What’s up everybody? This is Dr Nick with LVRG Media, and today we’re going to talk about the three most important metrics to track to be successful with Google ads.
Chiropractic Google Ads Tutorial
So Google ads are what I think is a staple for any chiropractor’s online marketing strategy and they can be a little bit different in terms of tracking the results than say Facebook ads. With Facebook ads, TikTok ads, Instagram, you’re able to really drive people to an opt-in form where you can get a name, phone number, and email address. Then you can track that person through the sales cycle and see if they did sign up for care.
With Google ads it can be a little bit more nebulous and harder to track things. So what you do want to focus on is number one: keeping track of who’s coming to you from Google searches, whether they end up clicking on organic rankings or google ads. You can only track so many things with the Google ads, but you want to kind of get an idea of how the entire Google presence is doing.
So the three things that really matter, that you can control, and that you can track are: Number one is click through rate. Number two is cost per click. And then number three is going to be conversions, which is gonna really tell you what your ROI is.
Google Ads Metrics for Chiropractors
So let’s start at the top. So click through rate (CTR) is going to be the percentage of times that people are shown the ad and how often they click through. So people that do Google ads will tell chiropractors that two to four percent click-through rates are kind of industry average and that’s normal. This is not normal. If things are being done the right way, you can see click-through rates in the double digits. So you can see them 10, 11, 12 percent, if you’re in more of a non-competitive area. But things need to be structured the right way with bid strategy and all that.
So with click through rate, you want to be tracking it. But every area is different, every office is different. Every budget is different. So you want to make sure that you are looking at things relative to what you’ve done in the past. So if you’ve been doing Google ads for say 12 months, go through month by month and see what the click-through rate has been like. Have there been any areas where it’s risen? Have there been any drops? Why might that have been? Did more competitors come into the market? Did you have more budget one month? So look at what could be different and what could be driving that click-through rate.
Now a couple of other things to keep in mind when you’re thinking of click through rate, is the copy on the ad itself. If it looks very computer generated, then it’s going to get less of a click-through rate. Less than if you think about what somebody who is doing the search is looking for. What would they like to hear? What would they like to see and how can we make it seem as human as possible?
Sometimes with Google ads, they’re just grabbing things that you’ve put into the ad campaign. But the more that you can work on the back end to specify what you want to show for specific keywords, that’s going to really translate into a higher click-through rate. If it can be more relevant to what they’re searching for.
So the second is going to be cost-per-click (CPC). So this is where things are really important because it depends on money allotment. If you have a thousand dollars that you’re going to spend on Google ads, and your cost-per-click is five dollars, well that means you can get 200 clicks out of that thousand dollars. If that same thousand dollars is getting twenty dollar cost-per-click rates, well that means that you’re going to only get 50 people that actually end up on the website or on the landing page.
So watching that cost-per-click is super important. Especially if your agency or if you are doing any sort of automatic bid strategy. Say someone new comes into the market and they’re willing to spend whatever it takes to get this specific keyword to click on their ad, and you’ve been spending say ten dollars a click on “chiropractor near me” for a long time. This somebody comes in willing to spend 20. If you have automatic bid strategies set up, you’re automatically going to start trying to compete at that 20 cost-per-click. And if you don’t want to be spending that much on a click, then you need to make sure that you have a strategy in place to where if it goes past this, it shuts it down or you have a bid cap on your ad campaign.
So making sure that you are competitive, it’s kind of a fine balance. You have to make sure that you are being as competitive as possible so that the amount that you’re willing to spend on that click is as high as it can be. So that it’s still profitable for you but still that we’re trying to drive down the costs as much as possible.
Two people in the same market can be spending different amounts on their cost-per-click. Let’s say chiropractor A has a super relevant website (people really like landing on it) they tend to convert. People don’t hit back and go look at other ads or other offices. Versus chiropractor B whose as just goes straight to a hardcore sales page. They have a high bounce rate and people aren’t spending a lot of time on the website. That chiropractor B is gonna have to spend more money per click than chiropractor A. So with google, the thing that it always comes down to is who’s willing to spend the most money. It’s really an auction on how much someone is willing to bid for that click.
But google wants things to be shown that are relevant. So it doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to spend. If your site is less relevant, you’re always going to spend more than the person whose site is more relevant. So getting that relevancy factor high, it’s something that they track within your Google ad campaigns. The higher that relevancy score can be, the cheaper your cost-per-clicks are gonna be. So the more clicks you get for the dollars that you spend.
Google Ad New Patient Conversions
The third thing you really want to track are conversions which are going to give you an idea of what your ROI is. So your conversions are going to be what goal are you trying to get out of that click. I would imagine most of us are trying to track appointments set or phone calls made. So those are usually the two metrics that chiropractors are really looking at when it comes to this Google ad click turned into something. That is going to be a person walking into my door, which hopefully turns into a care plan, which hopefully turns into a lifetime patient.
With Google ads you’re not always able to see specifically who those people are. You kind of have to use some rough math. But if you’re tracking conversions as effectively as you can be, it’s gonna be easier for you to calculate the ROI on the back end. So if you’re spending say a thousand dollars on Google ads, and your average cost per conversion (which would be an appointment made or a phone call to a tracking number that is set up with the google ads) let’s say that that’s at a hundred dollars. So you get 10 people that you’re kind of counting as Google leads.
Now Google leads are going to function differently than Facebook leads in that the vast majority of the people that come through Google ads are going to show up for their appointment. As long as you can get them in within say 24 to 48 hours. Google ads people are not willing to wait for weeks at a time. So if you have a waiting list practice, and you can’t get somebody in for three weeks, Google ads may not be the best bang for your buck. You’re gonna need to build more of a brand instead of finding people who are looking to do something right away.
So assuming you can get them in 24 to 48 hours, you’re probably going to get 80 or 90 of those leads that make the appointment or call in and make the appointment to show up for their day one. Then I think that Google ads people are probably going to function pretty similarly to whatever your average conversion rate is. So let’s say it’s 70. If you spend a thousand dollars you’ve got a hundred dollars or you get 10 of 10 Google ad leads out of that thousand dollars. That means a hundred dollars per lead. Let’s say 80 percent of those people show up. So now you’re at 8 of the 10 people that were leads showing up for day one.
And then you’re at about a 70% clip. Let’s skew it just a little bit lower. So let’s say you get 5 conversions out of the 10 leads that you got. So now you’re at 5 conversions. Let’s say your care plan is $1500. Or let’s say your lifetime value is $1500 (because I always like to use that instead of just what the first care plan is). But let’s say your average lifetime value is $1500. You have 5 conversions that would be $7500. You go back and you spend a thousand dollars on your Google ads. That gives you about a 7.5 to 1 return on investment.
So obviously if you’re doing that, that’s great. Those are pretty realistic numbers. I think that I was a little bit conservative on some of them. So it could be even higher than that. So this is why I think that Google ads is a strong strategy for most chiropractors.
But just remember click-through-rate is really going to matter because you’re not going to spend the money until they click on it. But you want to spend as much as Google is willing to take, because the more clicks you get, the more people you get to the website. Cost-per-click obviously you want to get those clicks as cheap as possible but you got to be willing to bid aggressively to show up at the top of the page. And then three, make sure that you’re tracking those conversions properly so that you can calculate your ROI on the back end.
So hopefully that helps if you have been thinking about doing Google ads, or if you’re doing them now, and you’re trying to fine tune. Hopefully that helps and we’ll see on the next one you
