M.Ad Focuses on Medical Advertising for Specialized Medical Treatments
Over the years M.Ad has been able to compile some helpful observations about what strategies deliver our clients the best results. There are three key areas of your Google AdWords medical advertising account to watch particularly closely: keywords, bids and landing pages. These are crucial parts of any advertising account that should be reviewed regularly, however, when it comes to medical advertising these three components become even more important. Here’s why you should watch them and what to look out for:
Specialized Medical Keyword Targets
The medical industry is a particularly challenging space to advertise in because there are so many rules and regulations threatening to stifle account performance at every turn. If you don’t choose your keyword targets wisely when targeting searchers in the medical industry you run the risk of incurring nasty penalties that will set your account back months. This is why I mentioned in a previous post that it is vital to stay on top of Google’s ever changing advertising rules for medical service providers.
If you’re wanting to target a specific treatment like “IV Ketamine Treatment” for example, it’s likely that the name of the particular drug is restricted – in this case “Ketamine” is a restricted drug term. In order to successfully run ads for specific drug terms, the advertiser must procure a special “pharmaceutical manufacturer” certification from Google. The certification is only available to accredited pharmacies in the United States and Canada. Most advertisers looking to attract patients interested in particular treatments will not qualify for the certification and therefore will not be allowed to run ads for specific drugs. If you want to see if you qualify, check out the application process HERE. That means directly targeting the main service you’re selling is out of the question and you’ll have to data mine auxiliary keywords that the same audience is searching for to find the treatment.
Bids on Medical Keywords
Once you’ve isolated auxiliary keywords that you’re confident your target audience is searching for, be very careful about monitoring your bids. I recommend monitoring them multiple times a day as things can change quite quickly in medical advertising. Medical keywords like “depression treatment in Manhattan” for example, can get quite expensive. If you’re not careful, you’ll chew through your daily budget in a few clicks as keywords in the medical field can easily reach CPC’s of well over $44 and are much higher on average. And please, select a manual CPC bid strategy as automatic bid strategies will conflict with any attempt to keep the CPC’s and CPA’s of your account low.
Medical Advertising & Landing Pages
This is one of the most common ‘missed opportunities’ in my experience auditing advertising campaigns for medical service providers. I also find many people aren’t aware that Google is constantly caching your landing pages looking for infractions in addition to the regular monitoring they do of your actual advertising account. It’s highly likely that you won’t be able to point your ads to the medical service provider’s main website. If the main website has any kind of SEO in place at all it will trigger Google’s flags and your Final URL will be disapproved. Very often, I’m responsible for both the SEO and the PPC account for a single medical service provider and I find the two activities conflict when it comes to using the main website as a landing page.
So what’s the solution? Third party landing pages OR custom advertising domains. I actually tend to prefer the second option because ultimately you’ll have more control over the domain and the content displayed than if you go through a third party platform like Leadpages or Unbouce. Either way you go – check these pages often and A/B test regularly. Google has clean summaries of what can and can’t be on a medical-related landing page – make sure your landing pages comply with all of these requirements or you’ll find your ads disapproved when you least expect it.
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M.Ad manages marketing and advertising campaigns for medical service providers across the United States and Canada. If you need help setting up an account or improving the performance of an existing account please reach out to us. We offer no obligation hourly consulting and we never require on-going contracts. The accounts we manage currently are delivering my clients 800% – 2700% ROI’s.