Google Ads in Healthcare: Importance, Use & Pillars

Updated: 5 days ago

Healthcare Google Ads

Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) are pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google that businesses use to advertise their products and services to consumers online, attract potential customers and gain new customers.

Healthcare providers also use Google ads to advertise their services to healthcare consumers, make conversions, and acquire new patients.

Importance of Google Ads for Healthcare Marketing

There are a lot of important benefits healthcare practices can get by using Google ads for their healthcare marketing. These benefits include:

Improved Patient Engagement

Healthcare Google ads offer healthcare providers an avenue to engage with their patients better by promoting patient events and sharing useful health tips and recommendations.

Using Google ads for healthcare marketing, healthcare professionals can help build credibility and establish themselves as thought leaders in their field. It’s an effective tool that medical professionals can use to grow their practice and reach a wider audience.

Reaches a Targeted Audience

One of the benefits of using Google ads for healthcare marketing is that it allows a practice to specifically target their ads to a specific population.

You can easily target your ads based on numerous criteria ranging from geographical location, search queries, and browsing behavior.

This means that for a healthcare practice, you can present your brand directly to the kind of patients who are actively searching for the kind of healthcare services you offer.

Cost-effective Advertising

Healthcare Google ads offer a cost-effective advertising solution for medical professionals. You get to set a budget your brand can afford and only pay when your target audience clicks on your ad.

This way you can control the practice advertising budget and ensure that the money is spent in the best way possible.

Increase Visibility Quickly

Google ads provide immediate visibility other than the conventional marketing methods. You can create an effective marketing strategy and pay for top placement in Google’s search results, making your website more visible to patients who require your service.

The strength of using Google ads for healthcare marketing lies in its ability to offer immediate visibility for your practice and target your ideal audience based on specific criteria.

Real-Time Insights

Google ads for healthcare marketing can provide you with real-time insights to make well-informed marketing decisions and achieve effective results.

The kind of data you get from the platform allows you to tweak your current marketing strategy to a much better strategy.

Google ads campaigns for healthcare marketing offer a great Return on Investment (ROI).

How to use Google Ads in the Healthcare sector?

Google ads are now commonly used by healthcare practices. However, there’s a need to use the channel correctly because Google has strict rules for healthcare ads.

It’s important to understand and follow Google’s rules when you want to start Google ads for healthcare marketing. Outlined below is the best way to use Google ads in the healthcare industry.

Understand the Google Ads Regulations For Healthcare Marketing

The first thing to start with after making a decision to start using Google ads for healthcare marketing is to understand the regulations guiding healthcare advertising.

Google and local governing bodies all have their own specific regulations that you need to factor in when it comes to advertising online.

The specific policies for the healthcare industry according to Google:

Prohibited Content

There are things you can’t advertise at all on Google. Google has a huge list of unapproved substances that can’t be advertised using Google ads.

Editorial and Technical

The elements of your ads must meet certain requirements. All health-related advertising restrictions on Google ads apply to the ad copy and images used as well as the landing pages associated with those ads.

Legal Requirements

You’re also expected to comply with local laws and regulations, including acquiring necessary authorizations, licenses, and approvals for advertising your healthcare practice on Google ads.

Set Clear Objective

After understanding all the necessary regulations of healthcare Google ads, you need to plan out your objectives clearly. You should know what you’re running the campaign for.

It could be to raise awareness about a new medical procedure or service, promote a health-related event, or educate the audience about a health issue.

Having a clear objective before running your campaign helps with direction and makes the process of achieving good results actionable.

Set up a Google Ad Account

To launch your campaign, you actually need to set up a Google ad account. All you need to do is go to the Google Ad website and sign up with your practice’s Google account. If your healthcare practice doesn’t have a Google account, you will need to create one.

It won’t take more than a couple of minutes to create the account. Once you have entered the necessary details, you will land on the page to create your first campaign. On this page, you can choose your budget, and target audience, set your bids, and write your ad copy.

Conduct Keyword Research

Keywords are the foundation of an effective campaign on Google ads. To conduct keyword research, you need a good knowledge of your industry and an understanding of how keyword research tools work.

Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to identify what potential patients are searching for. Ensure you’re specific and instead of broad terms like “dentist”, use “pediatric dentist in [City Name]”.

Set up your campaign

Now that you’ve created your account and conducted keyword research, you can then set up your campaign.

On Google ads, you will see that you can begin setting up your campaign with a variety of goal-based options such as sales, leads, website traffic, product and brand consideration, brand awareness and reach, and app promotion; or you can choose to create a campaign without a goal’s guidance. You will also need to set your campaign’s daily budget.

Set the maximum bid you would be willing to pay per click, and insert the text of your first ad, and the payment information. Google helps you to estimate the coverage you can achieve with the initial budget.

How Google Ads Works for Healthcare?

Google ads work for healthcare in the same way it works for other industries. You create a campaign, place a bid, and give it time for results to roll in. Google Ads works on different pricing models. There is the cost-per-click (CPC) in which you only need to pay a certain price every time a user clicks on your ad.

The price per click changes often depending on factors such as how many other practices are currently targeting that keyword, search volume, expected reach, time of day or year, and more.

The other bidding options available in addition to the cost-per-click include Cost-per-mille (CPM) in which you pay per 1,000 ad impressions and Cost-per-engagement (CPE) in which you pay when your target audience performs a specific action on your ad.

The Four Pillars of Healthcare Google Ads Campaigns

Identifying Your Target Audience

One of the pillars of healthcare Google ads is identifying and understanding your target audience.

Identifying and locating the right audience can be difficult because the data about them is often scattered among various sources but with an active search online, you will find your audience and learn what to use to attract their attention to your healthcare practice.

Effective Marketing Strategy

Another pillar of Google ads for healthcare marketing is creating an effective marketing strategy. A good marketing strategy provides you with a clear roadmap for marketing and ensures you spend your advertising budget wisely in order to achieve good ROI.

Consistent Identity and Voice

Building a consistent identity and voice helps to increase the trust of potential patients in your healthcare practice. For healthcare professionals to achieve their desired marketing goal, it’s important to gain trust and build credibility with consistent branding.

Building a brand that’s an embodiment of your practice helps unify the vision and mission of your practice and attracts more patients to your practice.

Data Analytics

Analyzing the data obtained from previous campaigns is an integral part of healthcare Google ad campaigns. It offers you accurate information that helps you make better and well-informed decisions in the near future.

Healthcare Google Ads Campaign Fundamentals

The Google ads campaign for healthcare fundamentals includes:

Understand the available ad formats and the one you would love for your healthcare campaign. You could opt for text, image or video ads.
Know the available Google ad placements. There are many websites within the Google search network. There are many places where your ads can be placed, ranging from Google search sites, to display networks and many others.
Creating your first ad is important to achieving a good result. Before creating the ad campaign, determine a campaign goal. It could be to drive sales, leads, website traffic, and others.

5 Healthcare Google Ads Campaigns to Help Guide Your Strategy

LifeStance Health

LifeStance Health is one of the largest providers of virtual and in-person outpatient mental health care services for children, adolescents, and adults. The practice partnered with Cardinal, a marketing agency.

The partnership has led to the implementation of new campaigns for the brand and the launching of various paid search campaigns that have driven nearly 28,000 conversions in just six months.

TheKey

This is the leading provider of home care for older adults across the country. This in-home senior care provider and luxury homecare brand is active in 76 markets across 40 states and includes more than 10,000 employees.

TheKey needed to increase market reach with a particular focus on efficient lead generation which resulted in its partnership with Cardinal. This agency transitioned TheKeys accounts from a local campaign structure to a consolidated national structure with immediate improvement in cost-per-conversion.

SENTA

SENTA missed out on numerous opportunities to attract new demands because their previous campaigns were not scalable. The brand currently oversees 56 locations across 8 brands.

SENTA was able to increase its conversion rate by 217%, decrease cost-per-acquisition (CPA) by 63%, and increase new patient lead volume by 40% with the help of a healthcare marketing expert.

ARSA

By partnering with the Cardinal team for just six months in 2022, ARSA experienced a 73% decrease in CPA, a 118% increase in new patient conversion rate, and a 294% increase in new patients.

Embark

Embark is a mental health provider for teenagers. It had expanded to 14 markets using effective healthcare Google Ads strategies.

The brand partnered with an agency to create and implement a Google Ads strategy that has produced a 272% increase in lead volume for the brand, growing leads from 62 per month to 232 per month.

5 Healthcare Google Ads Challenges and How To Overcome Them

Must use certain phrases

Healthcare advertisers are required to include certain phrases in their advertisements. The solution is to go through the list of phrases on Google ads to know the exact phrases to include in your campaigns for good outcomes.

Can’t use certain phrases

Healthcare marketers are prohibited from using certain phrases when advertising on Google ads. These phrasing concerns apply to both the ad copy and the landing page copy.

Google can reject or take down advertisements it deems to be against its policies. Know these phrases and avoid them in your campaign.

Certain services and products can’t be marketed

Another challenge for healthcare marketers is that certain products and services cannot be advertised. Google does not allow advertisements for CBD oil and a lot of other products.

It’s important to avoid violating these rules and stick to only services and products that you can promote using Google ads.

Intellius Medical is a leading healthcare marketing agency that specializes in partnering with medical practices to scale patient-generating marketing programs for their leading services.

Highly competitive

The competition for advertising healthcare on Google became stiffer and much more competitive a decade ago. As the platform has become highly competitive, the sooner your brand dips its toes into advertising on Google, the better.

Retargeting is an issue

Google doesn’t allow healthcare advertisers to use retargeting in their ad campaigns. Retargeting is an advertising strategy where you can identify those who’ve clicked on your ad.

This is because retargeting uses online user data, which brings up some privacy and ethical concerns, especially regarding health. Look for better strategies to use to replace retargeting strategies.

Google ads management for health practices

Regarding Google Ads for healthcare practices, it’s easy to waste your resources if you don’t know the intricacies and strategies to achieve success.

To be able to manage Google Ads, you need to have excellent knowledge of how it works. Hiring an agency specialising in Google ads management like Intellius Medical is best.

The agency manages your advertising campaigns and ensures you get good ROI of your advertising budget.

Healthcare Google advertising

Healthcare Google advertising is used by healthcare practices and companies to increase their brand recognition and boost revenue.

Certain restrictions and guidelines must be abided by when it comes to healthcare advertising on Google. Healthcare providers can leverage the huge opportunity on Google to promote their practices to the public and acquire new patients.

Google ads for healthcare providers

Healthcare providers use Google ads to promote healthcare services. Hospitals can promote themselves through Google Ads. It’s necessary to develop a good strategy that will help you plan your campaigns correctly.

Before starting with Google ads, you must build your digital presence by creating a business page. This is essential because nowadays, many patients tend to book an appointment at a hospital using the hospital's website.

Google Healthcare advertising policy

Google Ads is vital for growing digital health brands, but using it correctly can be tricky because of Google's strict rules for healthcare ads. Healthcare providers need expert help understanding and following Google’s rules and knowing what to consider when starting Google Ads in healthcare.

Certain categories of content and products are prohibited for healthcare advertisers on Google. Ads must meet specific quality and standards.

You must also comply with local laws and regulations, including acquiring necessary authorizations, licenses, and approvals.

Healthcare AdWords

Healthcare AdWords are Google ads that are specifically for healthcare businesses. Healthcare businesses can use Google ads to target people who are actively searching for their services on Google.

Google Ads Challenges in Healthcare

Retargeting is an advertising strategy that allows you to identify those who have clicked on your ad. However, Google doesn’t allow healthcare advertisers to retarget in ad campaigns.
Google prohibits using certain phrases within your Google Ads copy/text.
The competition for healthcare advertising on Google becomes stiffer and stiffer year after year.

How to Write Effective Google Ads for Healthcare

Your ad should fulfil the needs of your target audience
Include creative ad messages
Include researched keywords.
Avoid generic language in your ads
Use specific call-to-actions (CTAs).
Use insight tools to monitor the strength of your ads and watch how users react to your ads.

Tips for Running a Successful Google Ads Campaign

Create an effective Google ads strategy.
Set up conversion tracking on your website.
Implement smart bidding strategies, like Maximize conversions.
Spread your keywords into multiple ad groups.
Write ads that directly relate to the services your targeted audience seeks.

FAQ

Will I get regular Google Ads progress reports?

Yes, you get frequent Google ads progress reports.

Do you manage paid ads outside of Google?

No, everything is managed within Google.

Why does a Google Ads Healthcare campaign need to be optimized?

A healthcare Google ad must be optimized to consistently target the right people at the right time.

What are the different types of Google Ads?

The different types of Google ads include Search, Display, Shopping, Video, Discovery, Local Services, and Smart ads

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