Physician PPC Agency

What is PPC Management for Doctor's Office?

Physician PPC ads management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns for doctor's office. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

A paid advertising firm for physicians often begins by getting to know you and your needs before providing expert PPC ads management. Since the way you approach paid advertising for a local area doctor's office is much different than how you would for a nationwide physician ecommerce brand, this information helps determine the next steps.

For example, local doctor's office are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that builds traffic 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.

In contrast, ecommerce-focused doctor's office are most likely to be interested in online sales. Using PPC advertising, you can boost traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

Understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale physician PPC campaigns is the next step. For some doctor's office, 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 doctor's office should utilize multiple advertising tactics and marketing tools. For example, the best doctor's office paid advertising services will include tactics to:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your doctor's office.
• Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
• Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.

Tips for Managing Paid Ads for Physicians

Our team of PPC advertising specialists is knowledgeable in the latest PPC trends for physicians 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, keyword research for physicians largely relates to Google Ads and Bing Ads search campaigns. After all, search ads only show up based on what your doctor's office targets on Google or Bing.

For example, a person looking for a doctor's office nearby might search "local physician" on a search engine. 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 doctor's office needs to expand their advertising reach? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid advertising manager talking with the doctor's office about what products / services they want to target more often and where. A broader keyword targeting plan than exact matches might also be necessary.

As an example, the PPC manager might find that "nearby doctor's office" and "physician services" have high search volumes. 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.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. Negative keywords are used to stop your paid advertising from showing in search queries that you know won't bring in patients.

For example, a person searching for "free services from doctor's office" or "how to advertise to physicians" is unlikely to convert with you. Your paid advertising may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

You can see that as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend, the needs for keyword research become more complex.

2.) Audience Research Tips

For doctor's office paid ads campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.

Let's go over a little history on audience research and targeting within the Facebook Ads platform.

In years past, physician-focused PPC advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which physicians lined up to exploit.

The rise of data privacy and machine learning had a significant impact on custom audiences over time.

In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

Following that, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most advertising agencies for physicians. 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 doctor's office 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, if you'd like a second opinion.

However, audience research and targeting aren't going away. The targeting options within physician ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

3.) Landing Page Creation & Optimization Tips

It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements for physicians.

Our first step when managing paid advertising campaigns for doctor's office involves reviewing the landing pages for best practices. In this review, we consider the following factors and more:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Do I have immediate access to a lead form?
• Can you easily identify the call to action?
• 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 digital 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 doctor's office 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.) CRO 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 doctor's office, 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 agency 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 physicians, 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 beautiful 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 Doctor's Office PPC Management

If you want us to dedicate more time to your campaigns, the price of our PPC ads management plans will be adjusted accordingly. Below is the starting cost for our paid ads management services, 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 Doctor's Office

For doctor's office, there are many ways to run PPC advertising. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for physicians.

1.) Local Advertising

Local Area ads for your doctor's office can be run through nearly any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your local doctor's office, you may find better success in one platform versus another. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Let's talk about a few localized advertising choices.

Google is going to offer two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. 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. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals. Even local stores use this campaign type.

Alternatively, if your business qualifies, Google offers a Local Service Ads option. 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 use Facebook Ads to target people in your local area. This is a little more straightforward, since it just involves setting up a campaign that has ad sets with geographic restrictions. For all types of doctor's office, we often use Facebook Ads.

2.) Social Ads

Almost all online ads you see on social networks qualify as social ads.

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social media ads. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative changes for campaigns with higher spending.

The best part of social media marketing is you can target audiences that have never thought of your product or service, or perhaps just aren't thinking about it now. When running search engine marketing, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively looking for what your doctor's office offers.

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 Ads

You'll want to invest in search advertising if you know people are searching online for the products you offer.

In some circles, this is referred to as doctor's office Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

You might consider copying your Google Ads campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform if you've had success with Google 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.

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

With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different sizes. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you get results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

5.) Retargeting Ads

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your doctor's office website, landing page, or sales funnel.

Retargeting ads are almost always recommended to help bring people back to your site after they have weighed their options.

Almost any ad platform can be used for retargeting ads.

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 doctor's office.

By using these tools, you can provide Google Ads with accurate product data, including 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 Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, 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 PPC advertising campaigns.