PPC Advertising for Doctors and Physicians
The more technology advances, the more patients will use it to find the right doctor for general care or a specialty of choice. Doctors can also leverage the developments in communication to build their marketing for practices and clinics.
PPC is one online tool that doctors can use to improve their internet marketing. Managed correctly, it can leverage the average dollar invested in it for a higher return on investment, by bringing in more visitors to your website, and patients to your office.
PPC Services for Doctors' Practices
Pay-per-click can be a great way for doctors to attract a steady incoming stream of new, local patients to their website and business. However, if you don’t know the intricacies of running a PPC campaign in the healthcare sector, you risk wasting thousands of dollars without seeing any return. Some of the services we provide are:
- PPC Campaign Audits
- PPC Management
- Video Ads
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
…and more. Not sure if PPC is the right strategy for your practice? Contact us and we’ll put you in touch with an expert.
Speak to an ExpertWhat Is PPC?
PPC is pay-per-click ads. You are the advertiser who pays a website, in this case the publisher, to host an ad for your practice or clinic. That said, you only pay when a website user clicks on the ad and the link that follows. It is currently the most popular form of online advertising.
You and the publisher determine the price you pay beforehand. The better designed your website and landing pages are, the lower the price, or competitive bid as we call it. This bidding gives you leverage, more so than with traditional ads.
One benefit of PPC is that you pay based on their effectiveness, and that reduces the amount of upfront costs. With physical ads, such as billboards, you have to pay a large amount upfront, and the costs of changing those ads can be high. With PPC, the costs of changing ads are far lower, and you can use online analytics to measure their performance.
Another benefit is that PPC can target specific patients, those who live near your office locations or have a need that you can satisfy with good medical care.
Type of PPC Ads
You can use three types of PPC to improve your practice. You can use one or more in a combination:
Search Ads
These ads appear at the top of search engines, like Google, Bing or Yahoo, as sponsored results. Search ads are good for patients that are deliberately seeking out medical procedures or services that you perform.
Display Ads
Display ads appear on websites, usually in banner form at the top or bottom, based on your keyword of choice. They can involve images, text, or even video, depending on your budget.
Social Media Ads
You will see these ads in social media channels, websites and apps, appearing as part of feeds. These channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Which one you choose should be based on your business type and goals.
Average Increase in Website Traffic
+97%Average Increase in Conversion Rates
+52%Monthly Total Leads Generated
3,000+We become an indispensable resource for our clients to drive traffic and leads.
5 PPC tips for Doctors to Attract New Patients
1. Create Targeted Landing Pages
Unlike with your homepage, which uses navigation to have people explore your site, landing pages are intended to stand alone and deliver a message about your patient services. You can keep these pages simple, and hook the user.
Graphic design can help with simplifying and delivering your message: you can reduce your elements to the bare minimum, and focus the patient on the sign-up link. Your headers can be simple, and focused on signing up patients. Keep your forms simple as well.
These pages specialize in tracking users, and in conveying your information. You want to use them to convince patients to schedule an appointment, leave information for a follow-up phone call, or subscribe to your blog on medical information.
Targeted landing pages also allow an opportunity for trust; you can list patient testimonials along the bottom, to reassure new patients that they are in good hands.
2. Design and Optimize Your Ads for Mobile
We all use our phones to make Internet searches. Our screens vary, based on the model, and our budget. Thus, when we are marketing using PPC ads to get users to landing pages, we should design ads that can appear on a smartphone.
With over 50% of all web traffic being done on mobile devices, you need to think mobile first! Having mobile ads that are easily read on a cellphone is no longer optional.
Your ads should be mobile-friendly, so that a person who sees them is more likely to click and less likely to ignore. In addition, patients will associate your ad with good design, and that will keep your message consistent. You can also convey information in a fewer amount of words, so that a patient seeking specific information can get the message succinctly.
3. Target Your Website Visitors Using Remarketing
PPC ads give you the data on who will visit your site, and who may potentially schedule an appointment at your practice. You want to use that data, especially if a patient doesn’t take the time to leave their contact information or schedule a time for a visit.
Remarketing is creating new ads to show to people who have visited your site. These ads have a lower cost per acquisition and advertise more specific services based on patient demographics and such.
This can be a great way to engage people who have shown enough interest in your business to visit your website, but may not be ready to contact you for an appointment.
4. Regularly Review Your Performance
The important thing about PPC is that each dollar counts per click, and you want to ensure that your ads are always performing at one hundred percent quality. Conduct frequent reviews of your PPC ad portfolio and monitor campaigns based on time. Make improvements based on the data that you see, so that you can continue to leverage that initial bid.
Study your keywords, and see if they are netting you the right searches and website visitors. Analyze the time of day that people click and set schedules for your ads to be shown.
Additionally, you’ll want to adjust your bidding strategy based on which keywords are performing well and which keywords aren’t generating any results. This is a process called “bid optimization”
5. Identify Your Negative Keywords
You will have a list of keywords that your ads will feature, and they will determine what websites or searches will lead patients to your website. On the flip side, you want to focus on your patients, and the medical treatment that you can offer, because you only want to pay for the clicks that will lead to more appointments and checkups scheduled.
Negative keywords are words that you want to not associate with your brand; if you are an ophthalmologist and specialize in removing cataracts, for example, you may want to put “open-heart surgery” in a negative keyword list so that no one risks cardiac arrest when messaging you.
Regularly updating your negative keyword list is a good way to avoid spending money on unnecessary clicks, but make sure you do so gradually. Adding too many negative keywords all at once can adversely affect your ad performance.
Optimum7 has ample experience working with set ad budgets to leverage PPC. We also can design ads suited for mobile and desktop that reflect your practice’s brand and reach the ideal patient.
Speak to an Expert