Creating a Successful Online Medical or Dental Ad Campaign for New Patients

Having some lengthy experience with creating online ads for Doctor's practices and seeing how some offices are advertising online, we thought that we run through some of the fundamentals today. For those of you not familiar with how setting up an online ad in Google works, it is similar to the stock market. Lets suppose you desire to show up for the term "Orange County orthodontics" or "San Francisco rhinoplasty", well there are a few other offices paying for those terms so it works in a bidding system. Various offices will be bidding for those different terms and if you wish to be seen on the first page, you will need to be bidding high enough to compete.
 

Google only really gets paid when someone clicks the ad, so they will reward ads with higher click-through rate; in other words if you ad appears 100 times and 5 people click on your ad (and your competition has less for the same exposure), then Google will reward you with higher ranking in your ad location. This is why the ad copy is important, what the ad says will inspire more or less people to click it. It is found that repeating the search term in the ad is best practice for this. In other words, if you are paying for "orange county rhinoplasty", the term "orange county rhinoplasty" should appear in the ad copy. The basic psychology is that it affirms with the searching patient that they have "found exactly what they are looking for".

Back to the point that this is like a Stock market; Terms like "Los Angeles Dentist" will be expensive but other terms such as "Los Angeles dentist delta dental" would not be and if you only accept delta dental insurance, that might be better traffic for you since patients who other insurance you don't accept might be wasted visitors anyway. Longer search terms are less searched but tend to be better traffic since they tend to be more focused on what they want. Being found on a large portion of longer search terms can be more cost effective than a few shorter searches. Once the potential patient clicks through on your ad, now you face the next hurdle in getting efficiency out of your ad campaign. Where do you send them? Beginners in this arena will send to the front page of the practice website, not a good idea. The most ideal page to send them (for the ad for "Orange county rhinoplasty") to is a page designed to sell rhinoplasty to people in orange county. There are a couple of reasons for this;

1. The person came looking for rhinoplasty specifically, if you make them search your site for that information you lose a certain amount to that activity alone thereby reducing your efficiency. Every time you make a visitor click another page, you lose some so why make them work by giving an extra step?

2. All good web marketing directs a person to what is commonly called a "landing page". Any amazon product page is a perfect example of this, it is designed to capture the visitor on the specific inquiry they had and get them to buy. Similarly, the eager plastic surgeon  should direct his paid traffic on rhinoplasty inquiries to a page detailing his or her offices strong points on Rhinoplasty and make it easy for the patient to reach for an appointment. Sending them to a page that merely educates "what is rhinoplasty" is a waste ... they are already looking for rhinoplasty, they do not need to be told what it is. What they do need to be told is about your experience, education, reviews, technology etc.

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There are books on this subject, so this post is barely an introduction to a few of the pitfalls and opportunities.