What’s up everybody? This is Dr. Nick with LVRG Media, and today I want to talk to you about the five things that really matter when it comes to the success of your Google ad campaigns.
So there are a lot of pieces that go into how successful you will be. Some are on the Google ads side, some are on the website side, some are on the tracking side. So just make sure that you’ve got all these components in place if you’re spending the money with Google. And if you’re spending money on an agency, you want to make sure that everything is optimized the most that it can be.
Google Ads Guide 2022 For Chiropractors
So let’s talk about these five things. So number one is budget. Budget is probably one of the biggest issues that I see with people being able to be successful with Google ads. They are taking the standard Facebook budget strategy that is being used on a monthly basis, and they’re trying to put that into a Google context. And they’re just two completely different things.
A lot of people came to online marketing through Facebook ads, and most agencies recommend that you spend anywhere from $500 to $1000. I would say the average chiropractor now is probably spending about $750 a month on Facebook ads. In the past few years, it was maybe as low as $500 so a lot of people that added Google in after they did Facebook ads will kind of use that same idea.
The problem is that Google ads are a little bit different than Facebook because, with Facebook, you’re paying for the impression. So there are a lot of diminishing returns in terms of Facebook ads. So if you are successful (let’s say $500) theoretically you should still probably be just as successful at $1000. So if you’re getting 50 leads for a $500 ad spend with Facebook then you did a $1000 in ad spend, you could expect around 100 leads. Because there’s still room to be shown to new people, the bigger city you are the more that budget can grow. At some point, you run out of people to convert. So instead of getting leads at say 100 leads for $1000, that’d be $10 a lead. Say if you went to $2000, now you’re getting leads for $20 instead of $10. Now you’re starting to lose out.
There’s that law of diminishing return with Google ads. What I see is that most people are not spending enough, and they’re leaving impressions on the table. Because with Google you only pay when someone clicks on the ad. So if you’ve maxed out, let’s say you had a million-dollar budget, well you know Google’s only going to show it to whoever’s doing these searches for the keywords that you want. So even though you’re willing to spend a million, they’re not going to spend a million dollars. They might spend you know x amount of thousands of dollars just so that you can be at the top. And when you get clicked you get charged whatever you’re willing to bid on that.
So the budget is usually one of the things that I see holding people back just because they start off with a really minimal amount, and they’re not willing to scale up. So with our clients, we always come to them, and we’re like hey listen, here’s what we’re recommending the next step be. And then the client either decides yay or nay. But too many times I see clients that don’t want to spend the money because they’re worried that it’s not going to come back. But as long as you can still track those conversions (and you’re still tracking those people that come in through Google through the sales funnel), the higher the budget the more leads, the more conversions, and the more lifetime patients.
Number two is gonna be your website and especially whatever landing page you’re sending people to. So for chiropractic keywords, I recommend just sending them to the home page is going to be the best way to go if you have a chiropractic office. But let’s say that you were a chiropractor inside of a huge clinic, or inside a hospital. You wouldn’t want to send that traffic to the homepage of a clinic that does 20 different things, chiropractic being one of them.
Now I know that the vast majority of you listening to this are going to be in chiropractic offices only. So for those, you would just send them to your home page. If you are part of a bigger thing with lots of other services, you may want to build out a chiropractic-specific page. So it would be like ‘abcwellnesscenter.com/chiropractic’. That way those chiropractic keywords in the Google ad strategy are very relevant to the landing page. Because if chiropractic is one of ten services, and you have to talk about all 10 services on the home page, Google is going to see you as less relevant than somebody who only does chiropractic.
So with landing pages, 98% of you are going to need to send it to the home page, those 2% though that have a lot of other things going on you may want to consider sending them specifically to a chiropractic page.
Now if you were doing condition-based keywords like neuropathy or maybe even spinal decompression, not a condition but more of a service, if you’re doing things that are non-chiropractic keywords, you’re going to want to be sending those people to pages that are optimized for either those conditions or for those services. Same idea if you help you know 20 different conditions, and somebody’s looking for low back pain, the home page is kind of a page for everybody and all the things that you do versus sending them directly to a low back pain page that would be more specific to the thing that they’re searching for. So really making sure that that website is optimized not only for the content but also for the conversion. That’ll be important to the success as well.
Google Ads Budget Tip for Chiropractors
Third is going to be your bid strategy. So bid strategy is going to be on the Google ad side. So you want to make sure that you are being competitive with the other people that are bidding on the keywords that you want to show up for. So if we’re using chiropractic, what are the other chiropractors in town bidding for those keywords? Because if your bid strategy, or if your max bid is too low, you’re gonna end up with the scraps. Once everybody else has exhausted their budget, then you’ll get shown at the top.
So what will happen is if you’re not willing to bid enough per click, then it may not even spend your budget. Let’s say you’ve got $1000 that you’re willing to spend. It may only spend $200, $300, or $500 just because your ads aren’t being shown enough. Because you’re not being aggressive enough in your bid strategy. So that is one thing that I have found that is super important to having a successful Google ad strategy, that you have to at least get the ads shown.
So that’s step one. The impressions have to be there, then the ads have to be constructed in a way to where they’re gonna get the high click-through rate. And then your website has to be set up. But if you don’t even get the impressions in the first place, because you’re not winning the auction in terms of how much you’re willing to bid, then none of those other things matter. So always start with making sure that you’re being competitive with the bids that are in your area.
Chiropractic Bid Strategy for Google Ads
Fourth is going to be your targeting. So this is going to include your keywords and your geographic area. So I’ll talk about both of those in terms of keywords. You want to be as specific as you can be. Look for the things that people are actually searching for. So one good place to look for keywords is to look in your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) metrics. In the reporting that Google does, they will tell you what keywords that people are actually searching for, that your listing is showing up for, in the map pack. So that’s in the three-pack where your reviews show up in your Google Business Profile account. It’ll have reporting on what are the keywords that you’re showing up for.
Most of the time it’s going to be ‘chiropractor, city state’ ‘chiropractor near me’, any other services that you might have in the office. That’s what those things are going to be showing you. But you want to know what are the things that you’re showing up for that are going to allow you to add those keywords into your campaigns. So that you’re more likely to show up not only organically but also in the paid spots as well on the geographic targeting.
Kind of the rule of thumb that I use is you want to be as aggressive as possible in terms of how much area you are targeting. But if any less than eight out of ten people said, “Yes, I’m willing to drive there,” if they clicked on your ad and then saw where you were located, then you’re probably targeting too far away from your practice.
You’ll know your area better than anybody else, so be really honest with yourself about what’s feasible. You want to target as many people as possible but you don’t want half of those clicks to never call in the office. Because they’re not going to call and tell you, “hey I didn’t choose you because you were too far away,” they’ll just click, waste that money, and then go to somebody that’s maybe closer.
So make sure that your geographic targeting is conservative enough to where you’re getting the vast majority of those people actually showing up for their visits.
And then the last one is similar to number four in terms of keywords. These are going to be negative keywords. So there are a lot of things that Google will kind of lump into the chiropractic bucket that you have no interest in showing up for. If you don’t take insurance, you don’t want to show up for someone who’s typing in ‘chiropractor who takes insurance near me.’ Medicaid is a big one. For example, in Illinois chiropractic is not covered by Medicaid. So we don’t want to show up for this and spend x amount of dollars per click when somebody is searching for chiropractors who take Medicaid.
So make sure that you’re building out those negative keywords. And this is why it’s important to work with somebody who’s spending the time and the attention to really optimize your campaigns. Because, for example, a lot of your budget can be wasted on people that are looking for information about chiropractic school, and that is not who you want to be showing up for.
So make sure that you are working with somebody who does spend that time, that does spend the attention to optimize the campaigns not only for what you do want to show up for but what you don’t want to show up for.
And don’t want to waste money because again Google ads are based on a cost-per-click. So if you’re showing up there’s a chance it might get clicked. If it gets clicked you’re going to spend the money whether that person is relevant to what you’re looking for or not.
Hopefully those helped. You know Google ads is one of these things that people think seems easy, but there’s a difference between somebody who’s great at it and somebody who’s just okay at it. There’s a lot of complexity to it, so it’s similar to chiropractic. The general public may think all chiropractors are the same but we’re not. With Google ads, it’s similar to that in that there’s a wide variety of how good somebody is at running and being successful with those google ads. So hopefully this helped and we’ll see on the next one.
