Google Ads: How to Advertise on Google

When you’re looking for a new service in Edmonton, where do you start your search?

Most people in Edmonton begin their search on a search engine, like Google.

90% of consumers use major search engines prior to making a purchase to research products and services locally.

BIA/Kelsey, 2015

If your health and wellness business website is not easily found on the first page of Google, your patients will have a hard time finding your practice.

So, how do you get on the first page of Google?

When a person types a search query into Google, they see three results:

1. Google Ads: Pay Per Click
2. Google Maps: Local SEO
3. Google Search: Organic SEO

The results that you see in each of these three sections are based on completely different factors. Google Ads is the most direct and immediate method of getting your business website on the first page of Google.

Regardless of your company size, you can get your website listed on the first page of Google in Edmonton immediately. We wrote this article to help you learn:

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads are text, image, or video advertisements displayed by Google in their search engine results page, on websites and apps, as well as in YouTube.

What are the benefits of Google Ads?

1. Return on investment: for every $1 invested in Google Ads, you’ll earn $2.
2. Measurable analytics: extensive data to measure advertising performance.
3. Audience focus: focus your ads on people that are interested in your services.
4. Intent to buy: visitors are 50% more likely to book an appointment.
5. First page instantly: get on the first page of Google immediately.

How does Google Ads work?

When a person types a search query into Google, the first thing they see are Google Ads, which are triggered based on your chosen keywords, your maximum bid and your Quality Score.

How much does Google Ads cost?

The average cost-per-click for the health and medical industry is $2.62.

How to use Google Ads?

1. Define your goals
2. Know your audience
3. Know your competitors
4. Structure your account
5. Keyword Research
6. Create campaign
7. Setup ad groups
8. Create ads
9. Design landing page
10. Analyze and optimize

Let’s get started!

What is Google Ads (Google AdWords)?

When a person types a search query in Google, the first thing they see are paid advertisements through a service called Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords).

When a person is browsing a website, they may see paid advertisements throughout the web page delivered by Google Ads.

When a person is watching a video on YouTube, they will also see paid advertisements delivered by Google Ads.

There are three basic types of Google Ads:

1. Search Network: usually text-based ads that are displayed at the top of Google’s search engine results page.
2. Display Network: usually image-based ads that are displayed on websites and apps that are part of Google’s Display Network of over 3 million websites.
3. Video Campaigns: short videos that are displayed before or during YouTube videos.

What are the benefits of Google Ads?

The primary benefit of using Google Ads is that you can get your business website found on the first page of Google instantly. This attracts people to your practice website, wanting to learn more about your health products and services.

Do Google Ads work? Do people click on Google Ads?

According to WordStream Research, when a person is looking on Google to make a purchase, 65% of all clicks are on Google Ads and only 35% are on organic Google Search.

In addition, there are also many other benefits of using Google Ads, such as:

1. Return on investment: according to Google, for every $1 a business spends in Google Ads, they will earn an average return on investment of $2. In other words, if you spend $1,000 in Google Ads in one month, you may get new clients into your business that will purchase an average of $2,000 in products and services. These new clients may also return to your clinic for additional services.
2. Measurable analytics: traditional forms of marketing and advertising, such as television, radio, or direct mail (Canada Post) flyers, make it difficult to measure the performance of your campaign results. Google Ads provides extensive data analytics to measure every detail, including how many people view your ad, how many click on the ad to arrive at your website, and how many contact you to book an appointment.
3. Audience focus: using Google’s extensive database of information, you can focus your ads to a very specific type of person based on their location, demographics, devices used, and the exact words that they use in their Google search query. Instead of wasting your marketing budget displaying ads to people who aren’t interested, focus your ads on people that are actively looking for your health products and services.
4. Intent to buy: according to Unbounce, Google Ads visitors are 50% more likely to make a purchase than non-Google Ads visitors. In other words, when a person clicks on an ad, they often have a higher intention to make a purchase then when a person clicks on an organic search result. These Google Ads visitors are actively looking for a new product or service to purchase, and have a high “intent to buy”.
5. First page instantly: any changes that you make to your website to increase your organic search engine rankings may take several weeks or months to make an impact to your results. With Google Ads, you can see your business website on the first page of Google on the first day. Regardless of your business size, every website is competing on an equal playing field using Google Ads.

How does Google Ads work?

When a person types a search query into their search box, the first thing they see are Google Ads, which are triggered based on the keywords that you choose. Sometimes your keywords might be an exact match or a similar phrase match, which triggers your ad to be displayed.

The ads that are displayed are based on an “ad auction”, a bidding auction where Google decides which ads will appear and in what order. Google decides this based on an “ad rank” of several factors, such as:

• Your bid: the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad.
• Quality of ads and landing page: how relevant and useful your ad and the website it links to are to the person doing the search.
• Ad rank thresholds: the minimum bid necessary for your ad to show in a particular position.
• Context of the search: the search terms (keywords) that a person is using, location, type of device, time of day, and other user signals.
• Impact from ad extensions: how extensions (e.g. phone number, links) and other ad formats will impact your ad’s performance.

This auction determines which ads are included and where they will rank based on two main factors: your maximum bid and your Quality Score.

The Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords and ads, which are used to determine your cost-per-click. Your Quality Score depends on multiple factors, such as:

• Your click-through-rate (CTR)
• The relevance of each keyword to its ads group
• Landing page quality and relevance
• The relevance of your ad text
• Your historical account performance

A higher Quality Score results in higher rankings for your ads and a lower cost-per-click.

How much does Google Ads cost?

The three types of Google Ads (search, display, and video) are based on a price-per-click (PPC) model whereby you pay a fee each time a person clicks on one of your ads.

According to WordStream Research, the average cost-per-click for the health and medical industry is $2.62 for the search network and $0.63 for the display network. This cost varies on a number of factors, including your Quality Score, as well as the keywords that you’re targeting.

Different keywords have different levels of competition. In other words, businesses are willing to pay a higher cost-per-click for certain keywords than others. The reason is that some keywords are used more often in search queries than others.

For example, in Edmonton, the average monthly search volume for the keyword “braces” is about 210. In comparison, the average monthly search volume for the keyword “Invisalign” is about 590.

There is a growing demand of patients looking for Invisalign treatments than those looking for braces. This results in a higher average monthly search volume, which motivates business owners to spend more on a keyword with a higher search volume.

The average cost-per-click for the keyword “braces” is up to about $14.49, while the average cost-per-click for the keyword “Invisalign” is up to about $19.45. For many of our clients, the average cost-per-click for the keyword “Invisalign” is lower than $7.

The cost to get 100 potential new patients to your website looking for Invisalign treatments could be about $700. If only 1 of these potential patients purchases your Invisalign treatment, it would pay for your entire Google Ads cost. Any additional patient is extra profit.

How to use Google Ads?

The first step is to setup a Google Ads account. First, visit the Google Ads homepage. Then, click on the button that reads: “Start Now”.

This takes you to Google’s sign-in page. Google uses one account for all of their products, including Google Ads, Analytics, Gmail, YouTube, and more.

If you already have a Google account for any other product, type in your email address and password to login. If you don’t have a Google account setup, or if you want a separate account for Google Ads, click on the link below that reads: “Create account”.

After you’ve created your account, you’ll have to provide basic account information, including your location, time zone, and billing details. With Google Ads, you have two payment options:

1. Automatic payments: you will be charged upon reaching your billing threshold or 30 days after your last payment, whichever comes first.
2. Manual payments: you will prepay Google Ads and charges will be deducted from the prepaid amount.

Once you’ve setup your Google Ads account, you’ll see your dashboard, which shows you an overview of your advertising campaigns. Next, we’ll review the steps to create effective Google ads.

Step 1: Define your goals

It’s important to set specific and measurable business goals to evaluate and improve your performance. An effective framework for goalsetting is creating S.M.A.R.T. goals, which helps you quantify your results so that you can measure your marketing return on investment (ROI).

S.M.A.R.T. goals are:

• Specific – well-defined and focused
• Measureable – made of tangible numbers to track your progress
• Attainable – realistic and achievable for your business
• Relevant – based on your business environment
• Time-bound – clear deadline for goal completion

For example, a S.M.A.R.T. goal that you can set for your practice may be:

“By the end of our fiscal year, we will use Google advertising to increase traffic to our business website by 35%.”

Step 2: Know your audience

The next step in Google advertising is to imagine your existing clients or ideal clients. Imagine this ideal client as one person with a name, age, gender, profession, etc. This is often called a “customer persona” or “client avatar”.

This exercise helps you imagine who your clients are, their demographics (age, gender, profession) and psychographics (interests, hobbies, lifestyles), as well as how your health products and services can help them.

This exercise also helps you learn how to create relevant ads on Google that captures their attention from a list of other ads to your competitor’s websites.

The key is to learn who your existing clients truly are and how you can find more clients like them. By learning about your clients, their challenges, and how they use Google, you can position your practice to deliver the right message, to the right audience, in a way that resonates with them.

A patient survey is an effective method of learning about your patients, their challenges and how they find health and wellness providers. Instead of spending your advertising budget promoting your practice to people who aren’t interested in your services, focus your time and budget on finding the right people who are actively looking for your products and services.

Step 3: Know your competitors

In addition to knowing about your clients, you also want to know about your competitors. This helps you measure the success of your Google advertising campaigns relative to your industry. By comparing your performance metrics against industry averages, you can benchmark your results and determine how to improve your performance.

According to WordStream Research, the average Google Ads performance metrics for the health and medical industry are:

• Click-through-rate (CTR): 3.27%
• Conversion rate (CVR): 3.36%
• Cost-per-click (CPC): $2.62
• Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): $78.09

In other words, if 10,000 people view your Google Ad and your click-through-rate is 3.27%, then you’ll get 327 people to click on your ad to view your website landing page. If your conversion rate is 3.36%, that means that out of 327 people that arrive on your website, 11 will “convert” from a website visitor into a new client that books an appointment.

If your average cost-per-click is $2.62, to get 327 people to click on your ad will cost you $856.74. If you were able to get 11 new clients, then your average cost per acquisition is $77.89. In other words, it will cost you an average of about $78 to get one new client into your practice (based on these averages).

Researching your competitors gives you a perspective into how they use Google Ads to grow their businesses, or if there’s an opportunity that is being overlooked. That being said, many business owners assume that their competitors know something that they don’t. Often times, they will imitate their competitors’ strategies, believing that it will help their goals.

You can begin searching for your competitors in Google’s search. Use your industry’s keywords, such as “chiropractor” or “dentist” or “optometrist”. You can also refine your search by using local keywords, such as “chiropractor Edmonton” or “dentist near me”.

When you see Google’s search engine results page, review the existing ads created by your competitors. Analyze their word choice, headline, description, and the web page that their advertisement is linking to. Which ads are capturing your attention the most and why?

Step 4: Structure your account

Next, it’s important to decide how to structure your Google Ads account. How your account is structured will have an impact on your performance metrics, Google’s Quality Score, your cost-per-click (CPC), and your results.

Your Google Ads account is structured in a three-level hierarchy:

1. Campaigns: organize your ads into campaign themes, based on how you want your budget allocated. If you want to allocate 50% of your budget into two different products, services, client types, or treatment options, then you want to have two different campaigns setup.
2. Ad groups: these are held inside each campaign and can be used to focus on a specific audience segment. Each ad group contains its own set of keywords, ads, and website landing pages that your visitors will see.
3. Ads: the advertisement that is triggered based on the keywords found in the ad group, which provides a link to your website landing page. You can test 2-4 different ads within each ad group to get the best results.

For example, if you offer chiropractic services, you can consider creating one campaign for each service that you want to promote, such as active release or shockwave therapy. Then, if you want to segment your audience into males and females, or into young adults and seniors, then you can create a separate ad group for each audience segment. Finally, you can create several ads within each ad group to ensure its relevant to your specific audience.

Step 5: Keyword research

Now that you have your account setup and properly structured, you’re ready to conduct keyword research. Keywords are the key words or phrases that people enter into Google’s search box to find a website. These keywords trigger your ads to be displayed.

But, where do you find the keywords to use?

The keywords that your patients use to find your clinic may be different than the keywords that other people are using to find other clinics. There’s no way to know what keywords your patients are actually using other than to ask them in a survey.

A patient survey is a method of conducting primary research to learn how your patients found your clinic. Another method is by conducting secondary research using aggregated data compiled by Google using their Keyword Planner tool.

In your Google Ads dashboard, click on the “Tools” button in the top navigation bar. Then, under the section “Planning”, click on “Keyword Planner”. Selecting “Find new keywords” helps you look at the average monthly search volume for all related keywords in Canada.

Although Google doesn’t provide data local to your city, this is a good place to start looking for new keywords. This information tells you which keywords have a higher monthly search volume so that you focus your budget on attracting a larger pool of potential clients.

However, keywords with the highest volume aren’t always the best ones to use, as they may not necessarily be the words that your patients actually use.

Once you’ve found 10-20 keywords that are similar to each other, you’ll want to place them inside the same ad group. This keeps your ads relevant to the audience segment that you’re focusing on. You’ll add the keywords when you create your ad group.

Step 6: Create campaign

After deciding on a list of keywords to use for each ad group, you’re ready to create your first Google Ads campaign. In your dashboard, click on the “Campaigns” tab on the left navigation bar. Then, click on the “+” button near the centre-left to create a “New campaign”.

You can organize your campaign based on several goals, including:

• Sales: encourage sales online, by phone, or by visiting your clinic.
• Leads: encourage people to express interest by subscribing to a newsletter or providing their contact information.
• Website traffic: encourage people to visit your website.
• Product and brand consideration: educate people about what makes your products and services unique.
• Brand awareness and reach: introduce people to your company to increase their awareness of your products and services.
• App promotion: encourage people to download your mobile app.

These goals help Google provide recommended features and settings to help you attain your campaign goals. If you don’t want Google’s guidance, select “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance”.

Next, you’ll be asked to select a campaign type, which determines where people will see your ads displayed, including:

• Search: usually text-based ads displayed at the top of Google’s search engine results page.
• Display: usually image-based ads displayed on websites and apps that are part of Google’s Display Network of over 3 million websites.
• Shopping: text or image-based ads that promote your products.
• Video: short videos that are displayed before or during YouTube videos.

If your primary campaign goal is to attract potential new clients to your website using Google’s search engine results page, create your first campaign using the “Search” type.

Finally, Google Ads asks you to select how your campaign goals will be measured. In other words, what are the main actions that you want a person to take, including:

• Website visits
• Phone calls
• Store visits
• App downloads

Once you select your goals, Google will then ask you to setup your campaign. This includes your campaign name, the networks where your ad will be displayed (search or display), your audience focus, budget and bidding options, and other ad extensions.

Step 7: Setup ad groups

Once you’ve setup your campaign settings, you’ll want to create ad groups to focus your ads on a specific audience segment, or “customer persona”. You can segment your audience based on demographic and psychographic factors.

For example, if you offer health services for young adults and for seniors, you’ll want to create different ad groups that focus on your different audience segments. This ensures that your ads, keywords, and landing pages are all relevant to your specific audience segment.

This is the section that you’ll add the keywords that you researched earlier. Try to only use about 10-20 keywords for each ad group to ensure each ad is relevant and focused to each audience segment.

Your keywords can be triggered based on three categories:

1. Broad match: this is the default match type for your keywords that triggers your ad to be displayed. This category triggers ads for your chosen keywords, as well as for any other similar keywords, including misspellings, synonyms, related searches, etc. This keyword category will trigger your ads to be displayed the most, increasing the total views (impressions) of your ads. But, it may not be relevant to the people searching.
2. Phrase match: this keyword category triggers ads that match a phrase, or a close variation of that phrase, with additional words before or after. This keyword category will trigger less ads to be displayed than broad match, but will likely be more relevant and focused to your audience segment.
3. Exact match: this keyword category triggers ads that match the exact search term or are close variations of that exact term. This keyword category will trigger your ads to be displayed the least, but will likely be the most relevant to your audience segment.

Step 8: Create ads

After setting up your ad groups, you’re finally ready to create your ads. First, enter the “Final URL”, which is the website landing page that you want people to view after clicking on your ad. Google now offers three headlines and two description fields for your text-based ad. The format that Google uses for their ads changes often.

The display path is the URL that will be visible to people viewing your ad, not the actual website URL that they will visit.

So, how do you write compelling ads?

Successful Google Ads usually have three elements:

1. Features: highlight the features of your product, what makes your services unique, what makes your clinic different from your competitors, etc.
2. Benefits: focus on the benefits that your health products and services will have on your patients, and how those benefits are unique to your clinic.
3. Call-to-action: the action that you want your audience segment to take after viewing your ad, such as: “call us today” or “visit our website to learn more”.

There are thousands of recommendations for how to write the most compelling ads. There is no one winning formula for all businesses, as each business and their clients are unique.

Successful Google Ads managers don’t take guesses, they take a scientific approach by testing everything. In other words, test different variations of headlines, descriptions, keywords, landing pages, etc.

Step 9: Design landing page

Now that you’ve created your ads and your audience is clicking on them, what do they see when they arrive at your website landing page?

Your website landing page is the first page that your visitors “land on” when they arrive at your website. According to the research agency, Nielsen Norman Group, on average, people will evaluate your web page in less than 10 seconds. In other words, you have 10 seconds to capture their attention and encourage them to explore the rest of your web page. If your web page loads slowly, or isn’t relevant to their search, they will click to go back to Google.

Many businesses make the mistake of sending Google Ads visitors to their home page, or to another landing page that isn’t relevant to their search.

For example, imagine if you did a search in Google for “Invisalign benefits” and you read a Google Ad that has the description “Invisalign Features & Benefits”, so you click on the ad. Then, you arrive on a landing page that reads “General Dentistry Services”. Your first thought might be, “this web page isn’t what I’m looking for,” and you may click to go back to Google.

In order to keep your Google Ads visitors engaged with your web page, they have to be assured that your web page is relevant to their search and provides valuable information.

Many experienced businesses will create a separate website landing page for each Google Ads campaign that they conduct. This ensures complete relevancy for each audience segment.

Step 10: Analyze and optimize

Once you’ve launched your campaign, you’ll want to monitor the performance of the campaign regularly. Initially, you may want to monitor it daily to make sure that you haven’t made any errors and you’re getting the results that you want. Eventually, you can monitor your results weekly to ensure that your performance is achieving your business goals.

Compare your campaign performance to industry averages to benchmark your results. Then, test everything that you can using a scientific method. Try to maintain all variables consistent and only test one variable at a time. This helps you determine the best combination of headlines, descriptions, keywords, landing pages, etc.

Google Ads is easy to learn, but challenging to master. This article is a great starting point to setup, create and launch your Google Ads campaign.

Conclusion

Getting your business website on the first page of Google is one of the most effective methods for growing your health and wellness practice in Edmonton.

Google Ads provide the most immediate route, as you can get on the first page of Google on the first day.

Due to their auction process, you are competing on an equal playing field with any other business, regardless of their size or budget. The biggest drawback is that it only works if you continue to buy advertising.

Being found on the first page of Google through Google Ads is one of the most effective ways for increasing your website traffic with potential new patients to grow your health and wellness practice.

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