Increase in the number of calls by 41% for a foreign clinic

Author: Oleksandr Shylin

PPC specialist

Reviewer: Halyna Lyman

Head of PPC Department

2023-08-16

Brief Client Description

A private medical clinic in London provides a wide range of medical services, including consultations and examinations by a private GP, specialist doctors and physiotherapists.

The clinic provides patients with urgent same-day access to medical consultations and examinations such as blood tests, ECG and ultrasound scans.

Duration covered by a case study (6 mo.)

• Start of the project: October 25, 2022
• Milestone: April 25, 2023

Objectives

By using Google Ads service our client planned to achieve the following goals:

• Attract more relevant traffic to the site
• Increase the number of calls and appointments
• Manage the workload of GPs and doctors by practice areas

We converted the client's business goals into marketing tasks, defined KPIs and milestones for progress tracking. The team was optimizing campaigns with an eye on the next metrics:

1. CTR - as high as possible (to ensure a high rate of traffic relevance). Minimal allowed CTR = 15% and the desired CTR is 20% and higher.
2. Since the next two goals stated by the client may contradict each other, there was a problem with the prioritization of objectives. In discussion with the client, the decision was made to give higher priority to the goal, which would allow manage the workload of specialists in certain fields.

Results of the last period (March 25-April 25)

Challenges & solutions:

1. Lack of technical capability to track call sources in Google Analytics using external call-tracking services.

   To solve the lack with tracking call sources in Google Analytics, we launched Smart campaigns, which allow us to track calls made from ads directly in the Google Ads interface. Smart campaigns using Google forwarding numbers (GFN) technology to track the calls from ads. When a Smart campaign is active, a unique GFN is displayed in ads instead of the actual business phone number. Google receives and immediately forwards this call to the real number. Sounds a bit tricky. However, this way we have data about the source of the call.



Reported calls from Smart campaign Google Ads

2. Regular ad rejections on suspicion of violating Google Ads policies about Healthcare and medicines.

   Google does not allow ads related to birth control or fertility products, so we had a lot of difficulty figuring out some neutral words for a campaign with Gynecology services. There is no simple solutions for the problem with rejected ads, but our approach has eventually lead to a positive result. To run ads for medical services, it is necessary to pay attention to three elements that the ad bot moderate properly:

   • Keyword (using broad match keywords reduces the risk of rejection)
   • Ad Text (focus on the doctor's experience, reviews, working hours, and minimize the use of medical vocabulary and terms.)
   • Content on final URL (crawler may check all pages on domain, so gotta be ready to remove everything from there that may “cause questions”)
3. Restriction on the use of remarketing techniques and intent-based targeting because of policies about Health in personalized advertising.

   To use the audience targeting and cross-channel placement features without violating Personal Ad policy. We used the names of competing brands as queries for building a relevant audience by intention. With this approach, we were able to launch a Performance Max campaign and provide ad impressions on the Google Display Network.

Performance recap:

Over a period of six months, the following results were obtained:

• The click-through rate has risen to 20%
• Calls-conversions increased up 41%
• Average cost per click fell by 24%

Together with an increase in traffic volumes and a reduction in total spend, these results demonstrate the high effectiveness of PPC ads for healthcare promotion.

Half-year results: comparing the performance of the first period after launch and the last full period of optimization

Project team

• Project manager: Oleksandra Nesina
• PPC specialist: Oleksandr Shylin
• Head of PPC Department: Halyna Lyman