Content
PPC for Healthcare: How to Target the Right Audience
May 6, 2024
10 mins
PPC pay-per-click advertising is a strategic digital marketing approach to target quality patient leads and boost your healthcare business performance.
Paid advertising will help you attract new patients browsing for healthcare services like yours across search engines.
PPC is also about getting more traffic to your website and boosting brand awareness.
Today, Promodo Healthcare Marketers are sharing the best tips to target the right audience of loyal patients and optimize your marketing budget.
PPC for Healthcare is a pay-per-click marketing strategy where you pay for each click on your ad. PPC advertising allows you to get target patients to your website once they click on your ad.
Healthcare PPC embraces the ads your prospective patients see at the top of their Google search results.
With over 70,000 health-related queries a minute, competitive healthcare players implement effective PPC strategies to capture these searchers and turn them into loyal patients.
Paid Search Ads show a conversion rate of 2.6% in the healthcare domain, surpassing display and social media ads. This proves why top healthcare players spend about $50,000 monthly toward paid search advertising.
Our 2024 Healthcare Benchmark Report embraces median PPC indicators:
🚑 Customer acquisition cost (CAC) varies from $300 to $1,000
🚑 Cost per click (CPC) varies from 3.16 to $6.69
🚑 Click-through-rate (CTR) ranges from 7.35% to 4.63%
🚑 Cost per mille (CPM) on Google is $7.66 per thousand impressions.
🚑 Conversion rate (CVR) ranges from 12.33% to 3.60%
🚑 Lead conversion rate (LCR) for medical practice is 3.36%.
When users browse for healthcare and wellness services like yours, they will spot your ad displayed on Google pages and other popular search engines like Bing.
The good news is that you do not have to pay a cent for displaying your ad. Search engines will charge you only when a prospective patient clicks on your ad and gets on your website.
Google will display your ads above non-paid offers to patients seeking healthcare services across your area. A physical six-mile range is an average destination to bet on.
With more than 3.5 b. daily searches on Google, take healthcare marketing with Google Ads as a powerful way to reach prospective patients who need medical treatment.
So far, Google Ads is a top PPC channel to promote paid healthcare services online. This ad network competes with Microsoft Advertising, previously known as Bing Ads.
Google Ads has the widest PPC outreach and outnumbers any other platform.
To many healthcare providers, lacking in-house marketing teams, it is rather challenging to deploy the right PPC tools to select the most relevant keywords and set bids.
This means that failing to control their paid marketing budgets, most market players quit PPC advertising as a feasible option.
With over 900 m. daily searches, there’s comparatively lower competition on the Bing Ads Network than on Google.
Microsoft offers a lower cost per click (CPC) and lets you win more competitive advantages over the nearest bidding rivals.
Leverage Bing Ads as a sustainable paid marketing option to promote your medical services.
Microsoft implements Doctor and Clinic Ads open beta that helps healthcare providers connect with customers in the research stage and are about to schedule an appointment.
The platform helps U.S. healthcare advertisers promote individual medical services and branded campaigns for clinics and hospitals.
Doctor and Clinic Ads is an intent-triggered digital marketing channel based on popular Bing searches for:
🚑 Health conditions
🚑 Symptoms
🚑 Medical specialists.
Non-keyword-reliant, the platform embraces rich placements with real-time patient information. The Microsoft algorithms generate this data dynamically based on the user data left in feed files, including:
🚑 Specialties
🚑 Locations
🚑 Service type: personal or video appointments.
Your PPC hospital marketing task is to provide as many details as possible in the feed file to match your ads to users’ health intent.
Cost-per-click CPC-based, the Doctor and Clinic Ads auction does not depend on text ads. You may participate in auctions with regular campaigns and the campaigns associated with your feed file.
The optimized daily paid-per-click cost of $100–$500 will help you secure consistent results. The right geo-targeting and audience lists will help you fine-tune the return on investment.
The tips by our certified PPC advertisers will help you acquire, manage, and maintain target patient audiences at an optimal customer acquisition cost (CAC).
As a highly regulated industry, healthcare is subjected to strict rules and regulations to avoid fines and bans.
This year, we’ve seen updates in Google Ads policies in the health domain. As a solid healthcare provider, you should align your paid marketing efforts with Google’s Personalized Advertising Policy
From now on, health brands should not advertise sensitive topics to specific users in an invasive manner that would diminish user experience (UX). This means that you cannot use Google Ads to deliver personalized content that covers:
🚑 All kinds of disabilities
🚑 Chronic health conditions
🚑 Invasive procedures like cosmetic surgery
🚑 Issues related to managing chronic health conditions
🚑 Physical and mental health conditions
🚑 Problems related to a patient’s bowel, genital, or urinary health.
Google’s Personalized Ad Policy forbids targeting potential caretakers of patients subjected to a covered health issue.
The Personalized Advertising Policy also limits advertising of counseling services:
🚑 Highlighting personal trauma and abuse
🚑 Creating feelings of negativity related to things like body shaming.
Google’s Healthcare and Medicines Policy disapproves of ads related to health and drug information and imposes relevant certifications.
According to Google’s paid search policies for healthcare ads, you cannot use Google Ads to advertise:
🚑 Addiction services
🚑 Clinical trial recruitment
🚑 Experimental medical treatments
🚑 Restricted drug terms
🚑 Unapproved substances
The success of medical PPC is in clear segmentation of the target audience. Most practices are aware of their target demographics. Competitive healthcare marketers use this information to gain new patients.
While drawing your ideal patient portrait, we recommend:
Crafting patient personas: explore the historical demographics of your patients, including age, sex, profession, income, lifestyle, and healthcare concerns. With clear segmentation of these personas, you’ll target ideal patients through paid advertising.
Managing relevant messaging: accompany your ads with the right messaging that would cover immediate healthcare needs shared by your target audience.
Tracking your ad performance: always track your PPC ads and experiment with A/B testing to spot the best-performing ad copies and call-to-action (CTAs) on your website for patient conversions.
Lead healthcare providers leverage PPC keyword data to guide their search engine optimization strategy. Sharing relevant keywords between PPC and SEO analytics marks a complementary approach to digital marketing success in healthcare.
To make your ads appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) and win bidding competition, your strategic task is to target local-specific keywords like “dental practice in Cherry Hill” or “the best pediatric clinic in Cleveland”. With that, the more you localize your medical services, the more likely your ads will match the immediate healthcare needs shared by your target patients.
Providing you are a smaller healthcare provider in a larger town like Cleveland, you won’t cope with the competition by ranking popular search terms organically. That’s when implementing paid advertising is vital to display your healthcare services high on search engine pages and match them with popular search queries.
Medical clinics, hospitals, and private healthcare providers benefit from PPC to identify the hottest medicine and patient treatment topics for your further content marketing efforts.
PPC platforms like Google Ads provide search query reports showing the most popular keywords people insert while looking for health services.
Take Google Ads as a reliable keyword directory you should target while producing content on your healthcare website and across social media networks.
Your task is to leverage popular local health and wellness queries as evidence-based proof of patient search intent. Integrate featured keywords into the health blog posts and other content formats.
Explore what patients are searching for online and match your content to these individual queries. Google Ads holds sufficient keyword data in various niches like cardiology, oncology, and dentistry to help you best match current healthcare demand around your physical location and beyond.
At each stage of a patient journey, our healthcare PPC experts will help you:
🚑 Spot the keywords with the highest traffic potential
🚑 Discover the keywords bringing the most conversions
🚑 Align SEO and PPC efforts to win quality leads among your targeted patients.
Take patient-centered landing pages to use your PPC in the medical domain best. Set relevant PPC criteria to send prospective patients to customized landing pages where users would take targeted action.
Once your PPC ad promises free dental appointments to new patients, duplicate this offer on your landing page.
Enrich it with the best user experience (UX) options and straightforward CTAs to guide users toward a targeted action like scheduling an appointment.
Always test your landing pages from the patient’s perspective as part of their user journey.
Despite the digital promotion of healthcare services online, the industry is still bound to a local operation. That’s when geotargeting will benefit your PPC ad campaigns to reach the right local audience within the physical proximity of your healthcare practice.
Right geotargeting will help you bring in those patients that need your services most. Hook these prospects with paid ads who need medical intervention in emergency cases.
For maximum outreach, a strategic task is to position your brand as a lead local healthcare provider with a seamless reputation and patient trust. This way, you’ll reach out to the patients beyond your immediate neighborhood but farther across immediate communities.
Your clinic placement on Google Maps is part of the SEO homework you should do before launching paid ads.
Integrating ad extensions is vital for higher ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is how you’ll boost your content and provide your target audience with more information:
Callouts are 25-character descriptions highlighting your core healthcare services to supplement your ad copy.
Structured snippets highlight supplementary services.
Additional site links at the bottom of your ad will support the main headline link and lead your prospects to patient-focused landing pages filled with a targeted call to action like Schedule an Appointment.
Mentioning the Location in your PPC healthcare ads is the best way to guide patients to your physical practice.
An activated Phone number will help users call you directly.
With so many smartphone users in the United States, the lion’s share of users will explore your medical practice with their mobile phones.
🚑 Arrange your healthcare website and landing pages for optimal mobile use.
🚑 Develop a mobile medical app as an additional source of competitive advantage.
🚑 Benefit from responsive search ads offered by Google with automatic adaption to user devices. Proper patient-focused headlines and descriptions will help you customize your ads.
Promodo marketers hold exceptional experience in PPC healthcare advertising. We know how to attract qualified leads at every stage of a patient journey.
Our in-house team will help you customize a successful strategy to the individual needs of your medical practice.
Our happy clients are always eager to praise us with inspirational feedback:
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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