Dental AdWords – pay-per-click targeting

Broad or tight targeting for PPC campaigns?

Google AdWords is becoming increasingly popular with dentists, particularly where a website is new or where the competitor websites on page one of Google are entrenched and need many months of SEO to overhaul. Although the traffic from paid ads. typically converts into new enquiries worse than organic (free) Google positions, pay-per-click is still worth considering when free traffic is hard to come by.

To recap very quickly, AdWords is a bidding process whereby you can place an ad. very high on page one of Google simply by paying more than your competitors when your ad. is clicked. It’s actually a fair bit more complex than that, but in principle, the more you are prepared to pay, the better exposure you can get, both in terms of how often your advert is shown to searchers and where it appears on the Google results page.

AdWords is a complex tool and not really for do-it-yourself configuration and management. In the hands of the inexperienced, it’s possible to lose a lot of money very quickly on poor quality traffic and clicks which stand little chance of converting into meaningful dental enquiries.

Poor AdWords campaigns are something we see regularly when we inherit accounts, either where one of the dental practice team have tried to set up, or where an inexperienced agency has configured a “fire and forget” campaign to earn some quick cash. Usually there is a lack of understanding about the fundamental parameters and “must do” basics to ensure that campaigns do not leak cash. Similarly there is little or no attempt to measure the success of the campaigns, and so the advertiser ploughs on regardless, and usually with no idea if the campaign is actually worthwhile or not.

Targeting options

One of the main failures in home-spun PPC campaigns is a lack of appreciation of targeting i.e. how you can refine your campaign to give it the best chance of attracting high quality traffic which has a chance of converting; rather than simply just trying to gain clicks. There are numerous parameters which can be used to help target your AdWords campaigns with the main ones being as follows:

Location

You can set your adverts to display only to a select audience within a given region. Options also include radius targeting e.g. 15 miles around a certain location. It’s also possible to specifically exclude locations if you wish to.

Networks

Google gives you the option to advertise on various different networks – for example the standard “search” network (alongside the other Google results) and the “display” network (Google’s other ad. partners). Care must be take with this selection as indiscriminate use of the display network can result in very poor quality traffic.

Scheduling

You can select when your ads. are shown. By analysing the historical data which accrues in your account, you can determine the best, and worst, times to show your adverts.

Keywords

You can select different “match” types for your keywords to refine when your ads. are shown with respect to the search terms entered by the user. Set your match types too broad and expect to receive poor quality traffic, potentially even completely irrelevant to your business. However, those clicks will still deplete your budget.

Negative keywords

This is another regular mistake with home-spun PPC campaigns i.e. a complete lack of negative keywords. Negatives are used to prevent your advert from appearing when certain keywords are used as part of a search phrase. For example you may not want to show your implant ads when someone looks for NHS services or when someone is searching for implant training. Careful selection of appropriate negative keywords will stop you losing money in this circumstance.

Advert relevance

The ads. you configure must be relevant to the keywords you select and the landing page you target. This all affects something called “quality” score which dictates how much you pay per click. If your ads are optimised with good click-through-rates, your quality scores will improve and your cost per click will decrease.

Overall campaign granularity

This refers to how a campaign should be broken down into smaller component parts so that each element can be optimised individually. We regularly see a single campaign and ad. group with maybe 50 or so keywords – this is way too broad and cannot be managed effectively. Campaigns must be broken down into sub-groups, each with their own advert variants and a small set of keywords. As the data in the account builds, you can select what is working and keep it, whilst pausing the rest.

Summary

Whilst it’s not quite a case of saying whether a broad or targeted campaign is best, it clearly pays to understand the targeting parameters available within AdWords so that you can test to establish what performs best and delivers good return on your investment.

Successful use of AdWords does require knowledge and experience to avoid lots of wasted budget – if you need assistance, please call the Dental Media PPC team on 01332 672548.