Pay Per Click

Target Locally

Google Adwords makes it easy to target your audience geographically. This means that your ads will be shown only in the cities, neighborhoods, or regions that you dictate. Common sense and practice shows that the closer a customer is to your practice, the more likely they are to choose to visit your practice.

Once your campaigns are successful, begin to expand your targeting locations. You will discover a point where you are not seeing enough returns to justify continued expanding of targeting.

Become a knowledge source

In general it is not recommended to use your informative articles in your PPC campaigns unless you have a large budget, and are focusing on brand awareness. The reason for this is that people searching for informative articles are higher up in the buyer’s journey. Doing this means that you have just paid someone to read an article that you are offering for free. A click on an ad directed to an informative article will convert far less often than to one linked directly to a services/ treatments page for specific symptoms with a ‘book appointment’ option.

Understand your target audience and patients

Once again, most of the key ideas in the strategy overview above apply. Primarily for PPC, the most important thing is focusing your ads on specific end-goals of your primary patients. Knowing the issues that they are trying to resolve, and focusing on bottom-of-the-funnel searchers (those actively seeking treatment) is key.

Don’t Neglect Mobile

With the majority of searches now being conducted on mobile, be sure that your PPC ads are optimized across numerous devices. This means:

• Enabling mobile specific extensions on your ads that offer more information, and allow users to interact more easily on their mobile devices. Extensions only show when you have a high enough ad rank, so be sure to pay attention the quality score of your ads.
• Direct users on mobile to pages of your site that provide a great mobile experience.
• Tailor your ads to mobile users by including IF functions.

Utilize Data

Not all of your ad campaigns will be equally effective. Luckily, the Adwords platform provides comprehensive reporting. That should help you tweak and optimize your campaigns for the best performance. This should be done often and thoroughly.

• Make notes of what works and what doesn’t, and adjust your bids accordingly. Invest more in reliably high performing ads and reserve some budget to test new campaigns. You can segment your audience based on demographics like age, gender, etc. to find your perfect audience.

A/B testing

A/B testing allows you to test the performance of two slightly differing ads to see which performs better. This is a great way to optimize your conversions over time and end up with the very highest performing campaign.

Negative Keywords

Sometimes, the keywords you don’t show up for are as important as the ones you do. If a campaign is losing money, see if there are negative keywords that you can remove. For example, if many clicks are coming from “Free Dental Care Atlanta,” and this is not something you provide, it would be wise to add “Free” to your list of negative keywords.

Ad rank and quality score

Ad rank and quality scores are directly related. If you have a high- quality score, you will rank higher and pay less than competitors for the same spot. Check your ad rank and your quality scores often for the best results. This system prevents a single advertiser form simply buying the best rankings.