Healthcare PPC Agency

What is PPC Management for Healthcare Companies?

The act of creating and optimizing paid ads campaigns for healthcare companies is known as healthcare provider PPC management. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

A PPC advertising firm for healthcare providers often begins by getting to know you and your needs before providing expert PPC management. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a local healthcare company is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide healthcare provider ecommerce site.

Local healthcare companies, for example, are often only looking for contact form submissions or calls. To accomplish this, paid ads can drive traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, we recommend you start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

In contrast, ecommerce-focused healthcare companies are most likely to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through PPC advertising that increases traffic to an optimized product page or category page. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

To optimize and scale healthcare provider paid ads campaigns, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For some healthcare companies, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid advertising, your healthcare company needs to use multiple plans and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns for healthcare providers should include strategies like:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social channels, and third-party websites.
• Make your healthcare company more profitable by acquiring qualified leads or selling online.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Test the effectiveness of different ad creatives across different media and ad placements.

Tips for Managing PPC for Healthcare Providers

We are a team of paid advertising professionals with extensive knowledge in the latest PPC trends for healthcare companies and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of paid ads, you'll find keyword research for healthcare providers mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for that your healthcare company is targeting.

A search for "nearby healthcare provider" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a healthcare company website in their area. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the healthcare company needs to expand their advertising reach? The solution would require keyword research.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid advertising manager talking with the healthcare company about what products / services they want to target more often and where. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

Suppose the paid ads manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby healthcare companies" or even "healthcare provider services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. The second phrase is targeting a service, which might result in a more lucrative conversion.

When building negative keyword lists, keyword research can also be beneficial. You can use negative keywords to prevent your PPC advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more patients.

For example, someone looking for "free services from healthcare companies" or "how to advertise to healthcare providers" isn't likely to convert with your healthcare company. They might see your paid ads if you use broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

When you hear audience research talked about for healthcare company paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram. However, Bing Ads and Google Ads also allow audience targeting.

Let's take a look at audience research and targeting within Facebook Ads.

In years past, healthcare provider-focused paid advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most appealing features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers for healthcare companies eagerly took advantage of.

A number of factors, including data privacy and machine learning, have had an impact on custom audiences over time.

When Apple released its iOS 14.5 update, they included a pop up message that allowed users to easily opt out of personalized ad tracking. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

For most healthcare provider-focused advertising companies, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

Although many healthcare company paid advertising agencies still rely on custom audiences, the trend is shifting toward broad targeting. You can see it for yourself. Every few months Facebook rolls out upgrades that gradually remove lesser-used interest-based targeting options. They even keep changing out "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is pushed in the ad set creation.

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.

It's not to say audience research and targeting are going away. The targeting options within healthcare provider ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

An important factor in the success of your healthcare company paid ads campaign is the landing page.

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign for healthcare providers, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Is there an image above the fold?
• What is the quality of the content? Is it well written?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Can you easily identify the call to action?
• How quickly does the page load?
• Is there social proof?
• Can I load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Until you have a landing page that follows best practices, don't spend money on PPC advertising. Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Conversion Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their internet advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your healthcare company isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid ads, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most healthcare companies, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a PPC advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for healthcare providers, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out attractive ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Healthcare Company PPC Management

Our paid ads management service fees are determined by the amount of time you wish us to spend on your campaigns every month. Below is the starting cost for our PPC management plans, but we are happy to have a conversation about adjusting the budget if your ad spend or service requirements exceed our initial estimate.

Types of Paid Ads for Healthcare Companies

There are numerous ways to run paid advertising for your healthcare company. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for healthcare providers.

1.) Local Marketing

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your healthcare company. One platform may be more effective for your localized healthcare company than another. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Let's talk about a few local advertising choices.

Google is going to offer two options.

The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. The Google algorithm finds the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you local customers using this type of dynamic ad campaign. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. As a pay-per-lead platform, Google Local Service Ads charges a flat fee per lead. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

You can also target people in your local area using Facebook Ads. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. We often rely on nearby Facebook Ads for all types of healthcare companies.

2.) Social Ads

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social media ad.

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social media marketing. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. A weekly change in ad creative is often recommended for higher-spend ad campaigns.

Using social ads allows you to reach audiences who have never thought of your product or service, or aren't thinking about it right now. When running search ads, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively searching for what your healthcare company offers.

However, this benefit can also be a curse, since conversion rates are typically lower when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Advertising

If you know people are searching online for the products or services you offer, you'll want to invest in search advertisements.

Some people refer to this as healthcare provider Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. This is just a different way of explaining search ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine above the SEO placements.

If you have been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

There are display ads on message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even nearby news stations), gossip websites, and more.

These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.

With display ads, all you need are a few different sizes of ad creatives. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you increase results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Your healthcare company website, landing page, or sales funnel won't convert everyone on the first visit.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

You can run retargeting ads on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.

6.) Shopping Ads

It was Google Shopping Campaigns that popularized this form of search advertising.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. Using that information, they can determine what types of search queries to display your products at the top of search results.

7.) Video Ads

You can run video ads on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other social networking websites.

Using YouTube Ads is as basic as setting up a video ad campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Video is an excellent ad creative in terms of conversion opportunities. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid ads campaigns.