Google Ad Mistakes You Must Avoid!
With more than 2.3 million searches each minute, Google Adwords can bring you traffic you don’t want to be missing out on. But in a competitive healthcare market, whether you’re a physiotherapist, Chiropractor or therapy professional, you need to make sure that your Adwords campaigns are set up to maximise your conversion rate which is sometimes easier said than done.
Too Many Keywords…
When starting out with AdWords, many clinics will create a single PPC campaign, with 1 ad group and chuck in a lot of keywords.
The problem with this approach is it doesn’t allow for specific ads for each of your keywords and as a result, you’ll end up with low-quality scores.
It’s important to create separate campaigns for conditions such as spinal as this will be far better when it comes to managing your spend as you can set campaign-level budgets. You should use the majority of your ad spend for the most important, high-quality keywords. This might be around specific areas, if you’re a sports therapist then focus on those sporting keywords. You’ll have more control, know where your spend is going and what keywords are generating the best results.
With multiple, specific ad groups, it’s far easier to manage and keep track of. It’s far easier to manage 50 well-organised groups than 1 with no organisation at all.
…But No Negative Keywords
Not using negative keywords is right up there with the biggest Adwords mistakes. A lot of clinics that use Google ads don’t bother to make a list of negative keywords but by not doing so you won’t end up with the quality and specificity that you’re trying to achieve.
Negative keywords help you rule out keywords that aren’t a match for your clinic. Quite often these can be for competitive clinics or for generic searches eg Chiropractor jobs or back exercises. By ruling these out, you could save money on your marketing budget, and bring in more targeted patients. This means more revenue!
Post-Click Landing Page
When preparing your campaigns, it’s easy to get tied up with creating the perfect ad copy and neglect the landing page.
Your post-click landing page is the page your ad takes patients to when they click it. Having a strong, relevant landing page is essential to having a positive conversion rate, your quality score and it also affects the visibility of your ads and bounce rate.
Imagine your patients clicking an ad for back pain treatment but they then end up on a page specific to recovering from sporting injuries. Not good is it? Even if you could help them, they might think you can’t and will end up going somewhere else.
Your landing page must be relevant to the ad.
To make sure your ad has the most relevance, start off grouping your relevant keywords into an ad group. Then, put together your post-click landing page based off this ad group you’ve created.
Once you’ve done this, all you need to do is link your landing page to your ad from the same ad group. Once you know how, it’s an easy way to generate conversions while keeping costs low.
You Lack Targeting…
Targeting is vital for getting your ads out to the right audience and it’s what’s going to drive your conversions. Targeting is key to ensuring you’re not paying for clicks that aren’t going to convert.
Some ways you can target your audience is via their location or device targeting. You can also target via age-range, profession or other demographics. Whatever you pick to narrow your audience, make sure it’s fitting your business goals.
For example, if you’re only able to service a certain geographical area then target using this. Say you only cover London and Greater London. You’ll avoid paying for clicks from patients up in Scotland.
Or, if you find your patients most often come to you while on the move, it might be better to target mobile devices. When you tie your marketing in, it’s easier to track your progress in line with your goals cohesively.
…Or It Isn’t Configured
AdWords has a setting that shows your ads outside the area you’re targeting. It is the default setting when you’re starting up a new campaign.
A lot of people won’t ever go back to see if these “outside areas” are dragging their results down. It’s easy to check though! You go to Dimensions, choose the “Geographic” report from the drop-down.
You can narrow it further but asking it to show only “Location Type”. This shows the report results for Physical Location against when it’s a Location of Interest. If that is the case, make sure you manually change the setting for each of your ads.
Use Extensions
Make sure you’re adding in all the extensions. In Google Ads, there’s a section called “Extensions”. These are the features like when your address shows under your ad. Or, it’s those little links you sometimes see that come up.
For every one of your groups, make sure you put in as many of the extensions you can. They’re not going to trigger at the same time, that’s not the point. The point is there is a chance they can trigger.
If they’re triggering (even only 1), your ad takes up more real estate compared to your competitors’ ads. This is a huge benefit, but even more so on mobile because it’ll dominate the screen at the top of a search.
Breaking it down, you want to show your competition as far as you can down the search. You want to own as much of that search property as possible.
When including extensions, a lot of people make the mistake of setting them at, say, the campaign level. If you do this, you run the risk of different ad groups covering different themes.
Need Help?
Google has the reach to put your ad in front of almost anyone, so the key to getting the most out of Adwords is targeting. Whether that is audience, location, topic or keywords, the more you target the better your results will be.
If you want to invigorate your PPC campaigns, then contact us today. We work with hundreds of physios, podiatrists, chiropractors and healthcare businesses helping them with their AdWords campaigns, reducing spend, and finding new patients!
