Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Google Pay Per Click (PPC) is an online marketing tool that allows dental practices to get their marketing message out to potential patients in a very cost-efficient manner.
Have you seen those ads on the side or top of your computer screen when browsing the Internet? What about at the top and to the right of your Google or Bing search results? That’s PPC. It’s your marketing, right where your best prospective patients are looking for it.
What it is and Why You Need It:
It’s really a pretty simple process. You create an ad for a certain service you offer. Then, you choose to promote that ad to prospective patients who are searching Google, Bing or any other search engine for that service. All of what I just described is completely free of charge. You only pay when those quality prospective patients click on your ad. So you PAY per CLICK. Pretty simple so far, right?
PPC is a great opportunity for dental practices for 3 reasons:
- More Visibility and Recognition for Your Practice
- More Traffic For Your Website
- Incredible Potential Patient Targeting
You get your website featured more prominently in the search results of highly qualified prospects, which brings more prospective patients to your website. Those prospective patients, because of their high quality, turn into leads. Those leads turn into new patients and revenue for your practice.
How It Works:
Here’s a little behind the scenes look for you into the inner-workings of the all-mighty Google. It’s important for you to understand why some PPC ads get great results and some stink. It all comes down to what Google calls the “Quality Score” of your ad.
Ads with high quality scores get better, more prominent ad locations and enjoy a lower cost-per-click rate. Sounds pretty good, right? Here’s the thing: Google wants to give their users great ads that offer great products and services. So, if you perfect your PPC ads, they’ll do their best to get them in front of their users. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.
So, what does Google consider “Quality?”
An ad’s quality score is based on three categories: Consistency, Relevance and Popularity.
As you might have guessed, this is a self-fueling fire. The more consistent and relevant your ads are, the more popular they will be. That yields them better and better ad positions, which in turn make them even more popular. And the cycle continues. That’s why it’s so crucial to build a great quality score.
Building Your Quality Score:
As I just mentioned, Google rates your ads across three categories. Let’s take a look at each to show you how to ace each one in your PPC ad campaigns.
Relevance: Google wants to present its users with ads that are relevant to their needs. So when someone types “dental hygiene tips” into Google, they see ads from dentists, not ads from insurance companies. To make sure you create relevant ads, you need to be very specific in which keywords you target. For a dental professional such as yourself, for example, you need to create one ad for cleanings and check-ups. Then, create a separate ad for each of your cosmetic services such as teeth whitening, veneers, etc. That way your prospects are presented with highly relevant ads for their particular Google search.
Consistency: The PPC advertising process has basically three steps: The ad, The landing page, and The special offer used as an incentive for prospects to fill out the contact form. Google wants all 3 of these steps to feel fluid and consistent in design and tone for the end user (a.k.a. your prospective patient).
To achieve PPC consistency:
- Make sure your landing page looks like your ad (if it’s an image ad).
- Make sure your landing page discusses the same topic as your ad.
- Make sure your special offer is offering a solution to the problem the prospect went to Google to solve.
If you do those three things, your PPC process will feel like 3 pieces of a united effort to help the Google user, and Google will reward you for it by raising your quality score.
Popularity: This one’s pretty simple. If your ad generates a lot of clicks, Google will take their users’ word for it that your ad is quality. After all, if people like it, give the people what they want.
Targeting the Right Prospects
Before I jump into targeting, it’s important to know that there are 3 ad types in PPC advertising: Search Ads, Image Ads, and YouTube Ads. Search ads appear in Google on the top and sides of every search results page. Image ads, also known as banner ads, are clickable images that appear on the top and sides of regular websites. YouTube ads are ads that appear in YouTube videos as the video is playing.
Now, let’s look at your targeting options with PPC.
- Targeting Criteria: You can be very specific with who you display your ads to. For image ads, you can target only websites with certain content. You can target particular web behavior of your prospective patients as well. For example, to promote denture services you could target users that visit the Social Security website. You could also choose to simply show your ads to the visitors of a website that discusses social security benefits. It’s very flexible, so you can target just about anyone you want.
- Targeting Settings: These settings help you tailor ads for specific prospects. You can make ads that are optimized for mobile devices and only appear to mobile browsers. You can also select certain demographics to target such as age and gender, so your ads only display to quality prospective patients.
These are the important fundamentals you need to know to get started in PPC advertising. I highly recommend you start using it to market your dental practice to help you bring in new patients and more revenue (if you like that kind of thing).