01 Apr
When it comes to paid medical marketing, Google Ads is the number one option for online medical businesses. This platform offers a variety of options that range from customizing your ads, selecting their intensity, choosing your target audience, etc. It’s difficult to find an alternative for Google Ads campaigns that is neck-to-neck with its lead generation potential because of its ad tailoring features.
However, because it offers so many extended features, it is easy to become overwhelmed when launching a medical paid ads campaign. This is why a lot of doctors and healthcare business owners make mistakes or get subjected to suboptimal strategies and they are not even aware of it. By understanding the common mistakes, you can make when using Google Ads to launch your paid ads campaigns, you can learn to avoid them in the future and check your present campaigns for them to improve their optimization.
Six Google Ads Campaigns Mistakes That Medical Businesses Should Avoid
Even the most well-versed can go wrong in selecting the features of their Google Ads campaigns. If your medical business has just started using the platform or if you are noticing that your paid medical ads are not performing up to par, chances are you are making one of the following six mistakes with your Google Ads campaigns:
1. Choosing Incorrect or No Conversion Actions
The primary goal of using Google Ads is to acquire more page views that later contribute to patient conversion for your medical site. That’s why you use conversion tracking to measure those objectives by using pixels to monitor what your potential and existing patients do on your medical site.
This can become a bit convoluted as not every page view equals conversion. Instead of wasting your conversion actions, you can use them for higher-value actions such as signing up for your medical newsletter or joining a discount you may be running on your medical site. By choosing the right goals for your conversion tracking, you can ensure that your medical campaigns are optimizing for the correct actions.
2. Automated Optimization Recommendations
You may have seen a couple recommendations pop up when you use the Google Ads platform. These recommendations are developed by Google to help the user optimize their ad campaigns better. While overviewing these recommendations is useful, it is worth noting that some of them may not address your specific campaign goals.
This is another one of the reasons why your medical campaign may not be performing if your automated recommendations are on. The best practice here is to apply the ones that are relevant to your medical marketing goals and dismiss any that aren’t. For your medical marketing campaign, it’s best that the controls remain in your hands.
3. Adopting Only Broad Match Medical Keywords
When using Google Ads, you can use three medical keyword match types for your ads; exact, phrase, and broad. A lot of medical marketing campaigns use the broad medical keywords since it allows their medical ads to show for a wider range of searches than either exact or phrase.
While you may think that this works in your favor, you risk your medical ads appearing for searches that your medical business is not even closely relevant to. This can exhaust your medical marketing campaign and can waste your resources.
4. Leaving Out Negative Medical Keywords
Relevant to the previous mistake, another great mistake you can fall short of is leaving out negative medical keyword matches when launching your medical ad campaign. Listing negative keyword matches allows you to inform Google that you don’t want your ads to be triggered for matches that are not relevant to your medical business. Not using any negative keywords can also waste your ad campaign resources.
You can add negative medical keywords to start, and then utilize the medical search terms report available in the Google Ads platform to review your search queries. You can add search terms by navigating to the “Keywords” and then the “Search Terms” tab in your Google Ads account.
5. Not Testing Your Medical Ad Copies
Your medical ad copy is the most important aspect of your ad campaign that allows you to communicate what you want to say or offer to the patients. You can be as creative with your ad copy as you want, using different headlines and descriptions to make them custom fit for your business tone and goal. While it’s easy to go down this rabbit hole of customization, you can’t know if your ad copy is effective without testing it out.
Running ad copies without testing is another reason why your campaign may be underperforming. For this, try using 2-5 ad copy variants for each ad group and testing them out against each other. Eliminate the low performing copes and add in new ones. Maybe some text works for some medical keywords or maybe some designs don’t work for the ad’s intent. As you keep on testing, you will eventually end up with the ones that perform the best for your medical marketing campaign and some valuable data insights about them at the same time.
6. Not Funding Your Medical Ads Campaigns Enough
Lastly, it’s important that you know if you’re getting the performance for the money you are spending on your medical ad campaign. A lot of times, the campaign budget is too little and is spread across multiple marketing campaigns, which makes it difficult to fund the cost-per-click (CPC) for the ad copies. If you have multiple medical ad campaigns active and they are underperforming, chances are that they are underfunded.
If you don’t have enough budget to run several campaigns at once, you need to eliminate and prioritize. You can choose the ad campaign you think will work best for your current goals, activate that one, and set aside the other ones to focus all your budget to that campaign. You can keep it running to measure its performance. If it performs well, you can continue with it, if not, move on to the next one you set aside. This way, you can be cost-effective and have an optimized ad campaign running at the same time.
Learning from Mistakes for Improved Future Paid Campaigns
Google Ads can be one of the most effective yet the most complex marketing platforms even if you are a regular user. While it’s essential that your medical business should use it to drive more patient leads, it’s also important that you learn some common mistakes you may be committing in your current campaigns to obtain more optimized results. When using Google Ads for medical business, it’s best to be specific and diligent to get your medical campaigns performing better.
