Healthcare PPC: 7 Hospital Advertising Tips for Your Ads
Make advertising your hospital, healthcare center, or medical practice a success with this mini-guide on healthcare PPC. Learn how to get started (and improve your performance) now!
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insights from 98,500+ hours of healthcare marketing experience
Companies in every industry can benefit from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and this is especially true for hospitals. In fact, PPC advertising for healthcare is one of the quickest and easiest ways to attract new patients because it allows you to connect with them when they’re actively searching for a healthcare provider.
With laser-like focus, PPC will put your ads in front of people when they’re ready to act. Plus, in the healthcare field — perhaps more than any other industry — people are driven to find information and react quickly. Potential patients are already online researching their symptoms and concerns, and with healthcare PPC ads, you can be there when they’re ready to make an appointment.
Keep reading to learn more about healthcare advertising via PPC ads!
If you’re not yet using PPC as part of your hospital’s marketing strategy, call 888-601-5359 or contact us online to speak with a strategist about how WebFX can create and manage effective PPC campaigns to help you attract more patients.
7 healthcare advertising tips for your hospital
Get better results with healthcare advertising using these seven tips:
- Enable ad extensions
- Launch responsive ads
- Use location targeting
- Optimize landing pages
- Understand search intent
- Schedule regular PPC audits
- Research competitor campaigns
Learn more about these healthcare PPC tips now:
1. Enable ad extensions
Ad extensions for Google Ads can help your facility provide searchers with more information — before they click on your ad. For example, if you operate multiple locations, you could use the location extension so that users can find your closest facility even faster.
Since ad extensions influence your Ad Rank, which impacts your ad’s placement and performance, you want to use them in your healthcare advertising strategy. Extensions that share your locations, phone number, and capabilities can help your hospital reach and help more people in your community.
2. Launch responsive ads
Responsive ads, which you can use through Google Ads, help your medical center discover the best headline, description, and even image combination. With responsive ads, your team can save time without sacrificing performance. Use these ads to your advantage!
3. Use location targeting
Location targeting is another powerful healthcare PPC tactic.
With location targeting, your facility can focus on the areas you serve versus the entire world. This strategy will help your medical center reach the people looking for you, which can improve your PPC performance and return on investment (ROI).
4. Optimize landing pages
Landing pages serve a critical role in digital advertising. When someone clicks on your ad, they arrive on a landing page. This page must deliver on your ad. If it doesn’t, people will return to the search results, which doesn’t help your healthcare advertising initiative.
Look at your landing pages for different ad campaigns. Do they match your ads? For example, if you have an ad promoting emergency medical care, does your landing page offer additional information about your emergency care, like parking, capabilities, and more?
5. Understand search intent
When it comes to advertising for healthcare — or any industry — you must understand search intent. Understanding search intent can help your center target the most relevant keywords to reach your target audience.
It can also help you design relevant and useful landing pages.
As you develop your healthcare PPC campaigns, check the search results for different keywords. Make sure your ads match the intentions of searchers. You also want to confirm that those keywords match your intent, too.
6. Schedule regular PPC audits
Getting the most value out of healthcare PPC requires regular PPC audits. A PPC audit takes a comprehensive look at your advertising strategy, ad campaigns, and ads. While you can conduct a PPC audit in-house, third-party audits can offer additional value by providing a fresh perspective.
WebFX, for example, provides free PPC audits for organizations spending more than $1000 per month on PPC ads. If you’re curious about having our award-winning team look at your healthcare PPC ads, contact us online today!
7. Research competitor campaigns
Competing health centers can also provide insight into your healthcare advertising strategy. A tool like SEMrush, for example, can help you see competitor ads. You can also check Facebook’s ad library to see an organization’s Facebook and Instagram ads.
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FAQs about healthcare advertising
Do you have additional questions about healthcare advertising? Browse our FAQ:
What is healthcare advertising?
Healthcare advertising is the practice of promoting a medical facility, like a hospital, through offline and online channels. Medical facilities can manage healthcare advertising campaigns in-house or with the help of an ad agency.
What is healthcare PPC?
PPC stands for pay per click, meaning that you pay a fee each time your ad is clicked. This means that you never have to pay to simply have your ads displayed—you only get charged when someone actually clicks through to your website.
You can run these ads in a variety of places online, but some of the most popular are search engines like Google. These ads appear at the top of the page and beside the regular results, and you can choose which searches you want your ads to display for.
As a hospital, you could choose to use keywords like “hospital in Harrisburg” or “pediatric hospital”. When users search for those terms, they’ll see your ad. And if they click on it, you’ll pay a small fee for them to come to your site.
Which ad network is best for healthcare PPC?
Most healthcare PPC campaigns focus on Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, previously known as Bing Ads.
Google’s paid advertising program, Google Ads, has the widest reach of any PPC platform. It also has a selection of tools to help you select keywords and set bids, so you have complete control over your budget.
In fact, roughly 3.5 billion searches are made on Google every day. With healthcare marketing statistics like that, Google Ads is a powerful way to reach new people interested in your hospital.
Bing Ads works the same way. Although it’s not as popular as Google Ads, it still handles around 4 billion searches per week — making it a program you don’t want to ignore. There is less competition on Bing Ads, too, meaning that it typically offers a lower cost per click and is a good opportunity to be competitive at a low cost.
Why use PPC advertising for healthcare?
There are many hospitals out there that don’t use PPC advertising, meaning that you put yourself at an advantage simply by using it to attract search engine users. It can also help your hospital gain more site traffic and brand awareness.
Plus, it’s extremely valuable to get in front of potential patients when they’re researching their options. For instance, if someone in your city searches for “bariatric surgery + [your city],” chances are high that they’re looking for a surgeon—or will need one in the near future.
It can be difficult to rank organically for popular search terms, especially if you’re a smaller hospital in a larger town. With PPC, however, you can ensure your hospital displays for some of those search queries.
Beyond this, there are other ways that PPC can benefit your online marketing efforts. Here are two:
#1. Hospitals can use PPC keyword data to guide SEO
It’s wise to share data between SEO and PPC analytics. Google Ads provides information about your keyword performance, so you can:
#2. Hospitals can use PPC to identify topics for content marketing
PPC offers search query reports that show keywords people search for, which is valuable information that your hospital can use to its benefit.
Here’s an example: Your hospital just purchased new heart monitors that utilize cutting-edge technology, so you’re going to create and publish a long form content piece about ways to maintain heart health. You can use Google Ads to look for keywords that relate to cardiology and target them within your long form piece.
Whatever you’re planning to write about in your content marketing efforts, you can use the information with Google Ads to discover which keywords to target.
Similarly, you can use PPC to generate ideas to fuel your content marketing efforts. If you’re running out of ideas to write about, or you’re looking for an added boost in site traffic, you can take note of which keywords have a lot of interest. Use those keywords to create content to post on your website.
- See which keywords are driving traffic
- Discover which lead to the most conversions
This will allow you to use SEO and PPC together for the best possible results.
Grow your hospital with healthcare PPC
If you’re interested in using healthcare PPC ads or any other form of digital advertising to reach new patients, WebFX can help. Our team has years of experience creating and managing successful campaigns for our clients, and we’ll do the same for you.
Contact us today to speak with a strategist about how our healthcare advertising services can help your center reach and treat more people in its community.
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