This is the seventh in a series of articles I’m writing about Google Ads strategies for specific industries. This post will be about Google Ads for healthcare and medical clinics.
Depending upon what healthcare or medical services are provided Google can have some pretty serious restrictions that can hem you in.
Before jumping in I want to be clear about the scope and constraints of this series.
Scope & Constraints
The strategies and tactics outlined are broadly applicable to most advertisers that offer healthcare services. However, every business is unique, and hence every Google Ads implementation needs to be as well. This article, alone, shouldn’t be the basis for building and optimizing your Google Ads campaigns. You should always work with an experienced Google Ads expert or take comprehensive training before making this type of investment.
Industry Description
Medical and health clinics are a massive market with an estimated $4.1 trillion/year for outpatient services.
For the purposes of this article I’m including a wide range of services such as family medicine, medspa, weight loss, physcotherapy, addiction services, physiotherapy, dental, imaging services, and so forth. Most of these services can be treated similarly in Google Ads, noting some specific restrictions for certain service types.
For the most part, I’ll be discussing lead generation and branding. While some clinics may sell services directly online, it’s not the norm for acquiring new clients.
Google Ads Eccentricities
In this section, I’ll cover some specific things you need to be aware of when running Google Ads for medical clinics.
Marketing Claims & Ad Copy
Many medical services rely on certain medical devices, drugs, or treatments that are authorized by the FDA, Health Canada, and the CE mark. This being the case, you need to be careful and deliberate about ad copy avoiding making claims they cannot support.
It’s important to ensure that any stated health outcomes are verifiable through clinical studies. This isn’t a problem for most providers, just be thoughtful when stating any claims. If, for example, you offer weight loss drug treatment, you can state results that are already verified by the pharmaceutical manufacturer. But don’t make extraordinary claims for patient “x” that fall outside of the norm.
Also, your PPC manager needs to have a playbook for what they can say and cannot not say. Or you need a process to review and approve new ad copy through your regulatory team. At Ten Thousand Foot View, we generally work from existing landing pages or shared collateral material to avoid any problems.
In addition, this means you absolutely must avoid running any dynamic ads as well as prevent any Google automation from generating copy. More specifically:
a) You need to ensure you don’t run dynamic search ads (DSAs) or AI Max URL expansion
b) You need to turn off URL expansion for P-Max campaigns
c) You need to always dismiss Google “recommendations” to enable automatically generated creatives
One other critical aspect to your creative is to include what payment methods you support. As health insurance coverage is fragmented in the US and not all healthcare services are covered it’s important to clearly state how you can be paid. This not only routes the right prospects through your ads but also prevents the wrong ones from clicking!
No Remarketing Allowed
Google doesn’t allow any remarketing in the patient-facing medical space as per their health in personalized advertising policies. For the most part, this just means that you can’t add remarketing lists to your search campaigns nor can you run any campaigns specifically for remarketing. Likewise, automated dynamic remarketing ads won’t run for any P-Max campaigns.
If you do happen to add a remarketing list to your search campaign your ads will typically be flagged as limited. This means they won’t run to anybody in those remarketing lists but will otherwise run normally.
Niche Specific Restrictions
There are some specific restrictions for certain services. Most notably any service that incorporates pharmaceuticals as well as any addiction service much register with Legit Script. The annual subscription isn’t trivial ($1,000 – 2,500+) but it’s necessary to get approved to run ads with Google.
In addition to these restrictions there are some services that are not allowed at all or not allowed in certain regions. Some examples include abortions, fertility, opioids, and speculative/experimental procedures.
Search Campaigns
The bread and butter for medical/health clinics, you should spend a large portion of your ad budget on search campaigns.
How many campaigns, how they are organized, and how much you spend will depend on many factors. Typically you would separate campaigns into 3 main types:
- Service type
- Branded (advertising your clinic by name)
- Competitor (conquesting searches for competing clinics)
With a large budget you might also split these up into different geographic regions, particularly if you have multiple locations and need to control lead flow to each.
For a small regional provider, say covering a city or part of a city, I recommend one campaign for each of your major services plus one branded campaign. Competitor conquesting is an advanced strategy with client acquisition costs substantially higher than service-based or branded campaigns. Thus I don’t recommend introducing these until you start to see diminishing gains as you scale your other campaigns.
For service type campaigns you should sub-divide the campaign into ad groups by broad keyword themes. But don’t go nuts… these days with Responsive Search Ads you don’t need to be extremely precise.
You should always point your ads towards the most specific landing page possible. For some advertisers this may end up being your homepage. But for many, it’ll be a purpose-built page specifically for the service being advertised.
Most medical services advertisers have 3 primary ways (calls to action) to generate new leads.
First, you can generate inbound calls either directly from ads or from the phone number on your website / landing pages. Second, you can present a general inquiry form such as “get a free assessment” or similar. And third, you can present an appointment scheduler.
While the webform and scheduler seem similar, they are a little different. Prospective patients that set an appointment are typically way more qualified leads because they are willing to immediately book a service or at least meet to discuss diagnostic or treatment options. Those completing an interest form are less likely to actually book a follow up appointment. By the same token, initial conversion rates tend to be much lower for appointment booking options.
Thus you might consider offering both options or split testing the options to see what works best overall for your clinic.
With respect to tracking conversions, it can be a good idea to track both unqualified and qualified leads. You can set default or estimate the values using different techniques. By including both lead types with different values you can then use value-based bidding to drive better overall performance. This article explains a few different ways this can work.
As with any search campaign, ensure you fully utilize your RSA ad copy slots and add all applicable assets (formerly called ad extensions).
In terms of keywords, start with exact match and ensure you use qualifiers to avoid running to adjacent markets or the wrong audience, e.g. showing ads for indirectly competing services. A classic example of this is if you advertise weight loss using one method but have your ads show up for another method. In this case, using appropriate qualifiers such as “diet” or “surgical” can ensure you’re not throwing money away on your ads.
P-Max Campaigns
For most advertisers, P-Max makes sense once you’re spending around $10K+ per month. As with any Google Ads account, you need to place enough budget on P-Max to generate at least 30 conversions a month. Any fewer than that and you run a high risk of poor targeting and low performance.
P-Max can help you reach untapped search inventory and work the upper part of the marketing funnel. This campaign type often drives incremental conversions at a similar CPA to search while also driving more performance through your existing search campaigns, particularly through branded.
On the downside, many advertisers find that the lead quality from P-Max isn’t quite up to par with those from search. For this reason it’s a good idea to track campaign source through your lead forms and calls and then analyze performance.
Here are some general guidelines for P-Max.
Always turn off URL expansion. This will ensure that Google only uses your ad copy and only advertises landing pages and products you explicitly include in the campaign.
In terms of audience targeting, this is one case where you can actually add remarketing lists to your campaign. Consider uploading your existing client list and adding recent website visitors to your asset groups’ audience signal. Since Google doesn’t target these users directly there is no conflict with their healthcare privacy policies. Note that there aren’t any healthcare specific in-market audiences.
Setting demographics targets can be helpful if you only treat men or women, or certain age groups, or cater to those seeking luxury treatments. Keep in mind that audience signals do not necessarily/rigorously follow the settings you choose. But P-Max now does have campaign level hard exclusions for age and gender.
One last thing is whether or not to block your brand from running in P-Max search results. If you do have a dedicated brand search campaign or you don’t want to run ads for your brand at all you should generally block branded on P-Max. This can be accomplished by excluding your brand list (if you’ve created one) or by adding one more more negative keywords for your brand. That said, if you’re struggling to generate enough conversion volume on P-Max it can be worth letting it spend on branded to boost your numbers… it’ll help overall campaign performance.
Remarketing Campaigns Workaround
At my agency we recommend running healthcare remarketing through Meta Ads. This can be done for relatively low cost and the truth is that Meta Ads remarketing tends to outperform Google Ads anyway. Just keep in mind that it may not be worth throwing say $500-1,000 at Meta Ads for a few more leads given the overhead to set up and maintain the campaigns.
Other Campaign Types
If you’re spending big, $25K+/month, you might want to rethink your overall account strategy. Serious advertisers may find more efficiency at this level by running search with AI-Max or DSA (dynamic search ads) and Demand Gen for upper funnel advertising, i.e. nix P-Max. This allows for much greater control over spending and targeting per channel. I wrote a separate article about this recently. There are absolutely benefits and drawbacks to this approach. While it may sound weird, many advertisers still can’t get their head around spending on brand awareness campaigns and seeing zero conversions… it’s a psychological barrier that’s tough to break.
Campaign Optimization Notes
Most Google Ads best practices (not necessarily the ones Google tells you) apply to medical services campaigns. One thing I strongly recommend in this niche is to use ad variation testing extensively. Since you may be restricted to what ad copy variations you can run, this will give you greater control over testing ideas.
Search terms review is absolutely crucial when starting new campaigns. It’s very easy to go off the rails showing your ads to job seekers, for example.
Add negatives as needed, pause low-relevance keywords, and add more qualifier keyword variations as needed.
As conversions ramp up past around 50/month you should start to migrate to broad match keywords. Just keep a close eye on search terms as you proceed. Importantly, broad match keywords use additional signals for optimizing bids and can run on AI Overviews and AI Mode auctions increasing your reach. Most advertisers find that once conversions get dialed in the irrelevant queries disappear just like magic.
Tools and other Tips
If you’re running any kind of lead generation I strongly recommend using CallRail or another 3rd party call tracking tool to capture those conversions in Google Ads and Analytics. Even if you only get another 25% of conversions, that can help tremendously with campaign optimization. Importantly, CallRail does offer a HIPAA compliant solution.
A tool like CallRail can also pull in form submission keywords and GCLIDS, allowing you to upload offline conversions such as deals that close up to 90 days after initial contact. Feeding these sales conversions and values back into Google Ads can have a significant effect on both lead quality and campaign performance over time.
Many clinics already use appointment booking tools such as the Jane App, which can be integrated with Google Analytics to track conversions. Otherwise you might consider Calendly which also supports Analytics.
Implementing landing page split tests can boost post-click conversion performance over time. This means you can increase the number of leads generated without spending more on direct ad costs. There are many options for this including:
- using two pages on your own site with a Google ad variation test
- using a service such as Optimizely to create and test variations of an existing website page
- using a full blown landing page management service such as Unbounce or Instapage
Summary
Medical services companies have a few unique challenges with Google Ads, mainly revolving around restricted services and remarketing. They also need to be extra careful when it comes to automatically generated creatives… this can be a big “no no” when you rely on FDA and other clearances.
Outside of that, Google Ads should be run like most other service businesses.
It’s generally best to start with search campaigns and then add on P-Max as you scale up. As you grow further you might want to consider migrating from P-Max to Demand Gen for greater control over targeting and what channels you spend your budget on.
