What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC)?
Pay-per-click advertising is a service provided by search engines – as well as other types of social media and websites – that lets you advertise and pay only when your ad is clicked by a prospective patient.
For search PPC, you bid on certain keywords in order to get traffic to your plastic surgery website.
How Does PPC Advertising Work?
You bid on keyword terms that you want to be found for.
So for instance, if you are a plastic surgeon who performs facelift in Cleveland, Ohio, you would put ‘Facelift Cleveland’ as one of your keywords, and you would bid on this. It functions much like an auction, and based on the value of the keyword, you and your competitors will bid for prospective patient clicks.
How To Use Google Ads
The most well known pay per click service is, of course, Google ads, but there are others. Bing powers ads for both Bing and Yahoo. There is also Facebook ads, and then there are other social media like Twitter and so on that also have pay per click functionality.
Most of this article is about Google ads, along with a few words on Facebook ads and other types of pay per click. AdWords is set up in the following manner:
- Create a campaign.
- Create Ad Groups
- Create Ads
- Add Keywords to Ad Groups
In a campaign, there can be multiple ad groups (or just one, if it’s a small campaign). In each ad group, there can be multiple ads. You can have as many as you like, but best practice dictates limiting to two or three ads per ad group.
In those ad groups, you are going to put a certain amount of keywords that relate to those ads. Then when someone clicks on that ad, it would then take them to a landing page. So you’ve got the campaign, ad groups, the ads, the keywords, and ultimately, the landing page.
Do You Need some Tips?
Tips for Setting Up a Google Ads
Campaign
Selecting Keywords
There are three main factors when selecting keywords for an ad group: relevance, search volume, and competition. Select keywords with high relevance and search volume; look for these keywords with as low competition as possible for cheaper bids.
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are terms that you do not want to be found for. This can be especially useful if you are using a lot of broad matches. For example, perhaps you bid on a broad match for ‘face wrinkles’ and you find that your ad is coming up for ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ This is highly irrelevant, and it’s costing you money. Best to put that term on a Negative Keyword list to prevent it from appearing again.
Quality Score
Quality score is the other main factor in both placement and cost of bid. Not unlike PageRank, Quality Score (QS) gauges the level of quality of the keyword, the ad, and the landing page. Low quality scores make it harder and more expensive to place; high quality scores do the opposite. Make sure you have excellent written copy on your landing page and ads, and that they relate well to the keywords you’re bidding on.
Keyword Matches
As you create your keyword lists, you will be asked which kind of match to select. There are 4 types: broad, Broad Match Modifier (BMM), Phrase, and Exact, and the difference from Broad to Exact defines a spectrum of the amount of searches your keyword will qualify for versus the accuracy of relevance.
A broad match for ‘facelift’ will pull synonymous searches and misspellings, while an exact match will only show ‘facelift’ as written, while the versions in between will offer something in the middle. It’s a good idea to test different matches for different terms.
A/B Testing
Because of the reliability of volume, it’s a great idea to A/B test various aspects of your campaign, from your ads to your landing pages. It’s a good idea to test out two different ads against each other, or two different landing pages, to see which performs better. This should be done for the life of the campaign.
PPC vs. SEO
Is pay per click better or worse than SEO? This is a common question. The answer is that they are two different types of search engine marketing, and both should be components of an effective internet marketing strategy. Both have their pros and cons.
The main benefit of pay-per-click is that you get steady and immediate traffic.
How Much Should I Spend on PPC?
So how much do you need to spend? This should be based on the calculated return on investment, which is dependent upon what you’re trying to sell.
PPC for plastic surgery is a more viable option than it is for a lot of industries because the cost of a procedure is relatively high. In our findings, the average cost of plastic surgery nationally is about $4,000, so let’s use that for a quick calculation of the numbers and show you what you would need to spend in order to make money.
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