A Chiropractor’s Guide to Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC (pay per click) or "Google" advertising is an important part of a holistic approach to marketing. These campaigns aren't designed to necessarily build your brand (which is also crucial), but rather convert people who are looking for your service.

In other words, if someone types "your town chiropractor" into Google, and your listing pops up first (THAT'S THE AD!), then it is quite likely they will click to learn more.

DOWNLOAD THE CHIROPRACTORS GUIDE TO PPC ADVERTISING HERE!

Below is a transcript of Matt Adams from Empirical360 and I discussing PPC advertising for chiropractors and their new guide to help make it easy.

Jeff: Hey what's up everybody Jeff Langmaid here and I am talking with Matt Adams from Empirical 360 today. We're going to discuss some PPC advertising and how you can maximize your results. Today they've just released a guide specifically for a chiropractor's, and that's what we're going to dive into. So Matt, who is this guide for?

Who is the Chiropractors Guide to SEO for?

Matt: It's dual purpose. It's specifically for a chiropractor-number one. But number two, it's for chiropractors who might have an agency relationship or for chiropractors that don't have an agency relationship but want to get into PPC marketing. If you have an agency, then it might offer some checks and balances to make sure that they're doing their job. If you're a chiropractor that's not doing PPC right now, this can be extremely beneficial regarding how to set up a PPC campaign and do it in the right way to actually monetize and get some new patients coming in a pool.

I've worked in healthcare marketing for quite some time, and chiropractic has been a significant portion of that. Coming to work for Empirical 360 as their director of client access, I really see a market in need. Chiropractors are great physicians who actually want to treat and make people feel better. I want to help them actually find patients and get them into their practice.

Jeff: And as we break this down in a moment step by step just recap for anybody that didn't check out the previous videos. What's PPC advertising in a nutshell?

Matt: So PPC advertising is a pay per click. Basically, it's when you use a search term in Google, like for example "chiropractor near me" and the first four results that come up are going to be advertisements. That's a chiropractor who is in PPC marketing. They're actually bidding on those words and queries so that their site can come up and a consumer can find them when they actually need them.

Jeff: Well let's dive in and take a look.

Matt: So basically this is going to be a step by step guide to PPC marketing. And again we didn't want to make this overly technical. We want it to be professional enough so that you know you're going to do things the right way and you get the point behind it is. But we want to drill things down enough to a fundamental standpoint so you can actually get to understand it.

Anybody who wants to be found on Google they're going to be using pay per click typically. So moving on down the line here we kind of get into the genesis of a campaign which is your keyword selection strategy. And you know there's a couple of things that we get into that are going to be for things that you want to avoid and things that you want to do. We talk about the keyword planner in there.

PPC Keyword Selection

Jeff: The keyword selection is absolutely essential. I mean it's really where everything else stems from. What's the biggest misstep you see chiropractors taking regarding keyword selection?

Matt: It's really leaving things too broad. If you're going to start with a campaign, we always recommend starting small. In most markets when it comes to PPC for chiropractic, depending upon the size of your demographic area, the overall budget may be 500 to 1000 dollars per month.

Also, don't use terms that are super broad. Because you may be lumped in with interventional pain management for example, which could drive up your cost. Just focus on people who are looking for chiropractic care.

Jeff: It's almost like reverse engineering what people are searching for. If you are the answer to what they're looking for, that helps in every aspect of your marketing. Number one, you don't need to feel cheesy or corny trying to sell them on something. If an individual is looking for a service that you offer, and you're there when they're seeking, then it's a perfect match.

Segmenting Your Audience When Marketing Chiropractic

Matt: This probably is this is legitimately one of the most important things in setting up a PPC campaign When you segment an account the right way it's done by device. If you have a campaign that is specifically for "chiropractor near me" and you realize that is performing particularly well on mobile then you can cut out some of the budgets for your other campaigns and funnel a bigger budget back into what's performing the best. That helps your cost per click go down. It's going to help the actual cost per lead go down as well, and you should be getting more new patients because you're using the money the right way.

Jeff: That's great. That's important because a lot of times it's overlooked. Being able to understand if something is converting better on a mobile vs. desktop is essential because it helps you gain efficiency.

That's a key component for anybody that's out there already involved in PPC advertising. Is your agency fine-tuning your campaigns?

Matt: Yeah. It's like a kind of like the stock market and diversifying your portfolio right. If you don't have that diversification in your average portfolio, you're not going to be able to allocate things the right way. So this is this is paramount. If you read this here, spend all your time on it.

Jeff: Then it comes to writing the actual ad copy.

Matt: In particular I want to talk about relevance. So if you're going to use something like spinal decompression, your advertising copy needs to be related explicitly to the efficacy of the treatment.

All About Ad Copy

Having relevant ad copy is going to increase your quality score on Google, and thereby you're going to get a lower cost per click lower cost per lead and more new patients coming in.

Jeff: Any time I think about copyrighting it's good to be creative but not good to be too cute. In other words, you can be creative with how you structure your copy and how you talk about it. But be direct, it's not the time to get drastically esoteric. You have to be able to lead the person from "I'm looking for this" to taking action.

Let's talk about landing pages. When we're talking about landing pages, if you have ad copy that related explicitly to spinal decompression, you really want somebody to fall at the landing page that talks about spinal compression and breaks it down. They see the spinal decompression apparatus. They see a patient that's actually getting spinal decompression. They know a testimonial about a patient that benefited from spinal decompression, and then they've got a form to be able to contact you right there dead center. So they can actually communicate with you and engage.

And once you get those landing pages of what some of the next steps as far as optimizing so optimization?

Matt: So let's say for example somebody search for "chiropractic university." You probably don't want somebody to click on your advertisement if they've searched for "chiropractor university." So you need to go back into your account and add a negative keyword which will exclude it from being shown. So this is done on an ongoing basis as dealing with competitors. So if somebody was searching for a specific chiropractor, you want to exclude that particular chiropractor as a negative,e so that you can refine your strategy within Google ads.

Jeff: That's that's a really really crucial point, especially when we talk about the competition on some of the large pain management groups and some of the large surgery groups. These are people that have bottomless pockets that can dump a ton of money into their online advertising that you just can't compete with for dollar for dollar. It's challenging.

Matt: Well the other piece of that puzzle is that it's not just that big pocket competitors that you're worried about. You're actually worried about Google as well because Google's job let's not forget 92 percent of Google's revenue comes from paid search. They are getting paid billions and billions of dollars for their advertising and the Google ad platform. If you don't put checks and balances in place and you don't have those negative keywords, you're not doing things based upon the exact match, and you don't actually set in a budget.

Jeff: That's very very very well said.

Dynamic Call Tracking with PPC Advertising

Matt: Also, we use a particular platform that enables dynamic call tracking. If you have a consumer that has reached a landing page, then we have a unique phone number that we can attribute back to the actual advertisement. So that call tracking data we want to pump back in to see that this particular campaign is doing really well-generating calls for you. So when the drive is doing really really well the next step is to say. All right. Perfect. This is working great. We've got the right recipe. Let's go ahead and funnel more of our budget into that campaign, and we should expect to yield the same results. So it's rinsed and repeat.

Jeff: Love it. That has been a complete breakdown of the entire chiropractic pay per click guide.