Medical PPC Agency

What is Paid Ads Management for Medical Practices?

Medical Company PPC management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns for medical practices. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

A paid advertising agency for medical companies often begins by getting to know you and your needs before providing professional paid ads management. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a nearby medical practice is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide medical company ecommerce site.

For example, local medical practices are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. Through paid advertising, traffic can be driven to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. 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.

Alternatively, ecommerce-minded medical practices tend to be interested in online sales. Using paid ads, you can generate traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense to include for some online businesses. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

The next step in medical company PPC management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some medical practices, 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 PPC advertising, your medical practice needs to use multiple tactics and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns for medical companies should include plans like:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Increase conversions for your medical practice through qualified leads or online sales.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Provide social proof with case studies, white papers, video testimonials, etc.
• 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 Medical Companies

Our team of PPC advertising consultants is knowledgeable in the latest paid ads trends for medical 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 advertising, you'll find keyword research for medical companies mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, search ads only show up based on what your medical practice targets on Google or Bing.

If you are looking for a medical practice in your city, you might search "nearby medical company" on Google. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the medical practice wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

Typically, the PPC advertising manager will discuss with the medical practice about what types of products / services to target more often. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

For instance, the paid ads manager might discover high search volume for "nearby medical practices" or even "medical company 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 paid ads from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more patients.

For example, a person searching for "free services from medical practices" or "how to advertise to medical companies" is unlikely to convert with you. However, they might see your PPC advertising if you are using 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 medical practice 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.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

Facebook custom audiences were heavily relied upon by medical practice paid advertising managers in the past. After all, one of the most appealing features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which medical companies lined up to exploit.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

Apple's iOS 14.5 update included a pop-up message that lets users opt out of personalized ad tracking. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

For most medical company-focused advertising agencies, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. By choosing your own interest-based targeting, you tend to do more harm than good because their algorithm often understands your ideal audience better than you do.

While there will still be plenty of medical practice paid advertising firms relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within medical company ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your medical practice PPC advertising campaigns.

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign for medical companies, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to 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.

Please, don't spend money on paid ads until you have a landing page that follows best practices! 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.) Sales 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 online 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 medical practice 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 Rate 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 PPC advertising, 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 medical practices, 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 paid ads company 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 PPC 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 medical companies, 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 Medical Practice PPC Management

If you want us to dedicate more time to your campaigns, the price of our PPC ads management packages will be adjusted accordingly. Below is the starting cost for our paid ads 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 Medical Practices

For medical practices, there are many ways to run paid advertising. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for medical companies.

1.) Local Advertising

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your medical practice. Depending on the nature of your nearby medical practice, you may find better success in one platform versus another. You should try out every option available to see which suits you best. Let's talk about a few local advertising choices.

From Google, you'll have two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out 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. For all types of medical practices, we often use Facebook Ads.

2.) Social Media Ads

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

It's important to keep the ad creatives fresh when running social ads. 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.

One of the best things about social media ads is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. The opposite is true when you run search engine ads since your ads will only show when someone is actively looking for what your medical practice has to offer.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Advertising

You should invest in search advertising if you know people are searching online for your products or services.

There are some people out there who refer to this as medical company Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

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

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.

Google Ads and Bing Ads commonly offer these campaign types.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your medical practice website, landing page, or sales funnel.

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 any ad platform, too.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

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 for your medical practice.

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. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

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

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

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

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. 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 advertising campaigns.