PPC advertising is a great way to generate new dental patients online. However, if done wrong, your ppc campaign can become a nightmare and burn through your marketing budget quickly. Therefore, it is important to achieve a good ROI for your PPC campaign before scaling it further. In this post we have identified 5 proven tactics to improve the ROI of your PPC advertising campaigns.
Add Negative Keywords
Negative keywords help prevent clicks from irrelevant and low quality searches. If your dental office is open from Monday – Friday, you don’t want your ad to appear for searches like “dentists open on Saturday” or “dentists open on Sunday”. In this case adding negative keywords like saturday, sunday and weekend will prevent your ad from showing up on such irrelevant searches.
A/B Split Test Ads to Improve CTR
CTR (click-through rate) is the most important component of quality score. A higher CTR means a higher quality score. Ads with a high quality score will have a lower cost per click and a better ad position than other ads bidding on the same keywords. Therefore, improving CTR will directly reduce the cost of your PPC campaign and thus improve its ROI. The easiest way to improve CTR is to create multiple (2 to 4) ads in the same adgroup and rotate them evenly. Then every week revise ads with the lowest CTR with new verbiage and offers until you can beat the highest CTR ad (called the control). When that happens, you revise the previous comtrol until you can beat the new control. This procedure of testing one ad against the other is called split-testing. Using split tests, you can improve the average CTR of your campaign over time.
Use conversion optimizer or CPA bidding
In adwords, if you get more than 15 conversions in past 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer. Doing so will help you optimize the campaign for a target or max CPA (cost per acquisition of a new patient lead). For e.g. if you need 50 leads at $70 each to meet your ROI target and your campaign has an average CPA of $80 with more than 15 conversions in past 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer with a target CPA of $70. Google Adwords will then automatically adjust your CPC bids on each keyword taking into account the expected conversion rate for a click from each keyword. Thus achieving a maximum number of conversions at your target CPA of $70.
A/B Split Test Landing Pages to Improve Conversion Rate
Landing pages are a vital component of any successful PPC campaign. Once a searcher clicks your ad, all the work you did in optimizing the campaign is over and the conversion now depends on your landing page. A lot of dentists do not use dedicated landing pages for PPC advertising which can kill their campaign ROI and they end up shutting down the campaign. One of the quickest ways to improve the ROI of your PPC campaign is to improve your landing page conversion rate. This can be done through A/B testing of landing pages similar to ad split tests described above. However, with landing page split tests our goal is to improve conversion rate of clicks into leads (form submissions or calls).
Improve Call Handling Performance
The purpose of any PPC campaign is to generate leads in the form of calls and appointment request form submissions. However, you need to convert these leads into confirmed appointments and office visits to earn a profit from the PPC campaign. This is where call handling skills of your front desk come in. Often ignored by most dentists your staff’s call handling performance can make or break your PPC campaign ROI. Therefore you need to ensure that your receptionist is giving due attention each inquiry generated by the PPC campaign. The more leads they can close, the higher will be the ROI of your PPC campaigns.
In order to improve call answering performance, you need to record all inbound and outbound calls so that you or a sales expert can listen to these recordings and identify any shortcomings. These issues can then be addressed with some training sessions so that the a better closing rate can be achieved in the future.
As you can see from the discussion above, you must optimize a PPC marketing campaign through all stages of dental patient sales cycle – from the ad impressions to clicks, from clicks to leads (calls or form submission) and from leads to confirmed appointments. This will give you a high ROI after which you can increase your PPC campaign budget to generate even more dental patients for your dental office.
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