Almost nobody searches for a hospital in the abstract. They search for a procedure, a specialty, a symptom or a second opinion. Paid media for a health system works when it is organised the way patients actually look for care, and when the reporting speaks the language the service line leads already use.
The problems here are as much organisational as they are technical.
One account promoting the hospital produces broad, cheap impressions and no attributable volume. Service lines have distinct audiences, distinct competitors and distinct economics, and they need distinct campaigns and budgets.
Brand awareness and demand capture answer different questions on different timescales. Reported together, neither can be defended, and the whole channel becomes hard to justify.
Impressions and click-through rate do not answer the question a service line lead is asking, which is how many cases arrived and what each cost. If the reporting cannot answer that, the budget conversation gets harder every year.
Clinical review, legal review and service line sign-off are real and they take real time. Plans that assume agency-speed turnaround produce work that expires before it launches.
Structured around how care is actually organised internally, and how patients actually search.
Campaigns, budgets and targets built per service line, so each one can be judged and funded on its own performance rather than hidden inside an institutional average.
Different campaigns, different measurement windows, different success criteria, so both can be defended on their own terms.
Offline conversion import so the platform optimises toward acquired cases rather than form fills, with privacy-aware tracking design that passes the outcome without passing the condition.
Copy and claims written inside what medical advertising rules and your own clinical reviewers allow, with review time built into the calendar rather than discovered late.
Volumes, cost per acquired case and contribution against each line's own targets, in the format the people who own those targets already use.
You get the person doing the work, not an account manager relaying questions to a junior team. In an environment with this many stakeholders, that difference is most of the value.
This is the environment I work in day to day in a senior in-house role, which is the reason the section above is about stakeholders and review cycles rather than only about bidding.
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.
For service lines, yes, and often very well. For the institution as a whole, paid search has little to bid on, because almost nobody searches for a hospital in the abstract. The productive framing is that you are not advertising a hospital, you are advertising a set of specific services that happen to share a building and a brand.
In the currency the board already uses: volumes by service line, cost per acquired case, and contribution against the line's own targets. Impressions and click-through rate do not survive that room, and they should not.
They have a place, but they should be funded and judged separately from demand capture. Mixing them into one number is how an institution ends up unable to say whether either is working. Brand answers a different question and needs a different measurement window.
Slowly, and that is worth planning for rather than resenting. Creative and claims pass clinical and legal review, service line leads have their own priorities, and procurement has its own timeline. Accounts that ignore this produce excellent work that never launches.
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.
Rather book a time directly? Schedule a call.