Considering the extreme competition and cost of hospital marketing—especially online hospital marketing—every advantage helps, and that includes pay per click (PPC).

In an ideal world, micromanaging your hospital’s PPC campaign—including its keyword bid rates—would be your full-time job. But in reality, you probably only have maybe a few hours a week to manage dozens of ad groups and hundreds (if not thousands) of keywords. Make the most of it with these tips.

Here are three essential hospital PPC tips that will quickly improve your traffic, conversion rates and ROI:

Geotarget Your Ads

As its name implies, PPC geotargeting (or location targeting, as it’s known in Google AdWords) targets your ad’s visibility to a specific geographic location.

For the majority of hospitals and clinics that typically serve specific metropolitan or regional area, geotargeting makes a world of sense—and especially if you are including your town’s name in your keyword search criteria. After all, what good is paying for somebody in Portland, Maine to click on your PPC ad if your hospital is in Portland, Oregon?

Get More From Your Landing Pages

Pick any of your hospital’s service lines or centers of excellence, and chances are extremely good that you’ve got multiple pages with content that support specific but related concepts and topics.

Yet, for some reason, many hospital PPC campaigns ignore the diversity of potential landing pages and instead have all of their PPC ads direct clickthroughs to the same page—which is usually a top-level page that delivers broad information.

Instead, think about what people that click on your ads probably want. For instance, back pain and spinal conditions: They will usually want to know about definitions, symptoms or treatments.

Most likely, you have a page (or pages) that answer those questions…at least better than your catch-all, top-level page. Instead of pointing all of those people to the same top-level page, give them what they want by having the ad direct them to a more relevant page.

Put another way: Reduce the number of clicks it takes for them to find what they want…or risk one of those clicks being a bounce or exit.

Scale Your PPC Bid Rates

In an ideal world, micromanaging your hospital’s PPC campaign—including its keyword bid rates—would be your full-time job. But in reality, you probably only have maybe a few hours a week to manage dozens of ad groups and hundreds (if not thousands) of keywords.

Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean you have to give all of your ads and keywords the same constant bid rate. One suggestion is to scale them based on the landing page strategy mentioned in the previous section.

Using that definition/symptom/treatment example, think about which of them will provide the highest volume or probability of conversions (read: new patients).

Most likely, those looking for definitions are less likely, those looking for symptoms for symptoms are more likely, and those that know enough about a condition to search for a treatment are even more likely.

For every dollar that you spend on keywords and ads that point to treatment, spend less (say, 75 cents) for symptoms and even less (start low, say, 25 cents).

AVID Design specializes in online healthcare marketing, including hospital PPC campaigns.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.