#1 Most Common AdWords Mistake

December 09, 2014

Recently a client came to us needing help with his chiropractic marketing campaign. He had been running an AdWords PPC program, but was unhappy with the results. (That's an understatement; he had no patients from the AdWords). He asked us to review the campaign for him and suggest improvements.

Once we went through his AdWords settings, it was clear why he wasn't having success with it: he had 150 keywords in his campaign!

Now, it's certainly possible to run a campaign with 150 (or more) keywords, but this doctor had pointed every keyword and ad to the home page. This resulted in multiple problems:

  1. The Quality Score for the ads was very low, 1 on a scale of 10 for most of the keywords. Google wants your landing page to match the keyword. If you run an ad for "migraine in Seattle," you want your ad to point to a page on migraine in Seattle. If the page doesn't match the keyword, you get a low Quality Score, your ad will not run very often, and if it does run, you'll pay more per click.
  2. The user experience is going to be poor. Imagine you're a patient and you search for "migraine headache treatment in Seattle," and you see the ad. If you click on that ad and go to a chiropractic website with no information on migraine treatment, you're going to be frustrated and confused, and you're going to leave the page. You've just wasted an expensive click.

This is one of the most common mistakes we see when doctors are trying to run their own PPC campaigns, and it's easy to throw away thousands of dollars of your marketing budget if you're not careful.

If you want some help running AdWords for your clinic, give us a call. We can help you optimize your campaigns with targeted landing pages that will increase your conversion rate, decrease your cost-per-click, and help you get new patients!