PPC Not Working? Don’t Ditch the Campaign

Just Make a Few Tweaks to Get Better Results

In today’s digital world, it makes sense for a large portion of your marketing budget to be allocated to pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Searching on Google is usually the first place a potential new client will find your practice and if your ads are targeting the incorrect audience, you may be wasting valuable marketing dollars. With a few simple changes, you can increase your click through rate and convert potential patients into actual patients.

Targeting the Wrong Audience

Targeting the correct audience or demographic seems pretty simple, especially in the ophthalmology space. For LASIK, you are targeting adults between the ages of 25-45 who live in a certain mile radius from your practice. For cataracts, you are targeting adults aged 65+ who also live a certain mile radius from your practice. But, did you know you can drill down on that audience to eliminate certain characteristics, such as those who don’t wear glasses? It also doesn’t make sense to show your LASIK ad to a cataract patient or vice versa. That’s where targeting plays an important role in the success of your PPC ads.

Google and Facebook have different ways they target the ad audience. Google Ads target by keyword, search terms and search engine. Facebook Ads target by demographic. By making minor changes to your target audience, your ads will be served to the correct audience who are more likely to act than those that will just scroll by or leave the landing page because it’s not the information they were looking for.

Ineffective Bidding Campaigns

One important aspect of a successful PPC campaign is a good bidding strategy. Like in a traditional auction, a bid is placed on a PPC auction to help secure ad placement, ideally at the top of the search results. A campaign will bid on specific keywords (such as LASIK) or keyword group in an attempt to gain ad space for services important to their business. A poor bidding strategy can result in your ad not being shown or your ad being shown to an uninterested audience.

If your bids are too low, your ad may not be showing up or being clicked on. If that is the case, try adjusting your bid. You can set a daily budget to ensure you don’t spend your monthly marketing budget in just a few days. If you adjust your keyword bids and you don’t see an increase in clicks, take a look at your targeting. That may be the reason your ads aren’t performing at the new bid rate. It’s important to remember that some keywords may be very competitive and may require a higher bid rate.

Landing Pages Not Matching Your Ads

When a potential customer clicks on your PPC ad, it’s important to send them to a landing page. Landing pages allow you to better track your ads and see if they are converting to new patients. If your landing page doesn’t match the messaging on your PPC ad, then you will have a high bounce rate. That means these patients are not interested in what you are selling, or they thought what you are selling is different than what you actually are selling. Google can also “ding” you for this, so it’s important to make sure you have a consistent message across your PPC ads and your landing page.

A/B Testing

A/B Testing, also known as split testing, is a great way to determine what is working or not working in a PPC or digital marketing campaign. To create split testing, you will run the same ad with only one thing different between the two. That means you can alter the ad copy but keep the same photo. The reason for only changing one item on the ad is so that you can understand what is working versus what isn’t working. Once you find the winning ad, you can stop running the lesser performing ad and ramp up the frequency of the well performing ad.

At Denali Creative, we understand the importance of a well-run PPC ad. Many of our clients dedicate over 90% of their marketing budgets to PPC so it’s up to us to make sure those ads are performing and resulting in conversions. If you are new to PPC or would like us to perform a free evaluation of our current PPC strategy, give us a call today! We are happy to provide this service free of charge and discuss how we can help improve your online marketing campaigns.