Google Ads, if done right, can be a super powerful tool to bring in lots of patients. If not, they can be a complete waste of money.
When it looks right, it can look like this:
- You set up your ads. People start seeing your ads almost immediately.
- You get a new patient for $30 in ads.
- That patient stays for an average of 8 visits at $50 each. Meaning, they spend a total of $400 with you (usually over the course of a few months).
- Over a few months, you make a profit of $370 per patient.
- You repeat this as many times as you want and your Google Ads become an extremely valuable part of your business.
However, when it’s done wrong, it looks more like this:
- You set up your ads. Nobody sees your ads for a week.
- Eventually, you get a new patient. That patient cost $200 in ads.
- They stay for 2 visits at $50 each.
- $100 was just lost.
- This more-or-less repeats until eventually you shut down the ads.
When I was first learning Google Ads, I paid for the ads myself for some of my chiropractor clients I was working with. If it worked, they’d pay me back. If not, I was out the money. It was great for learning, but there was a problem: My ads looked more like the second version than the first. Eventually, though, I was able to get it figured out.
While getting patients is just part of the battle (the other part is making sure they stay), in my experience with clients, getting new patients can be the toughest part for chiropractors.
So, I wanted to share the tips that helped improve my Google Ads results so much.
Here are some tips I’ve learned that you can hopefully use to make your Google Ads more like the former and less like the latter.
Before we get started
There are a couple things that can make your Google Ads even better—but they aren’t in the Google Ads dashboard, so I wanted to mention them here.
- Have lots of Google reviews. The more reviews you have, the better. People look at your reviews to see how good you are and whether they want to go to you. If you have 200 reviews at 5 stars each, that will look a lot better than 4 reviews at 3 stars each. If you need to get more reviews, check out this post I made on an automated way to get more Google Business reviews. Hopefully it helps.
- Be fairly active on social media. The clients I’ve run ads for that have done the best have all done social media posts regularly. The ones that didn’t still got results, but they weren’t as good as the ones that were more active on social media.
You don’t have to do anything crazy here. Usually once or twice a week works just fine. You can repost interesting articles you read, quick answers to questions you get a lot, funny posts, etc. The main goals are to show people that you are (1) active and still in business (this might seem crazy, but you’d be surprised how many people wonder if you’re still in business if you haven’t posted in a while) and (2) knowledgeable about helping people. - Know your patient visit average (PVA). This is helpful for knowing how profitable your Google Ads will be. You don’t necessarily have to know this—you could just guess. But knowing it makes it a lot easier to run your business off metrics and numbers instead of guesses.
We specifically want to know the PVA because it makes it a lot easier to calculate what’s known as “lifetime value (LTV)” (this is calculated by taking your PVA times your average appointment price). This is a metric that tells you how much a patient spends with you in total, which basically tells you whether you are able to run Google Ads profitably. If you’d like to learn more about PVA and how to improve it, check out this article I wrote here. - Make sure you reach out to them fast. People nowadays expect quick results, quick responses, etc. This is especially true when they are actively looking for solutions on Google. If they call your business from a Google ad, it’s best to pick up when they call. The second best is to give them a call back within 5 minutes. The last resort should be to text them.
The longer you wait, the more likely it is that they will either go somewhere else for a solution or completely forget they contacted you and ignore your attempts to reach out.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the Google Ads lessons I’ve learned. These are the main things I did that made my ads a lot better.
Google Ads tips
I would like to mention real quick that these tips aren’t step-by-step guides on how to set up Google Ads. There are tons of guides from Google and other sources that can show you how to do that. Besides, Google makes it really easy to set up campaigns (you probably don’t even need other documentation). These are tips that will hopefully make your Google Ads much more effective.
If you want to watch the video version, here it is. Otherwise, the rest of the article is below.
1. Use Google Ads’ Smart Campaigns.
Unless you have multiple locations and are doing some comprehensive Google Ads strategy with a big budget, I’ve found it works better to use Google’s Smart Campaigns.
The reason for this is that the Smart Campaigns basically do what multiple other types of campaigns do all in one. They’re made specifically for small businesses. In order to rebuild the same functionality of a Smart Campaign, you’d need to set up multiple other campaigns of various kinds—which would require significantly more ad spend. I’ve found it’s cheaper, easier, and better to just run with a Smart Campaign and instead focus your time on other ways of improving your ads.
If you’re setting up a Google Ads account for the first time, this is the default option (at least as of the time of writing this). Just follow the instructions to set it up and make sure you have the right location settings on: Usually, this means make sure it’s centered around your business location with a 10–20-mile radius around it. This may depend on your exact location, though.
If you’ve got an established Google Ads account and are not in expert mode, then again, Smart Campaigns are the default.
If you are in expert mode, then to create a new Smart Campaign (at least at the time of this writing), go to Create > Campaign > Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance > Smart > then follow the instructions and fill in the info.
If you have your Google Business Profile linked to the same account (which I would recommend), then you can use that information to automatically populate the information for your Google Ads.
2. Don’t make your search terms too narrow.
You’re already narrowing the number of people you can reach quite significantly by making them local. If you add too many narrow search terms, this can make your ads super expensive. This is the main mistake I made that caused new patients to cost $200 or more.
Generally, what you want to do is make them something rather broad. Terms like “chiropractor”, “back pain”, “neck treatment”, etc. When people are searching for these things, they’re usually looking for solutions. They already know what a chiropractor is if they’re looking for one, so you don’t need to do anything fancy.
Making sure you’re search terms aren’t too narrow goes hand-in-hand with this next tip:
3. Tell them how you’re different.
Like I said, if they’re searching for a chiropractor, they don’t need to know what a chiropractor does. Instead, focus on what makes you different from other chiropractors.
For example, do you take insurance? How many patients have you helped? How many reviews do you have? Where are you located in relation to your city?
Some of the best ad formats I’ve found mention:
- the number of patients helped,
- which side of the city they’re located on, and
- some text saying, “Call Dr. [name] today!”
- They also mention some basic information about what kinds of solutions they offer (for example, if you do muscle work vs. just joint work).
4. Split test your ads.
The way you improve your ads is to test various parts of them against each other. Just like the scientific method, we use a control and then a test and try to beat the control. With local ads and the smaller budget we’re dealing with, there are really only a few things we can split test: The ads and the website page they go to (this is called a landing page).
A lot of website software has a split test function you can use or get. But it’s important to note that if you send them to your homepage, you won’t want to change that too much. The reason is that it can mess up your search engine optimization (SEO). This can mess up your organic search results.
Instead, it’s better to build a separate web page for this if you plan on testing different landing pages.
Usually, though, you can get away with just focusing on your ads. The way I do this is by creating another Smart Campaign. Set it up exactly as you have your other one: Same location setting, same search terms, same ad spend, etc.
Once you do that, the only thing you change is the ad. In one Smart Campaign, have your control, and in the other, have your test. Each week (or whatever duration you’d like), see which one got better results and turn that one into the control. Then, set up a new ad.
I’d recommend recording all of this in a Word or Google document. That way, you can have a big list of which ads you’ve already tested and what their results were.
Over time, you’ll have a bunch of great ads that you can run together in a “best hits” campaign to consistently get good results. You can toggle between running your “best hits” campaign and your test and control campaigns depending on when you need more patients than normal.
Those are the tips I have for you. They’re the main ones that caused my results with Google Ads to improve quite a bit. Hopefully they help.
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