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Do you own a therapy practice? Are you looking to turbocharge your lead generation?
If so, consider pay-per-click (PPC) ads!
For a therapy practice, PPC ads are among the best and most cost-efficient forms of online advertising. Instead of paying for each time your ad appears (impressions) or each time it reaches a new user (reach), PPC ads charge you only when someone actually clicks on your ad.
Search engines like Google and media platforms like Facebook both sell PPC ads.
Therapy Practice PPC: 5 Expert Tips
This article will home in on therapy practice PPC advertising strategies. We’ll primarily discuss “negative keywords,” DKI, bid adjustments, and timing ads correctly.
Finally, we’ll talk about one particularly cool trick of the trade: A/B testing.
1. Use “Negative Keywords”
Normally, keywords determine when your PPC ad is displayed.
Say you run a therapy practice in Detroit and choose the keyword “Children’s therapy Detroit” for your Google PPC ad campaign. When someone searches for that keyword, your ad will appear in the SERP (search engine results page).
Negative keywords do the opposite. They control which SERPs the ad will not appear in.
A good example of a negative keyword is “free.” If you don’t offer any free services, it won’t do any good to show your ad in searches for “free therapy Detroit.”
If you don’t treat clients with post-traumatic stress disorder, “PTSD” would be another good negative keyword for your therapy practice PPC strategy.
You may be wondering: “why should I worry about excluding my PPC ad from certain SERPs? If users aren’t interested in my services, they won’t click the ad. And that costs me nothing!”
In fact, many users do click on ads that aren’t relevant to them. They may do so on a whim, without carefully reading the ad content first.
If this happens, they will quickly see that your practice doesn’t offer what they need and leave your site. In other words, they’ll bounce. And because they clicked first, you just paid for that bounce.
In short, negative keywords can reduce your bounce rate, avoid wasted clicks, and boost the ROI of your ads.
For more on negative keywords, see Google’s Help Center here.
2. Improve CTR with DKI
DKI stands for dynamic keyword insertion. This feature currently offered in Google Ads and certain other PPC ad services.
DKI is the process of inserting keywords into your ads in real time, based on search queries.
DKI is a great way to boost your click-through-rate, or CTR, for your therapy practice PPC.
Suppose you design a Google Ads campaign for your therapy services. You can use DKI to tailor your ad to various search queries.
- If someone searches for “Detroit therapy,” your ad headline will read “Detroit Therapeutic Services.”
- But if someone searches “Counseling Detroit,” your headline will read “Detroit Counseling Services.”
As you can see, DKI is particularly useful when one service could be described in multiple different ways.
It’s also great for repurposing ads for different prospective clients. Instead of making a whole bunch of similar ads with different keywords, dynamically modify a single ad based on search terms.
3. Apply Bid Adjustments
Google Ads is basically an auction site for keywords
You choose keywords that describe your services and place a bid based on how much you’d be willing to pay for clicks.
Google will then place your ad in SERP based on the keywords, your bid, and the quality of your ad campaign.
A bid adjustment is a small increase or decrease in your bid.
For example, if you see that your ad for “Children’s therapy Detroit” is producing a high ROI, you can increase your bid on that keyword. You might up the bid by 10%, from $1 per click to $1.10 per click.
This will increase the ad’s reach and let you rake in more clicks. That will, in turn, boost your ROI even further.
Likewise, you can decrease your bid on underperforming ads or eliminate them entirely.
When done correctly, bid adjustments will boost impressions, generate more clicks from your target audience, and maximize your ROI.
4. Show Ads at the Right Time
Ads can perform very differently depending on when they appear.
So, in addition to the ads themselves, optimize your ad schedule.
Start by simply scheduling your ads to run 24/7 without any preferred times. As you analyze your data, you’ll see that ads have high and low points at different times or on different days.
You may notice that your ad for “Children’s therapy Detroit” does best 9 AM–12 PM on Mondays and Tuesdays. However, your ad for “Adolescent therapy” actually peaks later in the day, around 4 PM.
Remember what we said about bid adjustments?
If an ad performs well at a certain time of day, you can increase the bid for that ad during peak hours only.
5. Perform A/B Testing
A/B testing is a super cool trick for analyzing ad performance in a scientific manner.
In an A/B test, two versions of the same ad are shown to different groups of users.
Apart from minor adjustments between the ads, all factors are constant: the time, keywords, targeted geographical location, etc.
Suppose you’re considering adding a brief client testimonial to your children’s therapy ad. Simply perform an A/B test and see which version (with or without the testimonial) attracts more clicks.
The goal is to determine which ad produces the best CTR and drives conversion rates the best.
In this way, you can optimize your ads based on real, concrete user data. We told you it’s scientific!
Conclusion
Crafting the perfect therapy practice PPC ad campaign for your practice will not happen overnight. Advertising is a skill that takes some time and practice to master.
But, if you follow these steps, you’ll notice a marked rise in clicks, conversions, and ROI in a fairly short time.
Practice Tech Solutions is happy to help small therapy practices with all their PPC advertising needs. Click here for more details!
Check out this post for more on PPC advertising for medical practices.
