Running a Google Ads campaign for your care business can be a costly and resource-heavy endeavour. To minimise your management time, check out the following 7 quick tips to follow when managing your care home Google Ads.
1. Create separate ad groups for each section of your business
For care businesses that offer a range of services such as domiciliary care, respite or specialist care, add specific keywords and ads for these in a new ad group. This ensures that customers see the most relevant adverts based on their search query, and prevents potential clients seeing ads for domiciliary care when they’re looking for a nursing home.
2. Make sure your targeting is on point
If you’re not a national specialist in the care you provide, it’s likely that you’ll be targeting a radius of 10-30 miles from your care business(es). Google will often encourage you to target the whole of the United Kingdom, as well as people who ‘show an interest’ in the UK. To prevent this, tweak your location settings to your local area + (X) miles, and to show ads only to people in your target area.
3. Think about your brand
One tactic in the more competitive areas of the country is to bid on the brand names of other care homes to drive interest in your business. To prevent your local competition pinching your potential customers, be sure to bid on your own brand terms – as your website will naturally appear above theirs in a bidding war.
A word of warning: If you’re driving traffic to your website using brand terms, some conversions will be counted where relatives might be trying to call in, rather than generating a new enquiry or lead. So, be mindful of this when monitoring the success of your campaigns.
4. Keep a close eye on your CPC
Your cost per click (CPC) is the average price you pay every time someone clicks one of your adverts. In healthcare and medicine in general, we regularly see high CPCs due to the high volume of competition. Keep an eye on your average and any outliers to pause any super-expensive keywords that are eating up your budget.
5. Focus on driving traffic initially
If you’re setting up a new campaign, focus initially on driving traffic to your website. Later down the line, you can set your campaigns to drive conversions. However, Google needs a lot of visitor data for their algorithms to optimise your campaigns and deliver results. So by driving as much traffic as possible in the early days, you’re giving Google the data it needs to make your campaigns a success.
6. Use local terms
When thinking about your keywords, remember to use a combination of terms that also include your location. So, as well as “care home” or “nursing home”, consider trying variations such as “care home worcester” or “nursing home near me” to make sure you’re appearing for high-intent searches.
7. Use conversion tracking
To properly measure the success and ROI of your Google Ads, make sure that conversion tracking is in place. This helps you to measure the journey customers take from clicking your ad to eventually converting – whether that’s a call, a lead submission or a live chat conversation.
At Conteur, we’re specialists in care home digital marketing and PR. If this all sounds like gobbledegook or you’re struggling to give your advertising the time it deserves, get in touch today.
