Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising for Healthcare Practices

You may wonder why your healthcare practice should use PPC when you’ve already got a good SEO strategy going for you.

At PPC Services India, we believe PPC and SEO work hand-in-hand. SEO is a long-term strategy that can take months before you start seeing results.

Good PPC ads are live instantly and will start sending traffic to your site immediately. That means instant visibility for your practice.

Another reason is that no matter how good your SEO, you’re not always going to be in Google’s local pack or at the top of search results. Paid ads will always appear at the top of search results, however, because you paid for that spot.

You’ll be the first thing patients see.

PPC ads also allow you to target, at the very least, patients in a specific geography, and on social media platforms even more direct targeting.

SEO is great because it gives you a broad reach. PPC complements that broad reach by attracting specific patients.

Developing an effective PPC advertising strategy is key if you want your ad dollars to result in new patients.

Here’s how you can go about developing an effective PPC advertising strategy for your practice.

Establish Goals

The first step in creating effective PPC advertising strategy is to determine your goals.

Why are you advertising in the first place?

Are you interested in getting more new patients? Or do you want to raise awareness for a new clinic that you just opened?

Sounds simple, but so many practices forget to do this before they start advertising and usually fail because of it.

Regardless of the goals you have for your practice advertising, make sure that they are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic and Trackable.

Once you have determined your goals, you can move on to…

Choose Search or Social

This decision comes down to the goals you have for the practice.

You can start with both (and we’re sure some practices do this), however, you might find it easier to start by pick a search engine or a popular social network that you feel can help you achieve your goals.

For example, if you’re instantly looking for new patient appointments, targeting patients searching on Google, is your best place to start.

If you’re looking to grow your patient audience and engage with patients more frequently after they visit, social advertising probably is your best place to start.

Either way, start small, test and experiment often.

Determine an Offer

There needs to be a reason for a patient to interact with your ad.

This doesn’t mean that you need to offer a coupon or discount, but you do need to have something that the patient wants.

Most often you will have the solution to their health or medical condition, which is more than enough to offer. The majority of your ad creative regardless of the medium should focus on selling the experience and results you can provide – not necessarily price.

Always remember that there is competition in your area and patients can be swayed by enticing offers from healthcare providers

Oh and if you’re using social media ads to market your practice, your offer will likely be a piece of content or information that patients would enjoy.

Develop Creative

Armed with an offer, you can now develop the ad campaign creative – the copy (and in some cases imagery) that will drive patient action.

For search engines campaigns, your PPC ads are limited to text and links. Prior to writing your PPC ads and determining your ad extensions, you should do some keyword searches to check out the competition.

For social media campaigns, your PPC ads contain both text and images or video. This gives you a lot more flexibility and power over how you convey your value to patients.

Regardless of the platform, it’s important to have multiple versions of your ads running at the same time. While you don’t have to test huge variations, you should always be trying to find a better converting advertisement.

Plus if you’re experimenting with a new demographic or set of keywords, getting data back on multiple different ads can help you make decisions on future campaign tweaks.

You should also be rotating ads at least every month in conjunction with changing offers, unless you’ve found something that consistently works.

Implement Tracking

Search engine and social media advertising platforms provide practices with in-depth tracking capabilities. These capabilities allow your measure and track how your ads are performing on their network.

That’s simply the start.

In order to best track a PPC advertising campaign, you will also need to have analytics on your website, so you can identify which advertisements are generating the most new patient appoints. You’ll also want to leverage call tracking, because not all patients book appointments online.

Many still call.

Calls bring up another grey area – tracking online ads to offline appointments. While many online tools exist to track the various movements of patients, the front office staff will need to bear some responsibility as well for tracking.

Updating patient forms to include your new forms of advertising on the “how did you hear about us?” section and ensuring that the patient is asked at least once to verify, will greatly help in making sure you know what’s working best.

At the very least, you’ll know exactly what’s not working.