A plan of care is several weeks and many visits. Accounts that value a patient at one appointment conclude that the competitive searches are unaffordable, and they are wrong by roughly the length of the episode.
Three of these are economics and one is operational, and the operational one is the worst.
An episode of care is worth many multiples of a first appointment. Bidding against the appointment caps you well below what the search is actually worth.
A patient who books and then cannot get authorised costs you the click and the admin time and returns nothing. Unless that outcome goes back to the platform, it will keep finding more of them.
The broad terms are crowded and expensive. Specific conditions, post-operative recovery and procedure-related searches are cheaper and reach people who need what you treat.
Direct-access patient acquisition and physician referral development are different motions with different messages. Run together, neither is measurable.
Built on episode value and on the outcomes that actually survive to revenue.
Targets built from the value of a completed plan of care and the real rate at which evaluations convert into one.
Offline conversion import so the platform learns which enquiries reached authorised, attended care, rather than which ones booked.
Separate campaigns for the conditions and post-operative recovery paths you want more of.
Direct patient acquisition and referral development built as distinct efforts with distinct measurement.
Which search produced the call, and whether it became an attended evaluation.
Pages that answer the specific condition, show the therapists and make booking obvious. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns.
If you are in a direct-access state, that is a meaningful advantage most clinics under-use in their advertising, and it is usually the first thing worth testing.
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.
Both, and they are entirely separate campaigns. Direct access means patients can find you themselves in most states, and that traffic behaves like any local service search. Referral relationships are a different motion that paid search supports rather than drives.
An episode of care, not a visit. Most plans of care run for several weeks and multiple visits, so bidding against a single appointment undervalues the patient by a large multiple and puts the competitive searches out of reach for no good reason.
It is the biggest source of leakage between enquiry and revenue. A patient who books and then cannot get authorised is a cost with no return, and unless that outcome is fed back to the platform, the account keeps buying more of them.
Yes, and it is usually the whole opportunity. Generic physical therapy terms are expensive and crowded. Specific conditions, procedures and post-operative recovery searches cost less, convert better and reach people who need exactly what you treat.
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.