What is Pay-Per-Click Marketing?
It’s a kind of digital marketing strategy using pay-per-click ads that shows up on a search results page. To ensure a high return on your investment, you need to plan out your pay-per-click campaign.
What is a Pay-Per-Click Campaign (PPC Campaign)?
A PPC campaign is your ad strategy that involves targeting choices, pricing models, creative messaging, and metrics to track the effectivity of your ad copy.
Pay-per-click ads (PPC ads) are ad copies that appear in places where your customers search on the web, whether it’s Google Search or Maps. Advertisers pay when the readers click on your ads.
Simply put, you pay for the ad each time someone clicks on the link.
What are the advantages?
Your PPC ad shows up on a tablet, PC, or smartphone — whatever gadget your potential patient is using for his search query. And it also shows up on the search engine or social media platform where your potential customers go to find information.
Your PPC ad is targeted to the patients you want to bring into your practice. This helps you minimize unqualified leads (or people who don’t belong to your target population). Therefore, you increase your online presence when your PPC ad drives your target patient population to your website or social media platform, or gets them to pick up the phone to make an appointment.
You only pay for PPC ads that capture your target audience. So, you could set a cap and adjust your budget as you see fit. You can even analyze what ads are more effective in driving patients to your website and siphon your resources to run those kinds of PPC ads.
Will Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC marketing) Work for Your Practice?
It would if you have a website that can convert a reader to a customer.
Essentially, driving traffic to your website is one of the main goals of pay-per-click ads.
Elements of an effective website to make pay-per-click worth the investment:
Have a solid and clear landing page
As soon as your target audience clicks on the ad, it leads them to your landing page. For them to stick to your page and not bounce back to searching for other websites, they want to know:
- Who are you?
- What service do you offer?
- Does that service or product solve their problem?
- If yes, what is their next step?
At one glance, this should show in your headline, the graphics and videos on the landing page, and a call-to-action button that will lead them to the other pages of your website.
Publish valuable content
- Post testimonials of patients who have suffered in the same way that they did and found relief through your intervention.
- Feature blogs that educate the patient about their health problem.
- List your credentials that give you the authority to manage their problems.
If your website doesn’t have these elements necessary for decision-making, then they will leave your website and search again. There goes the money you spent on your pay-per-click ad.
Let’s say you do have all the elements needed to capture your target audience, how do you monitor the performance of your pay-per-click ad?
In my book, Content First Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Building Authority, Establishing Trust, and Creating Lifetime Customers, I enumerated some metrics you can use:
- Total Reach
- Click-Through Rates (CTR)
- Cost Per Lead
- Cost Per Sale
Metrics to measure effective marketing
Total Reach
This answers the question, “How many people have seen my ad campaign?”
Usually, the higher your budget, the greater your total reach. How does that happen, and how can you maximize your reach if your budget is limited?
With a bigger budget, your ad can run longer, outbid competitors, and reach more people, but to make sure those clicks convert to sale or appointments, you have to create ads that target the right clients.
Use keywords specific to your niche and location. Vague ads will hurt your pocket. Total reach will only be a cause for celebration if it translates to click-through rates (CTR).
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
This answers the question, “How many people clicked on my ad when they saw it?”
You know your ad is effective if your click-through rates are high. If ten people saw your ad and all ten clicked on it, your rate is 100%, whereas if only five clicked on it, then your rate is 50%.
Again, having a 100% click-through rate may be good but still not a cause to rejoice. Until it converts into a new business, it simply means your ad was attractive enough to hook someone to click on the link.
But if your click-through rate is low, then you need to improve your ad. You may be using the wrong keywords, or may not be enticing enough to capture your reader’s attention.
Cost Per Lead
This answers the question, “How much did I spend for each person who made an appointment?” Google would describe this as your total number of conversions.
Usually, you set the maximum price you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad. If you set $0.10 as your cost per click and five people clicked on the ad, then you pay $0.50 for those clicks. With Google ads, you may even pay less because of bid adjustments. You can also create an ad group for your ads that have a similar target audience. Each group will have keywords that you can set a bid price for. Read more about how ad groups work here.
If out of the five people, only two made an appointment, then your cost per lead is $0.25. The more conversions, the cheaper the cost of your ad campaign.
Cost Per Sale
This answers the question, “How much did I spend for each person who bought a product on my online store?”
You only calculate this if you have a virtual store. It’s almost the same as the cost per lead, but you track sales instead of lead.
Quality Score
Aside from these four metrics, another important metric you can track is your Quality Score.
This answers the following questions about the relevancy of your:
- Ads
- Keywords
- Landing page
Keep your quality score high, so that you can keep your costs low.
So how do you create relevant ads that will be worth the pay per click of your target customers?
Your ad must talk to your target customer in three short sentences.
- Who are you trying to convince?
- What are their problems?
- What solutions are you offering?
Let’s face it. People nowadays are on the go. They scroll their mobile devices as fast as they skim through words in an email. Rarely do we find people linger unless you’ve hooked them with your first three sentences.
If you’re offering chiropractic services, stand out with your ad by detailing your niche. For example:
Nagging neck, shoulder, and low back pain? A thorough exam and work-up will safely guide the type of adjustment and treatment program, including massage and body mechanics tips you need. Set an online appointment or simply walk-in at our clinic in (state location).
The sample ad above is your description text and forms one element of your text ads. The other two would include your Headline and your display URL.
You need three catchy and action headlines separated by a vertical pipe.
For example:
Quick, safe, and non-invasive pain relief | Say goodbye to neck, shoulder, and back pains | Walk-in at Irving, TX clinic or schedule appointment online
The display URL will be your website. You’d benefit from SEO traffic if your website name gives a clue about your service or business.
For our example on the chiropractic clinic, you can do a Google search using the keywords, “chiropractor” and location. How many of the websites listed would have the words that indicate they offer chiropractic services? Do you think your ad text affects your ad rank?
It’s best to choose a website name that doesn’t compete with another similar-sounding website. This may confuse your potential patients and may lead them to another provider.
You now see that there are many factors to consider when deciding on whether PPC campaigns will work for your business or practice. If you’re still not sure, contact us here for a FREE review. We can help you.
References
Arnott J. Content First Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Building Authority, Establishing Trust, and Creating Lifetime Customers. Performance Publishing Group, McKinney, TX. 2014.