should first compare your desktop vs. mobile performance in Google Ads.
Keep in mind that if your ads are getting clicks, but aren’t converting any visitors into patients, this might indicate a mobile landing page problem.
Part of running mobile ads is making sure they lead to a mobile friendly landing page.
You can quickly visit your website on your mobile device to see how quickly it loads and whether content adjusts to fit to your screen.
If your website does not perform, you should focus on optimizing your website for mobile users.
By default, your desktop ads will show on mobile if you do not create mobile focused ads. You should, however, consider creating at least two mobile focused ads in addition to your desktop ads. These mobile ad campaigns should make use of call extensions, short and relevant calls-to-action, and be optimized for a mobile-first audience.
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Ad Retargeting
Retargeting, also called remarketing, allows for businesses to retarget their audience by keeping track of the pages someone visits online through cookies and browsing history.
Retargeting allows you to reach customers who have already visited your website.
When you retarget a user, your ads continue to appear on other webpages or online for a set amount of time in order to keep your business at the forefront of their mind.
Recently, Google made changes to its retargeting policies. They no longer allows healthcare marketers to use remarketing tactics, which were previously one of the most effective ways to generate leads for healthcare practices. Google takes this policy very seriously and disapproves of any form of display advertising running concurrently with search advertising.
Basically, healthcare marketers have to be especially careful with their campaign efforts, as Google takes medical advertising much more seriously than other forms due to its ability to affect users.
Review Data and Analytics
In order to get the most out of your healthcare PPC campaigns, you need to regularly perform audits. Analysis and optimization form an important part of creating a great ad campaign, as you check and assess the data for areas where improvement is needed.
With regular audits of your healthcare practice’s PPC campaigns, you can ensure your ads are targeting the right audience, users are visiting your website, and you’re staying within your advertising budget.
Regular PPC audits are a must. Some metrics to look for are your campaign’s quality score, click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per conversion, and areas of wasted spending. The quality score is determined by how relevant your keywords are in relation to a search query, how well your landing page also matches up with your ad, and your click-through rate.
Click-through rate is one of the most important metrics to review. This can tell you whether your ads are relevant to users. Low click-through rates indicate that your keywords, ad design, or both need improvement and require further optimization.
Conversion rates measure the percentage of people who clicked on your ad and followed through on your call-to-action to contact your healthcare practice. This rate is just as important as the click-through rate because it determines whether your advertising budget is being spent on users who do not become paying clients.
The cost-per-conversion measures your return on investment, or ROI. Your ad campaign has a poor ROI if you’re spending more money trying to gain clients than the amount of money you’re receiving from clients. This metric can improve the cost-effectiveness of your PPC.
Aim for cutting back any wasted spending. You want to maximize the number of conversions without spending more money than you are making. Using the other data metrics listed above refines your ad campaigns so you get the most ROI for your budgetary needs.
Fraudulent clicks and robots may take advantage of and negatively affect your ad campaigns. By actively monitoring your account, you can ensure your ads have not become a victim of these bots using software that alerts you whenever there is suspected fraudulent activity. This helps prevent you from wasting money on false leads.
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Is PCC Right For Your Healthcare Practice?
People who find your website through pay per click are 50% more likely to engage with your business compared to organic traffic.
PPC campaigns have amazing benefits, but they’re not always the right strategy for your medical practice.
Other marketing strategies, such as SEO, may be a better fit for you budget and marketing needs at the moment.
When deciding whether PPC marketing is right for you, consider whether your practice will benefit from an ad campaign. It is important to define what your marketing needs are, this will help you set a budget for any ad campaigns you choose to run.
PPC marketing for your health care company is a great way to reach new patients, Just A Web Company can help!
Our team can help you develop and maintain a successful PPC campaign that maximizes conversions and your ROI.
Contact us today to learn how our healthcare advertising services can help your practice reach and treat more people in the community.