Chiropractic has a clear economic shape: a modest first appointment, and a course of care that is worth many multiples of it. Accounts that bid against the first appointment lose to accounts that bid against the plan, at exactly the same click prices.
Nothing here is exotic. It is the same four mistakes, and they compound.
If a new patient is valued at the price of one appointment, most competitive searches look unaffordable. Valued against a course of care, the same searches are comfortably profitable. The click price did not change; the maths did.
A discounted first visit is easy to fill and easy to celebrate. What matters is what share of those visits converts into a plan, and that number is frequently never calculated.
Someone searching nearby sees the map results first. A practice with thin or inconsistent local listings has to outbid that gap, which is a more expensive fix than closing it.
Someone searching a specific condition and someone searching your practice name are at completely different points. Merged, the cheap brand clicks make the whole account look healthier than it is.
Simple structure, correct economics, and a clear read on what the offer is really doing.
Targets built from what a patient is worth across a plan and the real conversion rate from first visit to plan, rather than from the price of an appointment.
The new patient offer tracked through to plan starts, so you can see whether the discount is buying patients or buying discount hunters.
Separate campaigns for the presentations you want more of, so bidding follows what you actually want to treat.
Most enquiries are calls. Which search produced it, and whether it became a booked visit.
Pages built for a local decision, with location, availability, credentials and one obvious action. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns.
A check of whether paid spend is compensating for a local presence problem that would be cheaper to fix directly.
Local Services Ads usually belong here too, measured separately from standard search so you can see which one actually produces patients.
I would rather describe a real engagement honestly than invent a case study with invented numbers. The healthcare work below is an ongoing senior role, so I can speak to scope, scale and approach, but not to a client logo or exact percentages.
Ongoing role as Senior Paid Media Manager, leading strategy and a growing paid media team across multiple service lines, in an industry where every claim in an ad is subject to medical advertising rules and clinical review.
Different industry, included because the numbers are public and verifiable. Roughly $20K per month in Google Ads spend, in a market with $45 to $80 CPCs.
I go through the account, the tracking and the patient journey and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how patients actually search, and around what your compliance rules allow.
Weekly optimisation against booked appointments rather than form fills, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
They work for volume and often work against you for value. A steeply discounted first visit fills the schedule with people optimising for the discount, and the conversion to a care plan is what decides whether that was worth doing. The number to watch is not cost per new patient, it is cost per patient who starts a plan.
Clicks in this category are not cheap, and the meaningful figure is the ratio to what a patient is worth across a plan rather than across one visit. A practice that only counts the first appointment will conclude the channel does not work, at roughly the same spend where a practice counting the plan concludes it does.
Both, measured separately. Local Services Ads sit above everything and are pay per lead, which suits a category where proximity decides a lot. Standard search gives you control over which conditions and treatments you appear for, which Local Services Ads do not. Most established practices benefit from running the two side by side.
Very, and it is the reason paid and organic cannot be judged in isolation here. Someone searching for a chiropractor nearby sees the map results prominently, and a practice with weak local listings pays more for paid clicks to compensate. Fixing the listing is often cheaper than outbidding the problem.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
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