Easy Steps To Impressive PPC ROI for Hospitals

In a highly competitive industry like healthcare, how can medical practices significantly improve their bottom line without draining their coffers? One of the answers lies in effective PPC for hospitals.

This blog post shares three easy-to-follow, highly effective pay-per-click (PPC) strategies that attract the right patients:

• Raise your ad quality score to improve ad prominence and lower advertising costs.
• Audit current PPC campaigns to know which works - and which doesn't.
• Analyze your leads and ideal audience to align ads to user intent and needs.

Do you want to learn how to grow your hospital's return on investment (ROI) with PPC? Let's break down these three tips.

3 Major PPC Strategies That Deliver Cash Flow and Patients

Improving healthcare PPC advertising should not be complicated. These three strategies alone can put you on the right track:

     1. Raise Your Ad Quality Score To Improve Ad Prominence and Lower Advertising Costs

If you can only follow one tip, this should be it. When done right, it can generate a domino effect of benefits that make other PPC strategies more effective.

But first, what is an ad quality score? It's a metric Google uses to determine how relevant and useful your ad is to users. It ranges from 0 to 10, but you don't need a perfect score.

Instead, work on getting the highest number you can hit. This way, you can:

• Lower your ad spending
• Feature your ads more prominently on the search results
• Improve your ad rank

To raise your score, you should focus on these three elements:

• Landing page experience
• Ad relevance
• Expected click-through rate (CTR)

Let's tackle each below:

       A. Landing Page Experience

If your marketing strategy is a hotel, then your medical PPC ads are doorways. The real experience happens when users click on your ad and land on your website. 

Creating a seamless journey from the get-go is important to prevent users from leaving before they even explore what you have to offer by walking through the door.

You can achieve this goal by optimizing your landing page with these ideas:

• Speed it up. Aim to load your page in two seconds or less.
• Include a strong call-to-action (CTA). A CTA is a short instruction that tells users what you want them to do next, such as "Schedule an appointment" or "Download our free ebook."
• Include persuasive visuals. People are visual creatures. Use high-quality images and videos to show, not tell, what you can do for your patients.
• Add social proof. Reviews, testimonials, and awards from credible sources build trust and credibility.

       B. Ad Relevance

Your ad must be relevant to what users are actually looking for. This way, you're paying only for clicks that have the potential to turn into conversions.

There are two ways to ensure relevance:

• Apply the right keywords. Use keyword research tools, such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner, to find relevant terms that users are typing into the search engine.
• Bid on branded keywords. These are terms that include your hospital's name, as well as your doctors' and staff members' names. Bidding on these helps improve your ad relevance score and promotes brand awareness.
• Match all ad elements. Every ad aspect should focus on one keyword and intent from your headline to your CTA.

       C. Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Your CTR measures how often users click on your ad after seeing it. The higher your CTR, the better, because it tells Google that your ad is relevant and useful.

You can improve your CTR by doing the following:

• Create a strong headline. Write something that's impossible to resist, such as "Get relief from back pain in two weeks."
• Add structured snippet extensions. These short descriptions highlight key information about your hospital, such as "5-star rated" or "over 50 years of experience."
• Use Google assets. The search engine offers more tools to streamline PPC and make ads more engaging, brand-centric, and effective. Take, for example, ad extensions that provide more clickable information about your service or product. You can use the extra lines to highlight unique selling points.

     2. Audit Current PPC Campaigns To Know Which Works—and Which Doesn’t

How do you know your healthcare PPC plans are doing you good? Audit them regularly.

Auditing your ads benefits you in many ways.

• The process helps you identify the best- and worst-performing campaigns. You can then decide whether to improve those that work, eliminate those that don't, or tweak tactics for those showing the greatest potential.
• It lets you know if you're hitting your business goals. Without auditing your campaigns, it's easy to get lost in the numbers and lose sight of whether you're achieving your targets.
• It allows you to know changes in user behavior. You can then adjust your PPC advertising techniques to reflect these changes and better connect with your target market.
• The historical data are useful for forecasting. This helps set goals and budget for your next campaign.
• You can obtain a clearer picture of your marketing performance. This allows you to better understand how your PPC ads contribute to the overall success of your marketing strategy.

Now, what do you measure? You have the essentials. These include CTRs, conversion rates, cost per conversion, ad cost per click, and impressions. But the following also matter:

• Search query relevance
• Ad position scores
• Geotargeting rules
• Ad delivery schedules
• Negative keyword lists
• Device targeting settings

With all this information in hand, you can conduct iterative optimizations that improve your campaign performance over time, including reducing PPC costs.

For example, you may find that increasing your keyword bid amounts or adding new phrases to the list leads to better results.

Furthermore, don't forget to always test new ideas and hypotheses for improving performance. This may involve making small tweaks here and there or more significant changes in strategy. 

Experimenting with different PPC strategies can help you stay ahead of the competition and refine your targeting efforts.

     3. Analyze Your Leads and Ideal Audience To Align Ads to User Intent and Needs

Ads that don't speak to your audience's needs are a waste of money. Ensure they are relevant and useful by answering these two questions:

• Who is clicking on the ads?
• Are the people reading your PPC advertisements your target audience?

To answer these, consider the following:

• Demographics. Who are they? What's their age, gender, location, job title, and interests?
• Needs. What do they want or need? Are they looking for medical help for themselves, or are they trying to assist a loved one? How can you help them?
• Buyer's journey. Are they poking around the website or checking out the product pages? Have they clicked the “Book an Appointment” before? How long did they stay on the pages?

Another critical factor to help you analyze leads is the search terms used, since they determine user intent.

User intent is the main reason someone types a query into a search engine. It could be to learn something, do something, or buy something.

There are at least three types:

• Informational: The key terms indicate the user wants to know more about a topic (e.g., "types of cancer").
• Navigational: The potential patient is looking for a specific website (e.g., "Mayo Clinic").
• Transactional: The user wants to buy something (e.g., "cancer treatment").

Once you have carefully analyzed your audience, you can now craft ad messages that speak directly to them and improve your chances of conversion.

Summing Up

As a healthcare provider trying to dominate the online space, you can always do better with hospital PPC. These three tips are simple but tried and tested. 

But if you want to amplify your strategies, hire a reliable healthcare marketing agency that specializes in PPC for hospitals. With their help, you can focus on other aspects of your business while they take care of driving quality traffic to your website.

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is a full-service agency that can assist you with PPC, SEO, web design, and other marketing efforts. We understand how the healthcare landscape works and what it takes to get noticed online. 

Schedule a free consultation today to learn more about how we can help you grow your business.